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

Friday, April 06, 2007

I remember Tom Jones singing, "It's not unusual that I'm feeling kind of blue." But it seems that I'm misremembering. I think I reconstructed the line when I couldn't get the annoying song out of my head. It wouldn't be a bad line. I remember seeing Tom Jones on my uptown grandmother's TV. She just had it on to some live variety show. He looked absurd, a low-rent Elvis who (like a cartoon parody) affected my sense of Elvis himself when I started watching Elvis movies. (And of course it affected, less fatally since Fielding is so overwhelmingly vital, my sense of the novel; just as the inevitably paired Engelbert Humperdinck affected my sense of the composer.) On the show, where Tom Jones performed live, some fan threw him her panties, and he swung them around as he sang. I realize now this must have been scripted. It was silly without seeming particularly interesting in any way at all, including its silliness.

posted by william 7:44 AM
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