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

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

I remember a couple of lines from poetry in my high school literary magazine, from students a year or two ahead of me. If I'm not mistaken, Steve Fenichel had a rapidly accelerating protest-against-the-times poem which ended with the striking grim propulsive couplet:
And mannikins applying Nair.
The hollow men are everywhere.
(I knew the reference to Eliot from Mr. McCormick's English class.)

And Jim Gleick had a wistfully nostalgic line about "A past that's high as a house."

I might be reversing who wrote what, though.

posted by william 12:27 PM
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