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 30, 2012

I remember my Pocket Books ("not one word has been omitted") series of Perry Mason mysteries, by Earle Stanley Gardner. I loved the kangaroo logo, and the idea that they really did fit so well into your pocket. They were a little different from today's ottavo paperbacks, just a little squatter, smaller, less tapered, fatter so they really did fit into your front pocket (maybe people will remember different generation iPhones this way). It was a pleasure being able to carry them around this way, to take them in and out. The tops of the pages were edged or dyed a kind of maroon.

They must have been designed to be recognized as once hardcover but not highbrow, so that you wouldn't mind the wear and tear of pocketing and unpocketing them. They needed and accepted Scotch tape better than more modern or classier books would. They began right after the copyright page, without any blank pages between them, so you got to plunge right in. And the typography was somehow appropriate to that: utilitarian from the start, so that the story was all that mattered.

I think that they all originally belonged to my grandparents, though now it's hard to say which, since I think I remember reading them in my uptown grandparents' house, but I can't think that anyone but my downtown grandparents would have liked mysteries at all.

posted by William 9:44 AM
. . . 1 comments

Thursday, November 29, 2012

I remember learning the phrase "Live and let live" (as a translation of "savoir faire") in 10th grade. It seemed like a lame variation on the well-known, glamorous "Live and let die."

posted by William 7:34 PM
. . . 0 comments

Saturday, November 10, 2012

I remembered (when someone expressed surprise that I knew the story of Goldilocks!) my Goldilocks board book, in shades of yellow and brown, a sentence to a page. I remember the illustrations of the beds and the porridge bowls vividly, but can't recall what the characters looked like.

I had another board book on Cinderella that I got later as a birthday present after I had outgrown them. Cinderella's picture was that of a much younger girl than I had imagined or seen in other books. That (slightly yucky) incongruity went together in my mind with being given a book that was too childish for me.

posted by sravana 3:46 PM
. . . 0 comments

Sunday, November 04, 2012

I remember first hearing about and hearing "Greensleeves" in an episode of Lost in Space. It was beautiful and unexpected.

posted by William 9:33 AM
. . . 0 comments

Friday, November 02, 2012

I remember the patterns of daylight in our house, one of those things that are not remembered until they are recognized. The intensities and shadows streaming through the balcony window in the living room and the front porch -- fresh and wide in the morning, curtain-blocked glare on weekend afternoons, comforting heavy orange after school, dim gray in the rain. My windows and porch now also face east, for the first time, and it's all the same light as then.

posted by sravana 5:27 PM
. . . 0 comments

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