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

Sunday, August 03, 2003

I remember the first Polaroid cameras. They were so cool. You took a picture with a camera that looked amazingly old-fashioned, with a pleated accordion cowling for focussing, and a lattice-work collapsable frame -- there must be a term of art for this. They were black and white. You took a picture, and then pulled a white tab that hung out of the back of the camera and which pulled the exposed film out through rollers that pressed it against a gelled negative backing. I guess, now, that the positive and the negative were actually separate in the camera, and that pulling them out brought them together. You counted to sixty and then peeled the backing off the photo. You threw the negative out, wiping the gel off on your pants, or wherever. I always wanted to keep the negative as a sort of carbon copy of the photo, but it was too yucchy. There was a metal folding clip you could use on cold days. You warmed it in your shirt pocket or under your arm for a minute before taking the picture. Then once you pulled the exposed sandwich out, you put it into the clip, which kept it warm enough to develop. I loved the smell of the chemicals, and the promise they made of new photos. One besetting problem was that they might streak if you weren't careful, but this wasn't hard to avoid. All those instant pictures, and I don't know whether any survive. My father thought it was very clever of Polaroid to sell the cameras so cheap -- $19.95 -- and make all the money on film. This impressed me.

Remembering that the original Polaroid camera was $19.95, I remember the infamous Ford Pinto, which went for $1,995, according to the full page ads in the Times.

posted by william 10:12 PM
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