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, August 01, 2022

I remember Nichelle Nichols.  Hers was the first time I heard the word "Uhura." Then I was very surprised to see my father had a book name Uhuru -- the famous book by Robert Ruark whence Gene Rodenberry must have got the name.  I really liked Uhura on the show: the way her intense focus on communication turned out to be as important as anything else.  Her character wasn't central to any episode but she seemed to represent everything that the long distance and information operators she updated meant to someone like me: the alert, highly competent, quick women who made the infrastructure of instantaneous communication and therefore of the whole country as a country work,



posted by William 12:29 AM
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