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, May 25, 2007

I remember the basketball courts south of 79th street in Riverside Park. The Promenade ends on 81st street (at the monument to the 6,000,000 Jews killed by the Nazis), then there's a downhill (where I fell once when my father was teaching me to ride a bike) and an uphill, and then you have to cross 79th to continue in the park, and that's where some basketball courts are. A fair number, actually, so the teenagers and people in their twenties played there, unlike at the one or two hoops I vaguely recall farther uptown. This was playground ball, shirts vs. skins, and they were all really good. Early on days that we had no school, we could play there too, and I remember going there with Peter Obstler, his friend who went to my school with equally long hair whose name I can't recall, and Billy Kaplan, though I'm not sure Billy was there. Maybe it was Eric Bendetson? Anyhow, what I remember is that some of these hoops had chain "nets" that were singularly unlovely. They didn't come down as far as the string nets at our school, which I could touch by leaping. (I remember that phase: how high you could jump measured against hoop, backboard, and net.) Most of the hoops didn't have any nets though. I remember also -- I wonder if the dimensions are subtly changed now -- the way basketballs would sometimes get jammed between the square bracket holding the hoop and the backboard. And I remember trying to shoot the ball with just the right touch to land it on the bracket, so that someone would have to throw something up or leap up and grab the net and shake to get the ball to come down again.

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