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, January 25, 2014

I remember my parents bought some Planters Mixed Nuts for a party. I'd seem them at other people's houses (e.g. the Herings'), but never in their can. We didn't buy them much.

You had to open them with a key that was attached to the top of the can. You inserted a strip of metal which stuck out just underneath the rim into a slot in the key, and then wound the strip around the key as you opened it. (Tennis ball cans, I would find out, were opened the same way, but with a more satisfying woosh of a vacuum being breached.)

I would never have been able to figure out how to open the can, and it impressed me that my parents simply knew how to do it. All that knowledge they had of things that weren't part of our house, at least not day-to-day. They knew about the household things in other kinds of houses as well. But what really impressed me is that they knew, before they even opened the can of nuts, that you could get cut on the edge of the metal strip when you'd opened it. They had a sense of possible childhood injury that I didn't even know existed. They knew how a can of nuts might interact with their own child. It was as though we were two little things, the can of nuts and me, and they were grown-ups who knew about us, knew more about us than we did.

posted by William 5:34 PM
. . . 0 comments

Saturday, January 04, 2014

I remember S&H green stamps. (Or were they S&H Green stamps; anyway, they were pale green perforated stamps and my mother pasted long strips of them into booklets.)

One winter day, when I must have been four or five, because we still lived in DC then, my mother took me on errand to redeem the S&H booklets. On the way, on the sidewalk, a man said "Happy New Year" to my mother, and she returned the greeting.

I was amazed; how did they know to say that? how did they both know to say that? I asked her if she knew him. She said she didn't. That ruled out conspiracy.

Possibly the conversation went on--my questions, her answers--but if so, it was probably about the holiday, and not about the fascinating thing, how they knew what to say.

(I can't shake an awareness of how this scene would play in a novel or film. Which would be, of course, yes, she knows the putative stranger, and only the child doesn't know that it's asking the right question. But this was about something else.)

posted by Carceraglio 3:14 PM
. . . 0 comments

Friday, January 03, 2014

I remember "Adam Smith" (who died yesterday: George Jerome Waldo Goodman). I didn't notice the quotation marks around his name on the cover of his perennially best-selling books The Money Game and Super-Money when I was in high school. They had a copy in the candy/stationery/newspaper store where I would take C'mere, the prejudiced lady's dog, to get her the first edition of the Daily News at night, and some chocolate Bonomo Turkish taffy for me.

Then I took a course on the Enlightenment, and was astonished to see Adam Smith ranged among the eighteenth century philosophes. That was when the penny dropped (so to speak). It was really interesting to see my own everyday environment -- what environment more everyday, every single day than a dark, richly stocked candy store? -- reorganized, framed and geometrized, as though by the plan and elevation somehow diagramed by those quotation marks, crystalized into an unexpectedly global lattice by a reading assignment about a world an ocean and two centuries away.

posted by William 1:56 PM
. . . 0 comments

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