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


Friday, February 13, 2009
I remember Lindsay Nelson, I think it was, calling a Mets game on the radio. Probably in 1969 or 1970. I was walking Powell down the big hill on 91st street and listening to the game on my transistor radio. Bud Harrelson took three grounders that inning, and threw out the runner three times, once at second and twice at first maybe. Lindsay Nelson said, "...and Bud Harrleson with three assists in the inning. That ties a record." I liked that quick, wry, lazy, afternoon notation: the routine ways records get tied in baseball.


posted by william 5:51 PM
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