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, March 21, 2010

I remember that one of the pleasures of metal rackets - my Wilson T-1600 - was that you could hurl them at the ground in disgust if you blew a shot. Sometimes, on composition courts, if you threw them just right, they'd bounce right back to you like a spring. Sometimes, though, they'd bend and you'd have to sight down the grip and handle to try to straighten them out, or live with the warp. I remember the pleasure of the look of veteran rackets, both wood and metal: the scrapes on the rim showing that you'd scooped up and returned your share of hard, low balls. Throwing the racket helped get you that look too, which also recorded the self-disgust of the good player who routinely expected to make the spectacular shots and saves that the thrown racket showed he sometimes missed, when he wasn't quite playing as well as he should have been.

posted by William 8:36 AM
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