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

Monday, May 29, 2023

I remember that my father told me that he wrote his brother a letter on D-Day congratulating him that D-Day occurred on his nineteenth birthday. My father was twelve. Three weeks later they got the telegram from Kermit Roosevelt, his commander, that he'd been killed in action June 4.

posted by William 12:32 PM
. . . 0 comments

Sunday, May 28, 2023

I remember learning in a music class in middle or maybe elementary school that purists would walk out of Don Giovanni right after he was taken off to hell and before the final ensemble. (I almost never saw that but did see it the other week.)

posted by William 9:46 AM
. . . 0 comments

Tuesday, May 16, 2023

I remember really wide leather watch bands that you just inserted the watch itself into. They looked vaguely like anceint Roman wrist bands, the kind you saw in movies about Roman soldiers. But with a watch face.

posted by William 2:24 PM
. . . 0 comments

Monday, May 15, 2023

I remember hearing on the radio about two kids my age (6 or7) stealing the family car. One steered but could not reach the pedals, so the other one worked the gas and the brakes. I liked my visual sense of this, which had a WB cartoon atmosphere about it: sweet, ingenious, ingenuous. Since only my uptown grandfathet had a car, I imagined the car as being like his (a blue Ford), and the two of them as someone combining to imitate him as a driver.

posted by William 9:02 AM
. . . 0 comments

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