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

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

I remember when I realized I wasn't passionate about birds and ornithology; I just loved it as an intellectual exercise -- matching pictures in extensive atlases to names, memorizing intricate and delightful taxonomies and Latin nomenclature, the trivia, and of course, the pride in my relatively esoteric knowledge. Birds were nice, but not as nice as knowing a lot about them.

posted by sravana 2:03 AM
. . . 0 comments

Friday, January 20, 2012

I remember being impressed by the well-defined and effective brown borders at the edge of my sunny-side-up fried egg, and how I vaguely wondered how that was done: it made the egg seem like a manufactured product.

posted by William 7:47 AM
. . . 0 comments

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

I remember how cool it was when my father confirmed my grandfather's trick, that to convert decimals into percents all you had to do was move the decimal point over two digits to the right. It seemed such a sophisticated European bit of knowledge and technique.

posted by William 5:41 PM
. . . 0 comments

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

I remember doing GoJu Ryu Karate. I remember how I loved my Sensei. I loved to do exactly as she did: count as she did, walk as she did, fall as she did, emulate her rhythm and form in the katas, turn my knee out as she did, breathe as she did, speak with her intonation when I instructed newcomers, make my body do as her body did.

posted by Rosasharn 12:30 PM
. . . 0 comments

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