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

Monday, March 05, 2018

I remember my father telling me how Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile: the physiological knowledge he had as a med student, how it allowed him to figure out how to pace himself, the help that he got from his friends who paced him. My father knew nothing about running (I was a wannabe runner at the time, because of my infatuation with Jim Ryun), but he knew all about Roger Bannister.

posted by William 10:43 PM
. . . 0 comments

Sunday, March 04, 2018

I remember the New York Times chess column, written by I. A. Horowitz, which appeared three times a week, I think. I usually couldn't understand his explanation of moves a player couldn't make because they would lead to a position that wasn't obviously bad enough for me to see was losing. But I liked the diagram that came with each column, usually of the position near the end of the game -- it would be captioned as the position after the move made in the caption. When the Times switched from English to algebraic notation I found the games much harder to follow (I hate algebraic notation) and gradually stopped reading the columns. I think this was after Horowitz retired.

posted by William 8:11 AM
. . . 0 comments

Friday, March 02, 2018

I remember how disturbed I was when I first saw a 9-volt battery, which I had to put into my new transistor radio. I hated its asymmetry. And that asymmetry was increased, rather than mitigated, by the fact that you had to snap it into terminals which were the opposite of the terminals on the battery itself. I think this was the worst version of the asymmetries I hated in training wheels and in bikes in general -- the chain on one side of the frame, not both sides. Trikes were so much more elegant, as were D batteries. Even dry cells were okay. The asymmetries I hated were left-right, not front-back. Hence my dislike of the new windshield wipers, which paralleled each other instead of describing mirroring arcs across each half of the front window.

posted by William 11:24 AM
. . . 0 comments

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