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

Thursday, February 25, 2010

I remember the little booklets of lyrics that sometimes came with tapes, and the slightly bigger ones sold separately in music stores. I remember how strange it was to read the lyrics disjoint from the music -- terribly bad poems, but with some kind of authority to them.

I remember the first store in Koramangala that carried English music. It also doubled up as an internet cafe, and charged for e-mail by the page.

posted by sravana 7:04 AM
. . . 0 comments

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

I remember that life changed when you could still be in trouble the next morning. I remember mornings when I was still in trouble and how school was a relief, a sort of shelter in time where if I did what I was supposed to be doing the authorities would not be aggrieved with me. This gave me both sustenance and hope at the end of the day - sustenance because of the feeling that I'd done what I was supposed to do even when my parents were so deeply skeptical of my character, and hope that the strongly perceived sense of time spent dutifully's being a lot of time indeed meant that my parents would also have felt that last night's trouble was a world away.

posted by William 4:34 PM
. . . 1 comments

Thursday, February 11, 2010

I remember that Jack Ruby was a nightclub owner. I read this in Life Magazine, I believe, the week after he shot Oswald. I was surprised: it seemed someone as tony as a nightclub owner, with his glamorous life and his obvious wealth, wouldn't be doing anything as tawdry as shooting people in police custody. I figured he was really mad. But even so.

posted by William 1:36 PM
. . . 0 comments

Sunday, February 07, 2010

I remember that my father came home from a business trip with a gift memento: a Superbowl III ticket encased in lucite to make a paperweight. He gave it to me. I really liked it. I was interested in the fact that this was a ticket that once had had immense value and now was just a paperweight. I'd look through the thick glass at this mysterious, depleted artifact a lot.

posted by William 10:04 PM
. . . 2 comments

Thursday, February 04, 2010

I remember misremembering a downhill stretch of road that I used to bike down. The block that I had to pass before getting there was narrow and badly paved, the sand and gravel accentuating the upcoming pleasure of the long pedal-free ride down. A couple of years later, when I wasn't allowed to bike anymore, I remembered the stretch as ending at a wide, quiet road bordering a pond or a small lake. But of course, this wasn't true -- it ended at a crowded street with no water in sight, and part of the fun was accelerating enough that braking and turning to avoid traffic was a mildly non-trivial challenge.

Still later, I realized there was a lake (a large one) beyond the street, but after a kilometer or so of undeveloped land. There was certainly no way to see it, or get to it easily, from that intersection.

posted by sravana 2:28 AM
. . . 2 comments

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