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, June 22, 2012

I remember watching how the varsity goalie (Mike Stevens, All-American!) and the best fullback knew just where to line up on a corner-kick, the goalie standing straight and tall at the far goal post and the fullback at the other. The were partners, and they knew what they were doing. Later when I played goalie I loved thinking of the quasi-professional knowledge that I had: where to stand on a corner-kick. I had my place, and the goal itself marked it out, the goal post a schema and rough sketch of me, standing contiguous too it, just as Mike had.

posted by William 6:50 PM
. . . 0 comments

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

I remember sleeping over and having friends sleep over. I remember sleeping at Nina's, especially at Rae's house in Lexington. I have so many different memories of sleepovers at that house, I don't know what order they go in: jumping on the beds; brewing toothpaste concoctions in Nina's powder room once the big bathroom renovation was done; swimming with mermaid toys in the big bathtub; eating ice cream; flying around the house in underoos and green felt slippers; eating melon chunks for snack (at my house we didn't really have snack); holding hands around the table and throwing kisses as grace; describing my family's six-week visit in Israel (in 1979) at dinner; playing hide and seek in the lower level (office); watching movies about horses; watching Nickelodeon (at my house we didn't have cable); listening to Rae read The Runaway Bunny, Frances, and Mercer Meyer books to us. I remember that sleepovers were so normal to me, so obviously what friends did at Rae's house, that when Celeste moved in (Nina and I were around four), I figured they were having a sleepover, too.

posted by Rosasharn 8:56 PM
. . . 0 comments

Sunday, June 03, 2012

I remember that my father brought his portable desk-top transistor radio to Europe. I was surprised when he got it out at the beach one day, because I had no idea that the radio could receive anything outside the U.S. I associated that radio only with WQXR and the wonderful show "Limelight" on WNEW. But it turned out the radio could speak Italian! (Not that my father could.)

I should have known, of course, because my uptown grandparents had a Telefunken receiver with German (Austrian) captions: FM was uKW (I think that was the way it was marked), which my father told me was for ultraKurzWagen, ultra short wave.

But I think I didn't make the deduction because in New York everyone I knew over a certain age spoke with an accent, and so I thought of New York as a place where goods came in multiple languages. Among those goods were radio broadcasts, and in particular the classical music my grandparents listened to: opera in German and Italian, and Beethoven and Mozart, which was music in German (a German I understood as I understood my grandmother's German too). So there was nothing odd about their old receiver - it too was of a certain age, with its tubes requiring thirty seconds to a minute to warm up - having a different first language and yet (and so!) being entirely at home in New York.

posted by William 11:39 AM
. . . 1 comments

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