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

Thursday, December 08, 2005

I remember sitting in Johnny's Big Red Grill, in Ithaca, with several friends when Paul R. came in to say that John Lennon had been shot. Someone had ordered French Fries with vinegar. We got them to go to the news on the bar TV, but that was pretty much all we knew. A couple of hours later we heard that he was dead. The next day I heard that one of the cops taking him to the hospital asked, "Are you John Lennon?" and he groaned and said "Yeah." And then he was DOA.

posted by william 11:37 PM
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