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

Saturday, September 14, 2013

I remember my uptown grandparents listening to the Kol Nidre on WQXR at the beginning of Yom Kippur. That was their radio station anyhow, and I remember the announcements that WQXR would broadcast it when my grandfather (the only person in our family who had a car) was driving me to their house, or driving me home.

posted by William 12:07 PM
. . . 0 comments

Saturday, September 07, 2013

I remember the duh! moments of figuring out the meanings of opaque words. Alsedindun, as I frequently heard my parents say, was actually "all said and done." Standertease was "stand at ease." Faps was just an abbreviation for Frank Anthony Public School -- not a distinct school by itself. Senmarks was Saint Marks. When I was little older: polycot was a compound, polyester-cotton, and that meant that terrycot was terry-cotton, though I didn't know "terry" was abbreviating. (I also remember realizing that art-silk was a clever euphemism for artificial silk.)

posted by sravana 2:10 AM
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Sunday, September 01, 2013

I remember David Frost. I was somehow aware of The David Frost show, maybe as the first adult eponymous show whose inception I remember: all the other shows -- Merv Griffin, Dick Cavett, David Suskind, etc. -- were just part of the eternal background of the TV schedule, like the Tonight Show and the Danny Kaye show. I remember when the Soupy Sales show started broadcasting on TV too, so I guess the David Frost show was the grown-up version of that kind of change in the presiding deities of TV, but he was much less interesting to me than Soupy Sales. I was very surprised when he interviewed Nixon -- this seemed more incongruous, by far, than Nixon's "Sock it to me" moment on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. (They too were new figures on the scene, but it wasn't called the Dan Rowan show, and even if it had been, it wouldn't have been the kind of interview show that Griffin, Cavett, Suskind and Frost were doing, and that somehow I thought of Sonny Fox, Sandy Becker and Soupy Sales as doing also, but with kids.)

posted by William 12:10 PM
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