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 13, 2006

I remember the beginnings of my obsession with Samuel Beckett. I read and loved Endgame and Waiting for Godot some time in high school, and bought and read his Proust essay at the Gotham Book Mart my senior year (before I’d ever heard of Proust—I figured, if Beckett wrote that, Proust must be pretty important). Then sat in on Ricks’ Beckett class my first semester of college, which was an amazing experience. Once he wept after showing Eh Joe and then he dismissed class. The following fall, I blew off school for a week to go to a Beckett conference in Dublin where they put on all the plays and showed all the films. When a professor I’d just met asked me to send a postcard, I thought, wow, my circle of fellow Beckett readers is expending. I remember getting Guy Davenport to talk about his afternoon with Beckett, at Les Deux Magots, and how Beckett was treated as a regular and not a celebrity.

Oddly, as I wrote the above, my mom came over with a copy of today’s Times and pointed out the two pieces on Beckett. I don’t remember her knowing of my obsession. (Oh wait: I do… I took her to see some Beckett plays, including Footfalls and Krapp’s Last Tape, in college.)

posted by jennylewin 2:53 PM
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