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


Wednesday, September 28, 2005
I remember agent 86. I remember Marc Bilgray wrote a parody of "Get Smart" whose hero was called "Maxwell House Dumb." I remember 99, and that she was glamorous, so one didn't know why she liked Max, the Chief, the cone of silence, Kaos and Control, and the agent who was always so good at disguises. And Maxwell Smart's shoe phone. I remember that I didn't realize the phone booth whose door he closed in the credits was an elevator until I read one of the books. I thought he was just ducking. But why I didn't know. RIP.


posted by william 10:06 PM
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