I remember / je me souviens

I remember / je me souviens

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For those limbic bursts of nostalgia, invented by Proust, miniaturized by Nicholson Baker, and freeze-dried by Joe Brainard in his I remember and by Georges Perec in his Je me souviens.

But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
And full of interest.
--John Ashbery, "A Wave"

Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
--Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

I remember "Bayer works wonders."

I remember:
"The earth is flat." "Man will never fly [I'm not too sure about this second one]." "All aspirin are alike." Funny how truisms come and go, isn't it?

The guy who said this was someone I later thought I recognized as the boss and mission assigner on Charlie's Angels, but it probably wasn't the same person. He also reminded me of the guy who said cop-AHH-septic, showing that he could now say "AHH." I think the truisms were from a Bufferin ad. (Anyhow, here was where I learned the word truism. I also liked that aspirin could be plural: all aspirin are alike.) With Bufferin more aspirin going to your headache meant less to upset your stomach.

posted by william 2:43 PM
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