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, April 16, 2010

I remember I thought the frozen dessert we'd get at the Lake Carmel Carvell (words I merged) was called custer, so that I was both amused and perturbed when I heard about Little Big Horn. I think my associative energies went to making it reasonable that the person was named after the dessert, just as Carmel (which I then knew was Biblical) was somehow named after Carvell, at least in upstate New York, because there was a Carvell there.

posted by William 9:15 PM
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