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

Thursday, August 29, 2013

I remember Hai King, the Chinese restaurant in Hyderabad, and my mother's nostalgia about eating there as a child. The food was good, but didn't match up to how fond she was of it. But she loved it too much to be wrong, so I convinced myself to love it too.

I remember that American Chop Suey had a white sauce rather than the red of Chinese Chop Suey, and we only ever ordered the latter. But some restaurants swapped the two.

I remember eating the green chilies that came with Chicken 65 -- how flavorful and painfully hot they were, the temporary relief of drinking water, and starting over again.

posted by sravana 5:27 PM
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