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

Sunday, August 31, 2014

I remember that Wonder Bread was supposedly raised by being plunged into liquid nitrogen so that it blew up into its airy cotton-candy textuds through a kind of doughy experience of the bends. I always wondered whether this made it kosher for Passover since it had no yeast in it or other leavening in it. I remember reading that if you suddenly found yourself in the vacuum of space, your blood would boil instantaneously. At some point, when I realized that this wasn't because your blood was hot, I must have put this together with Wonder Bread. I certainly put it together with the Ray Bradbury story of the spaceship that exploded and the radio conversation the survivors had as they drifted apart from each other. One of them had to punch through the face pane of a panicking screamer who knew they were all going to die (his trajectory crossed that of the person who punched through the glass), so that the others could continue their last, meditative discussion. (One was going to hit Earth's atmosphere, and become a meteor.) The screamer's blood would have boiled. I sometimes tried to picture what it would be like for your blood to boil: I imagined looking at my arms and somehow seeing the conduits of veins bubbling away, as though I'd partially uncovered the simmering channels. It seemed to me it would be really interesting. Then I realized my eyeballs would be boiling away too. Oh well. The stuff you think about in the Wonder Years.

posted by William 10:04 AM
. . . 1 comments

Sunday, August 10, 2014

I remember night terrors, my fear late at night of the outside, of the woods behind my house, of Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster, names I knew because WGBH sometimes previewed NOVA programs about them. Undoubtedly those shows debunked the monster myths, but the previews did not, and they were all I encountered. I remember that the upstairs bathroom window was always cracked about two inches, summer or winter, and the light -- at least a night light -- was always on in there. So the one room with light was the room with an open window, facing the forest.

posted by Rosasharn 2:17 AM
. . . 0 comments

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