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

Saturday, May 31, 2008

I remember Officer Joe, host of The Three Stooges on Channel 11 (WPIX -- I never realized that was "pix" before!) in New York, commenting on how impressive it was that they didn't blink or flinch before being hit in the face with a pie. I hadn't thought of that at all, of course, and this made the show turn out to be educational, in a way that contradicted my father's hatred for the mindless violence of the show (besides, Officer Joe was a cop, with a nightstick and handcuffs and everything). A little later, when I watched Soupy Sales, I knew that his ability to take a pie in the face was impressive. Knowing it made me an aficionado (the word I later learned still later from Mr. Grotsky when he told us about Death in the Afternoon).

posted by william 2:23 PM
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