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, March 06, 2005

I remember the Plaza Hotel. There's still no need just to remember it. But on April 30th it's closing! How can that be? It's as though New York were closing, or as though The Catcher in the Rye were being revised to take place in Kansas City. Not that The Catcher in the Rye mentions the Plaza. But...Eloise! Brunch at the Palm Court. Drinks at the Oak Room, with Tommy Fenerty. Before we broke up I had reservations to take Margot there for her birthday. The room was $55, all that I could afford. She said they had black onyx tubs.

It would be fifteen years before I actually stayed there, for a night. It was of course not quite the same as one imagined walking around downstairs, with that glamorous thirties movies hustle and bustle and snow and warmth and good cheer of everyone having anything to do with the Plaza. But the corridors were as wide as in a European hotel, the ceilings as tall, the doors as tall, and as thick. The bed was canopied, with many different strata of lacey bedcovers, so that you didn't know which were decorative and which you should pull over yourself. The view.... well, it was a cheap room. But it was the Plaza. The bathtub was ordinary white porcelain, but as good as black onyx to me.

posted by william 6:01 AM
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