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, December 21, 2007

I remember some hybrid illustrated coloring books that involved a scroll that you spun under a clear and flimsy clear plastic window. You colored on the window, so that you could erase it when you scrolled up another page. It was really interesting as a piece of cheapo technology, but nothing about the content was interesting and it didn't work anyhow. Now my main sense of it is that it jammed and bunched up in the cylindrical canisters where the rollers were and unspooled and went crooked. I think it was more a conveyer belt than a scroll -- that is it went around again to the beginning. But I may be confusing two similar toys, since I also remember that feeling of forcing it when you scrolled it out to the end, and the glue coming undone from the roller.

posted by william 10:56 AM
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