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

Saturday, January 22, 2005

I remember the infelicity of the crayon's relation to the crayon sharpener. (I believe that the 64-pack Crayola box had a built in sharpener, but of course we tended to use pencil-sharpeners.) The problem was the paper sleeve of the crayon. You wanted it to come down to the cone-part of the crayon, but if you didn't peel it back the paper would shred into the wax, messing things up, and if you tried tearing off some of the sleeve the whole thing would come apart, the crayon would break or be hard to hold, and hard to resist gouging with your fingernails, and it was all distressingly inelegant.

posted by william 4:48 PM
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