This cultural resistance to translation is more obvious in what may be Perec’s most untranslatable book, Je me souviens (I Remember), a collection of brief remembrances of things and people that are indecipherable to anyone not French and not of his generation.” –Footnote from Translator’s Afterword to An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Marc Lowenthal. Ci vuole un attimo a riannodare il filo, a immergersi nella magia, a lasciarsi prendere e trasportare nell’altrove più bello. I remember that James Stewart played the part of Glenn Miller in the biopic of this jazz musician whose most famous piece is “Moonlight Serenade.”

Churchill’s anaphora allows him to conscript his listeners, through the use of both “we” and “shall”—the latter of which, while used interchangeably with “will” in England, connotes obligation, even a sense of a legal contract. I don’t ever have an idea. The material does it all. You have a figure and a flower and you add a cityscape and it makes the story. You have control if you want to take it but that’s something I never wanted to do much.O'Brien, Geoffrey. "Joe Brainard's Communal Intimacy | Geoffrey O'Brien". {{ cite magazine}}: Cite magazine requires |magazine= ( help) the writing tends to be concrete, vivid, specific, e.g., the house that gave you a dime, and elsewhere in Brainard’s poem very light faded blue jeans, ice cubes in the aquarium, giving Aunt Ruby stationery or scarves for special occasions. Weeding my onion-patch or hoeing rows of carrots and parsnips, crossing savannas, trailing in forests, I remember sexual fantasies of seducing young country boys. (But old enough) Pale and blond and eager.

that existence has its own reason for being." This sums up the usefulness of trying out what might seem an old practice or redundant articulation or plain seemingly unoriginal repetition or extending sentences without really adding to the idea it conveys or what I'm doing right now or here I'll stop and let you read the entire poem instead or it's repetitive as well or don't tell me i didn't warn you Mean, awkward, fond, gentle, equable, comforting: this seems the right, modest register to use in talking about nice art. What’s remarkable, then, is how, when you’re in the right mood, Brainard’s writing can seem to give you all you need. His Collected Writings closes with a paragraph found in his papers after he died. Brainard titled it “January 13th,” and it ends this way: Lewallen, Constance M. (2001). "Acts of Generosity". In Constance M. Lewallen, Joe Brainard: A Retrospective (pp. 5–44). New York City: Granary Books, Inc.the writing is uncensored, authentic. For example, I note in the example above the reference to the Pilgrims and Indians celebrating a jolly Thanksgiving. Now: I don’t think it’s stretching things very far to say that that recollection is of a romanticised association! And we could of course parse that, and discuss what it means, e.g., in terms of decolonising the historical record. But the actual writing here is simply being honest – it’s about recalling a perception, a time and place – and it is being true to that. (Even if it’s not true to the historical record, and we hope there will have been scope for future reconstruction!) Elsewhere in the poem we get gender- and race-based descriptions that are products of that time, and there is an awful lot of sexually graphic and extremely fruity content. It means I’m always careful about selecting extracts for classes! But again: this has a truth. Me parece que todos encerramos en lo más profundo de nosotros mismos vergonzosos recuerdos similares a los aquí recogidos en la creencia de que nadie más los tiene o de que nadie podría comprendernos. Een detail van iemands kledij, de geur van een huis, een zin die je je hele jeugd door te horen kreeg, een eerste zoen, ... I remember (recently) getting blown while trying to carry on a normal conversation on the telephone, which, I must admit, was a big turn-on somehow.