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


Monday, November 24, 2008
I remember
this post from over five years ago, in which I remembered a New Yorker story that our English teacher (in eighth grade, I thought, correctly) read aloud about a mad punster and the puns he sets up, including one that leads to the headline "Pére Squegg in Hound Role." I thought about it a lot. Well, tonight, using the New Yorker's digital archives on line, I found the story! "Turtletaub and the Foul Distemper." By Roger Angell! Whom I wouldn't really pay any attention to until college. But he'd written that story. Which appeared in the May 30, 1970 New Yorker, pp. 26-29.


posted by william 12:04 AM
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