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


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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