I remember a blog post from December 6, 2021 titled "I remember...."

I remember it began: "I remember something made me read this old blog post of mine, from 2013, when I had a little project going where I'd take one sentence from 'The Great Gatsby' and present it for discussion.... The sentence of the day was 'I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-That’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: 'Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?' and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands.'"

I'm looking back at that post because I just did a search of my archive for "Brainard," because I'm reading a new article in The New Yorker, by Joshua Rothman, "What Do You Remember? The more you explore your own past, the more you find there" and it begins: "Last year, for my birthday, my wife gave me a copy of 'I Remember,' an unusual memoir by the artist Joe Brainard. It’s a tidy little book, less than two hundred pages long, made entirely from short, often single-sentence paragraphs beginning with the words 'I remember.'"

Writing about that "Gatsby" sentence, I'd said: "Things remembered: fur coats, chatter, hands waving, matchings of invitations, and long green tickets. These remembered things give the reader a sense of the incompletely delineated human beings.... This is a mass of faceless humanity, cluttered with hands, waving and clasping.... " And a commenter, gadfly, said: "Althouse is doing her Joe Brainard, 'I Remember' schtick - but she can't top the master." He quoted Brainard's book, and it was obviously my kind of thing — very sentence-y. I immediately read it. I'll read it again, now that I'm reminded of it.

But what is Joshua Rothman saying about it?

Ever since reading “I Remember,” I’ve been following the Brainardian approach in a file on my computer.... Like many people, I find that memory leads to memory. We can remember a lot, if we give ourselves the time and space to try.... Does it matter that your first watch was a Casio F-91W—a boxy, rubbery digital thing with tiny metal studs for buttons? That you used to be afraid of waves at the beach?... It doesn’t matter, and yet such memories can enlarge the scope of your past. They can increase your sense of temporal expansiveness, reminding you of just how much you’ve seen and done, of how long you’ve lived, of where you were and who you were. And so, strangely, random memories can become relevant to the expanded version of you that remembering creates. The more you remember, the deeper your sense of yourself becomes....

Of course, in writing “My Struggle,” [Karl Ove] Knausgaard remembered enough about his life to fill six volumes of autofiction. How did he do it? “I’ve developed a method, which is being in the present, sitting here, drinking some coffee, thinking of a memory,” he told me, after the final volume was published in English. “I would just start writing, and then I remember something, and then I write about that, and then I remember something else.” The hopscotch approach is important, he went on, “because then the moments will maybe not always be the important moments but could be the moments that are just beside the important ones. There’s a freedom in that.” Freedom from predictability, presumably, and from familiarity—but also freedom from the constraints imposed by who we are today.... 

That makes me think of another blog post I wrote a while back — here, also in 2021, January 2021: "How to write a book." It begins:

The "I" there is the comedian Fred Allen, and the book is "Much Ado About Me," a book I remember from a shelf in a house I lived in when I was a little child.