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

Monday, May 03, 2010

I remember Hoyt Wilhelm, the knuckleballer pitching into old age. Thinking of his cracked, smiling face now is like imagining Will Rogers as an old soldier leading young'uns through a campaign. I wonder if Hoyt Wilhelm is still alive.

I remember when I learned that the Yankees were called the Bronx Bombers. It was in a Daily News back-page headline that a kid at school had: "Bombers pound Tigers" or something. Since I was a complete Mets fan (the Yankees were terrible then, and the Mets were making history), I had no comprehension of this headline till I read the article. They weren't called the Bronx Bombers in the article, but there was something so WWII-ish about it, which hearkened back to the era of Ruth, that it felt as though the Yankees were some prehistoric creature, some King Kong returning to the headlines from the past. And so when a few days later I saw a reference to the Bronx Bombers, I knew what it meant, and began to think about how wonderful the Yankees were, a sentiment confirmed by The Old Man and the Sea. They were a little inaccessible, being a Bronx and not a Manhattan team. But they were generous in the umbrella they offered their fans, in Manhattan too. Even when they were wounded and down. They never gave up, the Bronx Bombers, the Yankees of New York.

posted by William 9:57 AM
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