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, November 26, 2010

I remember an anti-littering short we were shown in school. A guy on the street couldn't believe all the cavalier littering going on around him. He kept picking up other people's trash and putting it in the trash basket just a few feet away. There were no cops around, so he was the representative of the good citizen. Then he picked up one more piece of trash and tossed it, and suddenly noticed money in the trash basket. He tossed some litter away from the basket on to the street to get the money out, and with a smile of virtue rewarded, which made us smile too, he fanned the bill out into 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 dollars! And suddenly two cops appeared behind him and wrote him out a $25.00 ticket for littering. Unfair!

posted by William 11:32 AM
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