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, March 01, 2007

I remember that I was with Tommy, Kenny, and I think even Butch (the youngest) in their parents' bedroom, and they began making prank calls. They'd done that before, but it was new to me. But pretty much no one answered, and when someone did it seemed to be a woman living alone, and there was nothing thrilling about calling. I think I thought it would be a way of taking some swell down a peg. But we didn't reach any swells. After a while, Sally (their mother) came in and made us stop. She didn't seem too concerned about any of it though.

posted by william 12:01 AM
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