I remember / je me souviens
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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, October 28, 2008
I remember Tommy H pointing out a very high stain on the wall of the 90th street building that housed the Garden Market (or Daitch Shopwell by then), dribbling down. It was probably (twelve year old) head height, and we couldn't imagine the dog that had peed there. It had to be a Great Dane, but how tall could it have been? It was hilarious -- Tommy's hilarity was infectious and every time I saw it I loved thinking about the dog that could have done it. There was a Great Dane in our neighborhood, though it tended to be a feature of the street one block west of the market, between West End and Riverside. And it wasn't tall enough, though we imagined it kind of leaning to the side so as to point upwards as it went.

I remember how the dogs that people walked were part of the geography of the neighborhood -- a dynamic geography, since you'd see them at certain times of day. We didn't recognize the people we didn't know -- didn't know anyone to nod to -- but we recognized the dogs on their daily rounds, their nondescript owners in tow. I remember that Dr. C, a psychologist who had a German Shepherd named Cleo, always held a pair of pressed, aligned suede gloves in his leash hand. It made him look dapper as he walked his dog.

posted by william 11:42 AM
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Tuesday, October 21, 2008
I remember the pleasure of snapping off model pieces from their plastic branches, where the little twigs that held them just gave when you bent sharply. I remember how much more interesting it was to break the branches themselves, once they were completely plucked, and how interesting the unpainted dull interior of the plastic was, serious and undynamic and prosaic. I remember how tragic it was when you snapped a piece of the actual model in the same way, and got the same bland and useless interior facing which had just been a lovely painted-costume arm or leg. The snaps were always clean, and always seemed to mean a kind of dull and implacable substrate within existence itself. I remember that sports trophies were gilded versions of the same material, made of the same ineluctable plastic, and that you could easily snap off the athletic arm or leg on the trophy and just be left with that kind of cool, somehow always concave facet of indifference (the part that snapped off would be convex, but we paid no attention to that useless relic).

posted by william 10:23 PM
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Sunday, October 19, 2008
I remember the last "deep" recession, the one they talk about now on NPR as if it happened a long time ago--1987. I remember hearing my father saying to someone on the phone that we were down to our last nickel. It was hard to tell whether he was speaking idiomatically or if this was objective description. I remember a trip down to New York to sell artwork--to sell the metalwork they were doing then --the mezuzot and the jewelry, and possibly the kiddush cup, but since that was a big silver piece I doubt they had one with them. We stayed for Shabbat with the Davids, and I remember that Mrs. David took me up to the attic and got out her married daughters' old clothes and we went through them and she gave me what fit. I was in 6th grade, a bad time to be so outdated, but I remember liking these clothes for themselves, for their seventies' charms, even if I knew I wouldn't be able to pretend to myself that they were in style, or be accepted when I wore them to school.

I remember walking through the living room, passing behind the couch, hearing the TV talk about one more down day on Wall Street. There were graphs showing how far the Dow had fallen that day, but I wasn't really paying attention--there was nothing new about this. My sense of a constricted world stayed constant through high school, though I realize now that my perspective was decidedly micro; it never occurred to me that our family's straits were related to the larger economy--or, rather, that anything could change, that any change in the outside world could affect our circumstances. Without knowing it, I believed that the world was constant, as was our place in it, that my life and status were fated, fixed.

I remember my bewilderment when there were jobs, lots of jobs, plenty of "opportunities" for new grads when I myself was a new grad and newly married. I remember waking up in our second apartment, the one on Elm Street, where we slept in the back bedroom and where I had my own study in the front bedroom and where I was completely happy or as close to that as I have ever been, where I started grad school and where I conceived our first child, and hearing a surprised-sounding reporter on the radio describe how in-demand young people were, how we could call for unheard-of starting salaries. Or maybe I projected the surprise. Though we were two or three years into adulthood, into the workforce, I remember how impossible this seemed to me, how much I still expected things to be impossibly hard forever. Eventually, though, I accepted that things were different, now. I suppose that I got used to the expanding economy the way I get used to new shoe styles: The new thing always looks ugly to me for at least a year. Sometimes it takes me too long to acclimate, to adjust my sense of attractive (pointy toed to square toed to round toed to pointy toed again?), so that by the time I get around to liking whatever it was, it's moved on to something else.

posted by Rosasharn 11:10 PM
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Friday, October 10, 2008
I remember reading Robert Heilbronner, my friend David's father, on business cycles when I was writing a report in high school on the stock market crash. I thought it was fascinating.

posted by william 12:32 AM
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