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

Monday, March 20, 2006

I remember Mac Fast Food, probably the only source of American food in the city at the time. French fries were called finger chips, and people ate lambburgers.

I remember my father carrying me down Commercial Street, and vaguely remember him singing nursery rhymes. I don't remember saying what my parents claim was my first sentence, "he put in his thumb," as he carried me. But I remember seeing plums for the first time at a supermarket near Comm. Street, and my father buying a cassette player for my nursery rhyme tapes (because, I was later told, I'd broken his) there.

posted by sravana 8:19 PM
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