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, February 24, 2003

I remember what I guess are called pea-drop veils. (That's what they're called in French.) My uptown grandmother and some of her old lady friends had them. They were of black gauze dotted all over with small black cloth pea-shaped pea-sized pellets of fabric, which made it hard to see the face behind them. My grandmother wore them out when dressed at a slightly higher than casual level (what counted as casual to her), along with the nappy cloth coat that she had and that I pictured when hearing of Pat Nixon's cloth coat (from the Checkers speech, again). I didn't get the veil, and knew I didn't get it, when she or her friends wore them. (I think my downtown grandmother wore one once or twice, but I think for her it wasn't a natural accessory and it may have just been an experiment.) These veils, I am grateful to say, have disappeared completely. You can see one in a deleted scene from The Big Sleep, the 1945 version, where Lauren Bacall wears one in a badly judged scene with Humphry Bogart; the reshot version of the scene is sexy, the original grotesque. And you can see Faye Dunaway wearing such a veil in Chinatown, I suppose as an allusion to The Big Sleep. Neither wears it well. Who could?

posted by william 11:23 PM
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