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

Thursday, May 30, 2019

I remember my mother explaining the concept of the lost-and-found to me. I didn't understand it, but it seemed magical.

posted by William 11:04 AM
. . . 0 comments

Sunday, May 26, 2019

I remember that when I read To Kill a Mockingbird I admired Jem as a kind of young authority -- the older brother who was the most accurate pointer to who the good adults were. That means I was considerably younger than him, so I must have read To Kill a Mockingbird at about age ten. It's no wonder I missed so many literary allusions!

posted by William 12:00 PM
. . . 0 comments

Sunday, May 19, 2019

I remember that Marjorie Morningstar was the first novel for adults that I read. I remember how much I liked the line "Like a crooked arm," and how I argued that this was so much better than "Like Noel's crooked arm." Then I read The Caine Mutiny, and my father told me Queeg's balls were shit (or maybe the psychologist in the book says that?). Then Youngblood Hawk and The Winds of War, though I'm not sure I finished it. And This is my God, which (along with The Source and The Chosen) inspired a phase of religious mania. The last Herman Wouk I read was a novel about a guy who buys a Caribbean inn and thinks he's going to live a life of leisure and finally read Ulysses, "that difficult book." My father had a copy, I had seen, so I grabbed it, read the preface with Judge Woolsey's decision finding it not obscene, and started in. It was difficult. Dashes instead of quotation marks made it hard to say when speeched ended! I read it over the next year. About a hundred pages in, I asked my father whether Bloom was Jewish. Obviously a lot more difficult than Wouk!

posted by William 12:56 AM
. . . 0 comments

Saturday, May 11, 2019

I remember the first time I heard the phrase "hurry up" -- in the hallway outside our apartment. We were late for something. I remember the phrase was somehow thrilling to me, because I didn't quite know what it meant. But it was certainly urgent -- I knew what "hurry" meant -- so somehow I'd have to hurry to do whatever hurrying up meant. The only thing I could do was both run and button my coat at the same time. That seemed to be what was wanted.

posted by William 12:58 AM
. . . 0 comments

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