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


Wednesday, June 01, 2016
I remember that Babe Ruth's home run total went up when they reinterpreted the rules.  It used to be that a bases-loaded home run in a tie game in the bottom of the 9th counted as a single, since you only needed a single to advance a runner home.  As soon as the runners touched the next bases the game was over.  But then (I think after he retired) they decided that a home run was a home run, and the Babe had hit enough walk-offs that he went from below to above 700.  At least that's what my father told me when I was a kid.


posted by William 9:33 AM
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