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, November 22, 2008

I remember: "You could look five pounds thinner in a Playtex panty girdle. Five pounds thinner." The white-coated guy showed how if you pressed at just the right area of the abdomen -- kind of where Lee Harvey Oswald was shot (though I don't know that I made that connection then) -- you could look five pounds thinner. That's just where the Playtex panty girdle pushed!

posted by william 4:57 PM
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