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, January 12, 2006

I remember the first time Batman aired, 40 years ago tonight. I cannot believe I haven't posted about this before. We -- Hugh and I -- were really looking forward to it. It was going to be on on a Wednesday night, and I was allowed half an hour of TV during the school week (for the whole week), and Batman was half an hour long. So that was what I planned to spend my half hour on. The first episode was with Frank Gorshin as the Riddler. We watched it on the little TV on the radiator in the dining room. (Next day Hugh and I sang the theme song - Nananananana....Batman! Some kids had watched in color, but I didn't see Batman in color till we got a color TV several years later.)

I didn't know Frank Gorshin before that (but Marc Bilgray knew who he was, and might have said the day before the show aired that he would be in it). He was a wonderful villain, and the show was exciting and just about perfect.

And then it got to be 8, and the show turned out to be a cliff-hanger. Batman and Robin were trapped by the Riddler, in his suit covered with question-marks. We had to tune in the next night, "Same bat time! Same bat channel!" But I'd agreed with my mother only to watch the Wednesday show, not the Thursday, and she kept me to that agreement. In fact the next night she was working late -- but not late enough! She came home just before 7:30. So I never got to see part 2 of the first show. I saw a lot of the other episodes, whole, because of reruns, and so on. But I still don't know how it ended, or how the dynamic duo defeated lithe, charismatic, Satanically interesting Frank Gorshin.

posted by william 8:18 PM
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