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, January 09, 2024

I remember my father explaining to me when we were watching a James Bond movie -- one of the earlier ones with Sean Connery -- that a 0 on the roulette wheel meant you lost no matter whether you'd bet red or black, even or odd, etc. (and that this was how the house came out ahead). Not longer after we got a toy roulette set and I saw there was a 0 and a double 0 on the plastic mat you could lay out to place your chips on. But in the movie there was only a 0. I assumed that the toy set was more accurate and that probability of getting black or evens or whatever binary bet you made was 18/38 or 9/19 -- that is less than the a break-even 50%. (Only recently did I learn that the 00 was an American innovation: in Monte Carlo they only have one 0).

posted by William 8:30 PM
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