Dying Over Drapes
Never liked Madame Bovary. I thought Emma Bovary was a silly woman who killed herself because she owed money to the draper. Sure, she got dumped by her lover, but the curtains really did her in. I was required to read Flaubert in high school, but it didn’t take. I preferred Woody Allen’s story The Kugelmass Episode, in which a magician invents a device which projects anyone into the novel of his choice. Professor Kugelmass decides he wants to have an affair with Madame Bovary, so he steps in the box and whammo! All over the world, literature students wonder who the bald Jewish guy is on page 36. That’s the mark of great literature, a teacher declares. Each time you read it, you find something new.
Yesterday I accompanied my friend to SM to buy curtains. She’d moved into a new apartment, and had been without curtains for a month. True, she lives in a high-rise building, but there are people out there with binoculars. She wouldn’t take my suggestion: Just tape manila paper over your windows. Yes, I have the interior design sensibilities of a crackhead. So we go to SM, not some posh draper’s, and they have all these fabulous Restoration era/Victorian bordello curtains. So many choices, so pretty, and (comparatively) cheap! For a few minutes I actually considered redecorating my own apartment, and then I remembered I’ve never actually decorated it, then I snapped out of it. But I began to understand why Emma Bovary would forsake everything for curtains. I wouldn’t do it, but I think I get it.
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November 7th, 2006 at 15:22
My mom used to have a friend who declared that a house without curtains is like a woman without clothes. But I think she overdid it: she covered all walls of her house with heavy Victorian Era-type drapes. The only uncovered spots were where the A/Cs were placed. I felt smothered every time we visited.
And I loved The Kugelmass Episode, too! I was so taken with Allen’s writing that I read Without Feathers after that.