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, 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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