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

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

I remember the first time I rode pillion on a motorbike. I was reading with two other kids from Oliver Twist for All India Radio, and a girl in her twenties (I think) was helping us rehearse. She picked me up to take me to where we were meeting. I was surprised that my parents didn't mind. I remember how unstable it felt at turns, and clutching desperately to the back of the seat while trying to appear as nonchalant as possible.

posted by sravana 4:30 AM
. . . 0 comments

Monday, July 19, 2010

I remember my family, especially my downtown grandmother, telling me to throw things into the wastepaper basket. At first that was one word to me, and then a little later two, but I remember vividly when I realized that "wastepaper" was a compound of "waste" and "paper": how elegant that was, and how good her English suddenly seemed to me.

posted by William 12:12 AM
. . . 3 comments

Monday, July 12, 2010

I remember U2's Joshua Tree album. I remember listening to With or Without You on the school bus, which was the only place I heard pop music; at home it was classical, my parents' collection of 60s records, or nothing. Even asking for a radio (not a walkman, mind you, a radio) was a huge deal for me—risky, questionable. My father didn't like modern music, found it simpleminded, repetitive, boring. It was hard to like something he knew so much about and found so thoroughly dismissable. But I loved Where the Streets have No Name, and I remember listening to it with my oldest friend Nina, in her grandmother's guest room, when we took that solo trip to California, the summer before we turned 13. No pop music in family space, but go ahead and fly across country alone with your friend. What strange mix will my children take for granted?

posted by Rosasharn 11:19 PM
. . . 0 comments

Saturday, July 10, 2010

I remember going into the amazing courtyard of the Belnord once, in a car I think. As I recall, the mother of a friend who lived there had a bunch of stuff to bring home, so we drove in together, and it was beautiful, like another world, an English house drive in the middle of a building in New York. The Belnord was and is a pre-war building with a beautiful facade, and for me that made it pretty typical. But inside it was something else again -- like going into a movie. I didn't live there, and never would, but it was part of New York, and so I did live there, in the city with buildings like this wherever you turned, breathtaking but permanent and no big deal.

posted by William 12:48 PM
. . . 0 comments

Tuesday, July 06, 2010

I remember that (except on leap years) today's date will occur one day in the week later next year (because 365 is 1 (mod 7)). I remember how useful this was for figuring out when old birthdays were. I was born on a Wednesday, so I was 1 on a Thursday, 2 on a Friday, 3 on a Saturday and (leap year!) 4 on a Monday. I also remember listening to the Pirates of Penzance a lot, or maybe it was a compendium of Gilbert and Sullivan songs, and the "most ingenious paradox" that made the February 29th baby into someone who had only had five birthdays when he was twenty-one years old.

posted by William 11:49 PM
. . . 0 comments

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