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, October 30, 2010

I remember that Michael C. pronounced "new" without the enya or y after the initial consonant in my pronunciation. And Mr. Stern pronounced "Beautiful" "bee-ootifel" (so the first syllable was different from the first syllable of "beauty"). None of the other Sterns said it like that, so his way sounded to me like a wonderful affectation, a kind of demonstration that the beautiful thing he was praising was so good that it could survive his corny pronunciation, even flourish. As though its beauty had made him a goofy kid again, and made it okay for us kids to see that beauty was part of the array of the pure, transcendent, childish fun he was so good at encouraging and joining.

posted by William 10:48 AM
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