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

Wednesday, December 21, 2016

I remember that our English teacher brought in Pinter's Dumb Waiter to class one day, in seventh grade, I think. That would have been Mr. Richards, whose strangeness was partially encapsulated in our slightly uncanny knowledge that he had an identical twin. (There were fraternal twins in our class, but I never put their present and different twinship together with Mr. Richards' twinship with another, more mysterious, Mr. Richards, somewhere out there whom we never met.) I didn't know what a dumbwaiter was, though I believe he explained it. As a title, it didn't quite feel that you had to know what it meant, since it was a title, and meant the play it named. Mr. Richards had a couple of the students read a scene out loud, which they did with surprised and delighted gusto since it was all about puking. That's when I learned the word puke.

posted by William 10:59 AM
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