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 30, 2005

I remember noticing the printed letter g, in the font called American Typewriter -- the lowercase g you can see in the Google logo, but not in Times Roman or courier. I remember noticing it when we were learning something about writing and penmanship and printing, in my third or fifth grade clasroom. It looked creepy to me, the two closed loops made no sense, the hook at the top loop seemed wrong, it seemed somehow malevolent or malevolently closed to me, to my interest in reading, to responding to my interest or to my perturbation about its shape. It looked like an insect, the insect truth behind the apparently letters, the Gregor Samsa of typography, a degenerate ampersand, a a cruel witch where one expected a grandmother, an indifferent and illegible Cyrillic within the heart of the helpless Roman. Could that character be the first letter of "grandmother"? Eventually I stopped seeing it, but sometimes still I can notice its implacable presence, and the insipid looped g's of Times Roman seem hopelessly clueless about the inscrutable and uncanny permanence of the metamorphosis I first noticed then.

posted by william 4:05 PM
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