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, October 28, 2005

I remember that we decided who served first by calling rough or smooth. This explained an interesting feature of tennis rackets back then, which I had already noticed, a nylon thread looped around the strings of the racket near the base of the strung elliptical part. Rough meant the side of the racket which only had loops from the nylon line, and smooth the side which had most of the line. First we spun the racket on the clay, but later it was cooler to spin it in the air while the other person called, and then grab it out of the sky.

posted by william 10:09 PM
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