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

Sunday, February 10, 2008

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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