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

Thursday, January 20, 2005

I remember experiencing an odd revulsion to banners on products advertising them as 2 cents off. (The Apple keyboard doesn't have a cents-key. I remember the cents key! The up-arrow key -- ^ -- seems to have replaced it.) Why that revulsion? I remember it particularly about some powdered cleaning product in a tube, not Comet but a competitor. Ajax? I think that from a distance it looked like the product only cost 2 cents. That was in biggest type. Then closer, you saw that it said "2 CENTS OFF." And I didn't get how a price could be marked as something "off." It wasn't a price. It wasn't a meaning of off that I understood. It was some kind of witchery. It reminded me of my uptown grandmother, who had some of the physical presence of a witch, and who cleaned with this product. The you looked closer still and it said ""Price marked is 2 CENTS OFF regular price of this product." And this was strange too: that it had a marked price and then another reference to the price explaining the anomaly of the marked price. It seemed malicious to me: it was somehow breaking into the smooth surface of product, container it was sold in, label on container, and price of container. That smooth surface was somehow what the container and its label, almost continuous with the container itself, represented, so that price and product all belonged to one gliding self-offering commodity. But the jarring 2 cents off destroyed the commercial aesthetics of the whole thing -- seemed, as I say, cheap, and tawdry, and penny-pinching, just like one disconcerting aspect of my grandmother.

posted by william 9:55 PM
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