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 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
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