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 23, 2016

I remember how in huge snow storms the snow would fall through the grates into the subway. I could look over the edge of the platform and see it between the ties of the tracks. Sometimes, more rarely, it even got onto the platform itself. There was something comforting about that. It was as though I was still outside, traveling through the city. But also immensely protected by having gone underground. The slush and snow petered out as one went down the steps, sometimes collecting into scuzzy puddles at the bottom, which people tracked a little farther to the token booth and turnstiles, but which were gone once I was on the platform proper. The other snow, the snow I could see from the platform, was like a vision of snow, like looking at the snow through a window, but the window was just space -- city space which when I looked through the real glass windows of my room was there all around me and was where I was despite the window. Here in the subway there was no window but I was still in the space the same way, outside but just watching the snow, waiting for the thunder of the train, which would go through the endless black tunnels that could bring one anywhere in that space, any station out of which I'd exit into snow.

posted by William 1:17 PM
. . . 0 comments

Monday, January 11, 2016

I remember that Viva was a client of my father's, briefly. She gave him a copy of Superstar, which I paged through, vainly looking for salacious scenes. There was a lot less sex in her memoir than I hoped. (Same thing with Henry Miller's so-called pornography.) I remember that I answered the phone one day when she called for my father. That was the one time I talked to one of Warhol's superstars!

posted by William 12:31 AM
. . . 0 comments

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