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

Monday, July 11, 2005

I remember deciding who chose first in softball by tossing a bat into the air and alternating hands contiguously up the grip -- whoever couldn't get their whole hand on the bat lost; the other captain chose first, the loser got the next two (I liked this compensation), and the first team got last licks.

I remember that when my father taught me to throw and catch a softball I was disappointed -- it seemed like such a feeble substituted offered to kids for baseball -- but then it turned out that softball was what everyone played in the park (on the street it was stickball, with a broomhandle and a Spalding). Baseball was strangely not an option -- strangely I mean because it was the only game really that we couldn't more or less just do ourselves. It was too hard to play catcher, and too dangerous, and too hard to hit the ball, and we didn't have the space for it anyhow. When I played JV baseball in high school I was surprised by the way we could play it, just like the football players actually tackling each other.

posted by william 11:01 AM
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