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, February 27, 2008
I remember Geiger counters, from Superman, and I think also The Time Tunnel. They seemed very cool -- the way they clicked and the needle jumped. Then as a junior in an NSF high school summer program we actually used them. It was like the entry into the fantasy world of TV. But I could measure my approach towards adulthood by the fact that I could also see them as reasonably routine. Like (years earlier) routinely plugging things in, an activity once strictly and glamorously forbidden (I idiotically also held some radioactive material up to my throat the day we were introduced to Geiger counters, clowning around. I was immortal then. I'm pretty sure the radiation was insignificant.)

posted by william 9:50 AM
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Sunday, February 24, 2008
I remember that my uptown grandparents used to put sugar into their cups before adding the coffee. When she served coffee at my grandfather's bridge games I remember her as asking people if they wanted sugar before pouring the coffee. She'd put the sugar in first, then give them their cups and pour the coffee in over it while they held them. My father always added sugar to the coffee, and I've never seen anyone do it my grandmother's way since, but I was reminded of this by a moment in Peter Rushforth's novel Pinkerton's Sister (set in 1903) where someone puts in the sugar first.

posted by william 9:31 PM
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Friday, February 15, 2008
I remember oil rags. Whenever we filled up they'd check the oil, pulling out the dip-stick and wiping it down. The ritual was so interesting to me: remove, wipe, reinsert, remove, examine. We never got oil that I remember. I didn't know why they did it this way, or in fact what they were doing. But I do remember that they'd whip the rag out to wipe the dipstick down, and I thought there was something special about those rags. They had for me the enigmatic and wonderful status of Tools for the performance of activities we would never do or know how to do. Soldering irons weren't a patch on them. They were implements of a mystery.

posted by william 6:52 AM
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Tuesday, February 12, 2008
I remember how cool the 35 mm film canisters were. They used to be metal with screw on tops, the same battleship gray as the plastic ones now (maybe slightly lighter), but their tops were also gray, not today's (or yesterday's) black. They would get dented too -- a neat fact about them that I only treasured once the plastic ones replaced them. Of course kids kept their stashes in them too; but I think I started thinking they were really cool when I stopped associating them with stashes. They were beautifully utilitarian and so a badge of expertise. Camera expertise was the only genuine expertise we could have at the time -- the only thing we could do that adults did too, and did seriously, as serious utilitarian jobs, and that the best of us could do much better than most adults could. We didn't drop our film into Instamatics! The cannisters stood for all that. They stood for the way we could know what they meant.


posted by william 11:47 PM
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Sunday, February 10, 2008
I remember that I started this blog six years ago yesterday! But yesterday I forgot.


posted by william 8:07 PM
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I remember Chess Life and Review. When I joined FIDE, or was it the U.S. Chess Federation?, they sent it to me as part of my membership. My name was listed in it, in small type, at the end of the year, with my rating! I remember keeping the various issues on the shelf in my bookcase, above the castle that was the central display piece there. Slim and flimsy paper, crammed with chess games and ads for tournaments everywhere. I went to one or two, based on the ads. I also went down to the Manhattan chess club a couple of times, which was on the same block as Eclair's and the dojo where I used to go for karate, on seventy-second street. I never found the famous Marshall, though -- the Manhattan was my substitute for it.

Yesterday in a bookstore I found a bound volume of Chess Life and Review from one of those years. I looked myself up and there I was -- my name and rating staring up at me with more of an adult serenity than I possess even now. But I didn't plunk down the $16.00 they wanted for it.

I remember too that the schemester John Gross had a plan for raising our ratings in high school. If you beat someone more than thirty points higher than you were, you got bonus points -- it wasn't a zero-sum game. So we could report a series of wins for him, until he was a hundred points higher than I was, then a series of wins for me which would bring me up faster than he went down. Then I could leapfrog ahead of him until I was a hundred points higher than he, and so on. We never did this, but it seemed inelegant of FIDE that it was a possibility, though I vaguely thought he should get some points just for being clever enough to figure this out.

posted by william 8:00 PM
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Saturday, February 02, 2008
I remember my father taking me to see the statue of Alma Mater at Columbia. I'd been on the campus before, with my mother, since she worked for one of her law professors there after she graduated, Willis Reese. I don't know where she was the evening he took me there -- maybe in the hospital having my sister, but I don't think so -- I don't think that was on my mind and it would have been. My mother's name is Alma, so he told me that "mater" meant mother, and that it was a statue in her honor -- my mother Alma. (This is why I don't think that she was in the hospital having my sister -- that didn't enter into my conception of her being a mother as he evoked it. I think in fact it was before she was born, before I was six. Maybe when she was away in Washington, before we drove down?)

posted by william 1:18 PM
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