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

Sunday, April 26, 2009

I remember Ken H. knowing that if we rolled a bottle down the big hill on 91st street, it would shatter after just a few revolutions. I thought it would just roll, and maybe shatter purely by chance. But for him it was a technique -- roll and shatter. He took a Coke bottle and rolled it fairly gently, and sure enough it shattered into shards in less then two seconds.

posted by william 11:09 PM
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