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

Saturday, February 06, 2021

I remember seeing, in bright sunlight, my mother cup her hand one day under a kitchen counter and sweep the crumbs she'd brought together into her cupped hand. I thought this was astonishingly elegant -- the flat counter, the poise of her hand, all her fingers curving together, extending the arc of her curved palm.

posted by William 11:25 AM
. . . 1 comments

Monday, February 01, 2021

I remember that Sonny Fox (who just died of Covid) used to have the kids in the studio audience line up to tell him jokes. (As I mentioned before, my friend Marc Bilgray got to see him live!) The one joke I remember went like this:
KID: Why did the chicken cross the road?
SONNY FOX: I don't know. Why?
KID: To get The Daily News. (Beat.) Get it?
SONNY FOX: No...
KID: Neither do I! I get The New York Times!

posted by William 12:06 PM
. . . 0 comments

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