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

Saturday, February 10, 2007

I remember (from the pictures in The Little Engine that Could?) that trains had cow-catchers. Did they really? I mean is that what they were called? I think I saw them on cartoons also -- the grilled wedges on the front of the engine to plow things out of the way. At the time I thought they were kind. The cow would just be carried along instead of being slammed into, until the engineer could slow the train down and it could amble off into neighboring fields. When I first saw a real train, with my downtown grandmother, I was surprised and disappointed that the strange, gigantic, sleek diesel engine didn't have one.

posted by william 7:05 AM
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