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

Sunday, January 23, 2005

I remember Johnny Carson. Not that I watched him much; I remember knowing and recognizing the routines, the golf-swing and so forth. But I remember in seventh grade kids asking each other whether they'd seen Carson the night before, which seemed sophisticated and glamorous to me (it was supposed to) because he was on so late, and was so adult. I remember feeling sad when he did his last show, and I remember feeling in the know because I'd read Kenneth Tynan's ambivalent profile of him in The New Yorker: how great Carson was at what he did, including tearing up jokes on the air, and how part of that greatness was avoiding anything real.

posted by william 8:57 PM
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