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

Saturday, April 03, 2010

I remember the odd pleasure of typing onto the roller without any paper in the typewriter -- you could barely see the letters inked onto the plastic or nylon cylinder. My parents and grandparents were shocked when they saw me doing it and told me it was bad for the typewriter; I believed them, though I didn't see why, and after that I only did it by accident. (But why did I obey them? Maybe because being careful about the rules was a way for me to think of myself as a typewriter sophisticate.) But even though I no one ever typed on it intentionally, I remember the roller itself covered with these phantom letters, like a record of the typewriter's own writing or reading, its musings to itself.

posted by William 8:35 AM
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