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

Friday, August 12, 2005

I remember that the one compensation for getting back home in the summer was going through the tons of mail that had been kept for us downstairs, looking for the brown-paper-wrapped comic books and New Yorkers that had come in the interim. At that time there wasn't any other mail that I was really interested in, not even the Sports Illustrateds that I subscribed to but read somewhat half-heartedly because I was only interested in the New York teams, and besides the news was all out of date. I thought the swimsuit issue was the most boring of all -- everything frustrating about Playboy, with none of the good parts. But the comics and the cartoons were worth looking forward to.

posted by william 7:12 AM
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