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

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

I remember the original host of Jeopardy, Art Fleming. I love poor Alex Trebek, but I can never reconcile myself to him as true host. Art Fleming always seemed a little surprised. By right answers, by wrong answers, by the correct answers themselves. (Or rather questions.) His voice sounded ruddy, which made his face look ruddy even on our black and white portable, which I would watch in the kitchen on days that I was sick. (Jeopardy was a daytime show back then.)

Maybe my parents' generation couldn't reconcile themselves to Johnny Carson. Not that they ever watched the Tonight Show -- that was one of those things my classmates in middle school knew and talked about and sometimes regaled each other with, but it wasn't a part of our house. It was as though TV habits, even back then, far from being a great unifier was a kind of very low intensity divider of households, a kind of analogue to religion but with very little at stake except the formation of wispy, ephemeral in-groups conglomerating every morning in twos and threes and dissipating as classes stared or people talked about gym or after-school activities or new desert books or tests or weekend plans. As though the communion the hosts made possible (to use a Jeff Nunokawa pun), was more like a coffee break (though we didn't mostly drink coffee, though I supposed that might have been another gauzy shared activity among those who did) than the sipping of sacramental wine.

posted by William 9:07 AM
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