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

Friday, March 20, 2009

I remember dialing with my left index finger sometimes, maybe if I was making a lot of phone calls and had a pencil in my right hand, or was using my right hand for something else. It was much harder to dial with your left index finger, since now you were pressing against the spring resistance to the dial with the back of your finger, with your nail. And if you had a hangnail or any other sort of soreness in your cuticle, as I did all the time when I was a kid, it just hurt to dial that way. And the motion was much less natural, pushing the dial clockwise from the left.

posted by william 10:10 PM
. . . 0 comments

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

I remember "Purim Day, Purim Day, gladsome joyous holiday." "Let's make [something] pah! pah! pah!...with our dreidels play." "Hamentaschen good to eat! Cakes and candies sweet!"

But it was in a minor key, which puzzled me a bit, but also made some sense, since all the anarchic joy praised by the song was a sort of false joy, not the fun I would propose for myself if I could do anything that I wanted -- I'd be down in the park playing football with my friends instead.

posted by william 12:24 AM
. . . 0 comments

Sunday, March 08, 2009

I remember that there were two ways to make mistakes on dial phones: to put your finger in the wrong slot, or not to dial the phone all the way toward the curved metal stop.

The second source of error is the interesting one: I remember that sometimes you might not make it all the way to the metal -- you might have stopped a quarter of an inch or so too early. Then there were three choices: did you hope that you had just stopped and not let the dial move counterclockwise at all, so that you could continue the clockwise dialing motion? Or did you redial the whole number? Or hope that you'd gone close enough for the right number to register? Your answer to this question might depend on how far into the number you were (first digit? sixth?) and how quickly you had to make your call.

posted by william 12:17 PM
. . . 2 comments

Saturday, March 07, 2009

I remember that in the old, lighter green and yellow buses, the steering wheels were much more vertically oriented, the way they are in cars. In the newer, darker green buses, the pitch was much more horizontal, which made the bus drivers seem more godlike to me. They weren't confronting the wheel, face to face, as it were, but controlling it from above. I took pleasure in this constant reminder of progress.

posted by william 11:52 PM
. . . 1 comments

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