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, December 13, 2008
fsollero remembers:

I remember when I was six or seven, how I hated the movies of the Three Stooges. I thought they were mean, bad, and I was very surprised when I discovered that I was the only one that thought that way about them. And I noticed that the other children - and the grown-up too - laughed at the disgrace of others. But they didn't like when THEY were laughed at.

It was a huge discovery - the continent of human contradiction.


posted by william 10:50 AM
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