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, November 06, 2009

I remember that my father had a drawer full of 8 mm film; some reels were of us, some were unused (and expired).

When Hugh C. and I wanted to make a movie we saw that they were expired and went to the specialty camera store to buy more film for my father's camera. But is was so expensive! So we used the expired film and then the owner of the shop got p.o.'d at us when we went to get it developed: he thought we'd just bought some film from elsewhere. I think we got some film back from him eventually, but never figured out how to watch it. All those frames! I somehow thought we could just scan our eyes down the film -- after all we didn't need technology for Hugh's great flip movies.

My father also had some old commercial films -- ten minute shorts (of entertainers) and some cartoons. Cartoons you could watch at home at will! Amazing! But we never figured out how to watch those either, and I don't think my father showed them to us more than once or twice, if that. I just remember those large square flat enticingly colorful boxes in the drawer.

posted by William 2:13 PM
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