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, May 22, 2006

I remember there were many typically "kid things" that seemed to belong to other kids-- but not to us. All the things listed in the other blogs like kites, balsa planes, messages in bottles, etc belonged to another magical kid world that we didn't have access too. This is not because we never were given these things-- it was more that even having them, we didn't really know how to use them or relate to them. I think this was true for Billy, too. Is this otherness due to not being Anglo-Saxon or is it related to the way the world of play was/is portrayed on TV?

I think that was part of the magic of the Sterns -- a big family who played tennis, swam and belonged to the material world in a self-assured way.

One typical kid thing I did manage was to catch a frog in our pool. Billy bet me three dollars that I wouldn't be able to pick it up. But I could (he was sure it would hop out of reach) and it took mom's intervening for him to cough up the dough. But I think his grave miscalculation was part of us not knowing things kids are supposed to just "know".

posted by caroline 3:36 AM
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