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, June 25, 2010

I remember my father explaining that the odd looking extension on the gun of a villain in a James Bond movie -- I think the blond SMERSH agent in From Russia With Love -- was a silencer, confirmed by the fact that it made almost no bang when fired. I thought that was a really great, and debonair, accessory.

posted by William 12:18 AM
. . . 0 comments

Sunday, June 20, 2010

I only vaguely remember the time when my father's father could talk and move without difficulty.

I remember that in his shaky, silent way, he liked it when we took his blessings and touched his feet.

It saddens me that there is so little in the way of details that I remember about him.

posted by sravana 6:41 PM
. . . 0 comments

Monday, June 14, 2010

I remember seeing a photo of the black-clad Soviet goalkeeper making a perfectly horizontal diving save, his elegantly gloved hands beautifully poised. That photo made me a goalie, which was some of the most fun and glory and satisfaction I've ever had.

posted by William 10:49 PM
. . . 0 comments

Friday, June 11, 2010

I remember that you couldn't record over pre-recorded cassettes because there was a tab that when punched out disabled the player from recording. You could punch out that tab on your own cassettes too, though if you wanted to leave one side recordable it was a little tricky figuring out which tab was which. To rerecord you put tape over the tabs.

I remember thinking that it seemed interesting and wrong that the pre-recorded music cassettes I bought had the tabs already punched out, so that in an odd way they were defective. It seemed better to add something to disable recording, not to remove something. Just my aesthetic opinions about design at thirteen.

posted by William 1:57 PM
. . . 0 comments

Sunday, June 06, 2010

I remember my mother rewarding or offering rewards to us if we were "especially good." I loved that word and still do: it's a word that she owned, for me. When we used the phrase, bargaining with her, we felt close to her (which was the point, the approach we were making, the earnest we were offering in the negotiation). "Can we go out for pizza if we're especially good?" I didn't recognize, of course, the kind implication that we were pretty good anyhow. It meant to me (and maybe was supposed to) that just being good, which would already be an effort, wasn't good enough. I think now it was both. At any rate, the word almost always makes her vivid to me.

The fact that English was basically a third language for both my parents, that they talked in another language with their parents who often talked still other languages with their friends, was a dim background to my sense of her highly literate adult vocabulary. It was as though adulthood were her native language, or her destined language rather. The babble of little-kid English and my grandparents' heavily accented English, German, Yugoslav: it was all where I lived (English primarily but not exclusively). I remember I invented a gibberish I called "Aboshab," probably like the Saturday Hebrew I knew fewer than a dozen words of. But then there was the adult language of "especially." (I'm pretty sure it was a word I also heard her using on the phone when talking with her clients about legal matters, so it was flattering to have it introduced into my own ambit.)

posted by William 12:42 PM
. . . 1 comments

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