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, September 27, 2008
I remember Paul Newman. I remember there was a Life Magazine article about "Super-realist" painters, when I was about eleven. These were painters who overlaid fine graphs over photos, and then repainted the photos grid by grid, so their paintings looked photographic. Hugh C, who was the best artist I knew, was interested in this phenomenon too, and we decided to try some superrealism. But we had no graph paper, and certainly no transparencies (tracing paper, the balsa wood of foolscap, was the closest we came). So we had to do it by eye. I couldn't draw (still can't), but there was a beautiful glossy of Paul Newman in Life as well, and I copied it very carefully with my pastels, in full spectrum. It was one of the most impressive drawings I ever did, and I was very proud of it.

I remember seeing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But there Paul Newman was in motion. I'd read the book first (since everyone else had already seen the movie and I had to be au courrant), so I already had a good sense of the characters, and Paul Newman just sort of instantiated my sense of Butch Cassidy. He was in constant motion, riding the bike, jumping. So different from the gorgeous still photo. (Of course there's the sepia still at the end, but that's them frozen in action as they're being killed.) I remember him laughing at the Sundance Kid because he couldn't swim. "The fall will probably kill us!" That should be in the hundred best movie lines! And also, "SHIIIIIIIIIITTTT," as they jumped. My first real profanity in a movie. And also, "Who are those guys?" How winning he was in that movie -- that was a surprise.

posted by william 10:19 AM
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Monday, September 22, 2008
I remember Yankee Stadium. I remember the first game I saw there. My father took me. Hugh's father had taken us to Shea to see the red-hot Mets (Gary Genry pitching), and the Yankees then were terrible. But still, you had to see them, and Yankee Stadium was somehow more authentic than Shea (though I wouldn't have put it that way at the time), more about the stands than Shea which just offered a utilitarian, function-following form structure for seeing the field. I remember that we sat under a deck in Yankee Stadium -- we had good seats that my father's firm got from one of their clients -- and that Joe Pepitone was playing first, and Bobby Murcer was in center. I remember that the Yankees lost. The game was in itself of very little interest. But my father showed me how the catcher backed up first on grounders. I remember a dropped third strike and the catcher tagging the batter, or maybe throwing him out at first. I remember Pepitone lost his hat on one play, and you could see his impressive sideburns, and that somehow made him more real than he was on TV, whereas everyone else was less real, reduced only to their names and numbers, not to the faces that you could sort of see on the screen. I remember that it was interesting that you could hear the umpire (you couldn't on TV in those days), though I may have already noticed this in Shea. I remember my father explaining that the umpire called strikes, but said nothing for balls, so the players had to count for themselves. It was a beautiful day and the park was very big, and the crowd was huge. It wasn't magical, the way baseball stadiums sometimes are, but it was real, the way baseball games never are on TV.

I remember going to a game with Steve Shaviro (what felt like) many years later, when Tommy John was pitching, and a guy behind us yelling incessantly, "Escrew the ball, Tommy! Escrew the ball!" The Yankees won that night -- this would have been July of 1980.


posted by william 7:02 AM
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Thursday, September 11, 2008
I remember that Sunday, September 9, 2001 was a beautiful day. We were at the beach. I threw D into the waves several times. The sky was cerulean. When we went to leave a bit of wind kicked up and sand from our towel blew towards another group. The big male in the group, a burly ex-marine (from his tattoos) said "Thanks." A bit of unpleasantness. The next day was D.'s first day of Kindergarten. (I remember about half way through first grade, when I could read, realizing with a kind of puzzled but grateful surprise, that I'd spent the last year in a "garten," not a "garden" -- grateful because I liked that it was European, like my German-speaking uptown grandparents.) He came home excited and happy. Tuesday was a beautiful day when we dropped him off, and talked briefly to his new best friend's parents. Then I drove to school and heard from the departmental secretary, on the cell phone, that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. (I was in the parking lot outside the building, about to take J. to the pediatrician for a check-up.) I thought a small plane, no big deal, like the plane that hit the Empire State Building in the forties. I turned on the radio to hear the plane hit the Pentagon. It was all electric and frightening. At the pediatrician's office everything was silent. We watched the towers collapsed, while he made sure little J. was healthy. I reached my father in the hospital with pneumonia. The night before some self-important orderly had refused to let me speak to him because it was after 8:00 pm. Now they were releasing him because they thought there'd be a huge influx of the injured. So he got home, and then it was eerily quiet in New York too. Everyone in Boston drove with immense courtesy -- how could we ever think violently about each other? I felt bad about the tiff with the guy on the beach and the orderly on the phone. The sky was even more cerulean: no contrails for the next few days. I watched the golf channel for a long time that afternoon, and tried to figure out how much D. had heard and understood. I remember worrying about certain people I knew in the WTC, and also a really good poem by I think Deborah Gottleib Garrison in the New Yorker the next week. No one I worried about died, but people had no idea were there did. I remember going with mixed feelings to Montrachet, in Tribecca, for dinner on my birthday two months later -- we were supporting businesses, and it was good, but you could still smell smoke everywhere. I remember my wonderful,.sweet, committed student Bob M, whose picture I saw in the Times a few weeks later.

posted by william 11:50 AM
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Monday, September 08, 2008
I remember how interesting and arcane it was that the vacuum cleaner cord retracted. I didn't know how it did this, only that the cord of the unplugged machine was almost flush with its cylindrical body. Then one day I was allowed to vacuum too. They must have judged rightly that I was old enough to use it, because when I pulled the cord -- like pulling a shade -- I had a confident anticipation that it would go scrolling back, and it did. I knew too that if it didn't go all the way back, I'd only need to pull it sharply out a little more and then let it go. Still I liked the way it snaked back into its hole.

And that reminds me of the even earlier days when I was strictly forbidden to pull on the shades. Even now it seems a slight violation of the rules for me to do so.

Venetian blinds, which we got later, were ok (I was allowed to use them before I was allowed to pull the shade cords) and I felt kind of expert -- like a foreshadowing of a child's VCR expertise -- at detaching the looped string from whatever ratchet or catch that pulling it to the side to form a hypotenuse detaches it from, so that I could pull the blind up or even let it go all the way down!

I still like that feel -- in plugs and shades and Venetian blinds -- of the satisfied sensing of what's going on in the works by feeling the live elastic pull or unsnagging of the cord. It makes you feel part of the world those objects form and preside over, like you belong there too with them, able to feel and work their hidden parts.

posted by william 12:10 AM
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