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 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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