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

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

I remember learning about the great Brooklyn-born matador... Franklin? Do I remember that because I was at Franklin School? I picture him -- accurately -- with glasses, sort of like Buddy Holly or the kid murdered by Leopold and Loeb -- ??. Stephen Grotsky, our favorite history teacher and track coach, admired him intensely, and told us about him when in a spellbinding reverie about matadors in general (but maybe it was Mr. Donahue, since he was the one who had us reading Hemingway, I think, and taught us the word aficionado and told us about Death in the Afternoon; I now realize he may have just been reading it), and how they would kneel with their backs to the bull, and try to get two ears and a tail, all information relevant as well to The Sun Also Rises.

posted by william 7:05 AM
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