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, January 30, 2019

I remember the direction that a cassette tape goes. I remember that you rewind it to the start, with all the tape on one side in the window. Because in the first cassette player we ever had you put the cassette in tape side up (so that the label is upside down), I remember that all the tape has to be on the right side when the tape is upside down. I still find this easier to remember than that it should all be on the left side when it's right side up.

posted by William 1:59 PM
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Thursday, January 24, 2019

I remember reading about Kennedy writing his inaugural address -- or touching it up -- in the limo. This was in William Manchester's A Thousand Days. I remember thinking that having to give an inaugural address might be a reason for me not to be president, since I hated the very idea of giving speeches. Then a year or two later, I remember, we learned about the State of the Union address in a social studies class, and I realized that the president had to give a speech every year. I thought that that was certainly too much. I had an image of the president giving a speech -- I think it was Kennedy because I was still connecting it to his inaugural address -- and that president was definitely some highly competent adult and no version of me at all.

posted by William 1:41 PM
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Wednesday, January 23, 2019

I remember Russell Baker (who died today). I remember my father reading him in the Times when I was a child and how my father would laugh out loud -- a rare thing for him to do when he was reading the news. I remember that later, in high school, I looked forward to Russell Baker's twice- or thrice-weekly columns. By then they'd moved to the op-ed page because by then there was an op-ed page. I remember my high school English teacher reading aloud one of his columns about reading Proust, which Baker compared to climbing Everest, with Tenzing as his guide, promising him that there would be a cup of tea or a walk along the beach in the not too distant future if he could just hang on. I remember that I would laugh out loud when I read his columns too.

posted by William 12:42 PM
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Sunday, January 20, 2019

I remember that my parents would often say "I knew you'd say that" to each other, with a kind of delight. I liked it. I liked the way it meant that they were sharing a good mood, and were appreciative of each other's wit and in synch in that appreciation. I don't know that I ever knew it when they were about to say things, so there was something lovely about the way their agreement created a kind of reliable world -- if they were both thinking the same thing, and it was a happy thing that put them in good moods, all was obviously all right, and since I didn't know they'd say what they said, I was grateful to see that things were good and solid and stable too.

posted by William 11:39 AM
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