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, April 23, 2018
I remember his name is not Jasper. Someone says, "Screw you, Jack," to him, and he replies, "Screw you, Jasper."


posted by William 8:22 AM
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Monday, April 02, 2018
I remember how much I liked Jasper (?)'s lines in Cat's Cradle (?): "Go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut.  Go take a flying fuck at the moon."  (Also that a professional indexer could tell things such as that a person was "a homosexual" if he made the mistake of doing the index himself.  That kind of disturbed me, though, and made me wonder about people who did do their own indexes.  I read Cat's Cradle -- if it was Cat's Cradle -- in seventh grade, where I sat to the back on the left side of the classroom.  I remember when I read certain books by where I was sitting when I read them.)  I remember that at first "Go take a flying fuck at the moon" made more sense, but then I came to really like the vividness and aptness of "Go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut."


posted by William 10:27 AM
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