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
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