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

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

I remember learning the word endorse> from Ronnie Rogers, who used it a lot when he was paling around with the teachers so impressively in seventh grade. It was one of the common words in his joke routines. He'd seek endorsement or offer endorsement to some teacher.

And I remember thinking that the verb bump, which I remember my mother using, was funny. Later I remember being told not to sit around like "a bump on a log" and that wasn't as funny. I wasn't sure what a bump on a log was, but I did know that it wasn't a good thing to ignore her when you were the bump and she the rebuker of sloth.

posted by william 12:23 AM
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