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, August 23, 2008

I remember, but not with perfect confidence, "Can't get enough of Post Sugar Crisps, Sugar Crisps, Sugar Crisps, / Can't get enough of those Sugar Crisps...", and then what? It was a kind of nightclub jazz version of "Joshua fit the battle of Jericho." Was it "Post Sugar Crisps" or "those Sugar Crisps"? And what corresponded to "The walls came tumblin' down"? The cartoon character singing it was walking through some cartoon landscape, and murmuring it under his breath, carried along in his own superior world -- the world of his directedness towards his next helping of the transcendent privilege of Sugar Crisps -- past all the civilians who looked at him with curiosity and incomprehension, but whom he sublimely ignored.

posted by william 10:39 AM
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