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

Friday, January 14, 2005

I remember that the Herings, and with them sometimes my mother, drank gin-and-tonics, which was therefore to me the sophisticated drink. I think they drank Gordon's gin, and I'm pretty sure that Barbara Hering's maiden name was Gordon -- which made perfect sense, more than perfect since my mother used to work for a lawyer named Murray Gordon. Gordon meant the drinking, sophisticated, female, lawerly part of my life. (And wasn't another powerful woman whom I would have thought sophisticated, Victoria, on the Gordon's gin bottle? Or was that Tanqueray, which I remember the Herings were drinking several years later.)

posted by william 11:54 PM
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