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, April 20, 2006

I remember another song from one of my story-telling records: "Toby the tortoise and Max the hare / Met one day at the country fair." Toby of course beats "Max Rabbit." I remember the perky melody. I knew the story before I got the record, so essentially the setting, names, and rhymes that the song gave it functioned more or less like the melody, as ornament, and I realize, now that it was interesting to discover that things as basic as names or places could turn out just to be ornament.

posted by william 10:37 AM
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