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, May 31, 2009

I remember the white plastic T-shaped tags that attached the stoppers of waterguns to their bodies when you filled them. They were always in the way -- they made the guns much harder to fill, especially with hoses, so I never felt that my watergun was satisfactorily full. By pulling hard you could force the T to collapse and fold over and pull the whole thing out, but somehow after that the gun never seemed to seal up quite right.

posted by William 10:52 AM
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