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 08, 2005

I remember a paperback that I saw, maybe at the New Yorker bookshop, certainly on one of those turning racks, with a cover showing six men, one in a different color or wash of color or maybe in negative, called (I think) One in Six, and making the sensational claim that one in six men was homosexual. I don't know whether this book was pro- or anti-gay, though I suspect pro. And I associate this book with leaving the Bretton Hall one day, where I went to exercise class, and looking at men, singly or in groups, and thinking that I knew something about them that they didn't know I knew, namely that one in six of them was homosexual.

posted by william 5:24 PM
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