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

Monday, January 26, 2009

I remember that my parents had a Selectric in their office. Just like Doug B's. And it was such a thrill, to see that ball spin so quickly to type just the right letter through the one-time film ribbon. It was like science fiction -- a kind of precursor to that blob on The Prisonner that went after the prisonners who tried to escape. It was just this sort of elegant, paperweight-like model globe, sort of floating in the space of an empty typewriter, like a tiny monument to the Pica letters it would once have typed, but then you turned it on and the ball came to life, and somehow knew just what it was doing. (I liked also that you could read the film backwards and see what people had typed, though of course there were no spaces there.)

posted by william 5:45 PM
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