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


Thursday, June 16, 2005
I remember that the Bloomsday bookstore, I think it was, sponsored all day readings of Ulysses on Bloomsday. I remember Judge Woolsely's decision, and my surprise that there was a letter from Joyce to Bennet Cerf thanking him. My downtown grandparents had a book of 1001 after-dinner jokes by Bennet Cerf, and here he was being thanked by Joyce. I think he had just recently died when I became aware of his connection to Ulysses.


posted by william 10:20 PM
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