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, December 18, 2006

I remember learning a little bit about debate in junior high. We got a mimeographed sheet to take home and study with a lot of whereases and then finally a resolved. But it didn't seem resolved to me, and I didn't really get how this was all supposed to have been concluded. My mother explained how to debate, how you weren't just saying what you believed but arguing on an assigned side, but I didn't as her about the terminology. Later that same year -- maybe later that week she received a resolution thanking her for being President of the building, which also had a page of whereases, followed by a be it resolved that the tenants were very grateful to her. I sort of liked and was sort of puzzled by this way of doing things.

I remember watching a little debate on TV too, with very clean-cut college adults, but it was boring. I did like watching (with similar participants) the show called "It's Academic." I could do the literature and social studies questions pretty well, but I was amazed by how good their math and science was.

posted by william 7:34 AM
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