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, July 26, 2005

I remember the vinyl toe-caps (I just learned the term from Cormac McCarthy's new novel) of my Keds, and of my Converses, where I would write things in magic marker, my intitials I remember, and then later bits of phrases from books I liked, Stephen-Dedalus like quotations, often Beckett; eventually I wrote them in small letters on the sides of the soles too. I remember black, green, and red sneakers that I owned, and different colored markers, though I don't remember what color they were.

posted by william 6:29 PM
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