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

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

I remember feeling something stronger than surprise, though not quite shock, when my parents' present for me after a trip they made to Britain was a tartan kilt. A skirt! What were they thinking? The intensely interesting fact that I learned at the same time -- that in Scotland men wore kilts -- wasn't interesting enough to make me want to wear it (it didn't quite come to the level of my Lederhosen), but was enough to make me think of the present as intriguing rather than awful. Later I saw Sean Connery in a kilt. One of the women writes her room number in lipstick on his thigh. When he goes he drops his kilt and she cries (we only see him waist-waist up, from behind) "It's true!" My parents explained the no-underwear lore.

posted by william 12:45 AM
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