p.s. Hey. ** Misanthrope, Pee is like pigeons, there’s more there than meets the eye. He won’t think chipmunk cheeks are so funny when he has them, I reckon. Good luck to him this morning. I haven’t heard the term ‘tea bagging’ in ages. They probably still use it in England. ** _Black_Acrylic, Okay, I’ll use your link as my entry point into the oeuvre of Aaliyah, but I will try not to judge it based on your extraordinary hype. Goodness. Oh, sure, ‘Romper Stomper’, that was a good one. Is Crowe’s band still called 30 Odd Foot of Grunts ? Such an unfortunate name. ** Tosh Berman, Hi. Yes, I think I remember you saying you replicated the Perec experiment conceptually. Perec’s a god, oui. ** Dev, French pronunciation is really tough if you’re an American. I honestly think one of the unconscious reasons I’ve never learned it is because whenever I hear Americans speak French, with certain exceptions, I feel really embarrassed. I studied Spanish in school, and I’m vaguely okay with it. When I lived in Amsterdam, I learned Dutch, took classes and everything. I got pretty good at it, but, after I moved back to the US, there was no one to practice it with, and I lost my ability. Although when I overhear, say, Dutch tourists talking on the metro, I basically understand what they’re saying. I like Dutch. It’s a very underrated language. Oh, wow, I mean congrats on that school’s offer, whatever you do. Dang. But you’re still magnetised by N.O. ? Trust your gut? ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yeah, it’s a great book. Nothing else like it. The meeting was okay all in all. It was a start, but only a start. We got some questions answered but many not. We did find out that ‘RT’ came very close to getting into Cannes. We were in the running until the last minute. They ultimately rejected us because, one, there were a lot of American submissions and few slots for American films, and, two, because they thought our film ‘didn’t sufficiently address larger world issues’. Which, of course, is the last thing we wanted to do. Anyway, at least they liked the film that much. Your love’s demand of yesterday was pretty demanding, at least in my case. The person I hate is pretty incredibly hateful. But okay, teeth gritted. Love disappearing Khloe Kardashian, G. ** Oscar 🌀, Howdy! Biomedical engineering: I can only try to guess at what that is, but it sounds serious, and, yes, like something someone would need to take a break from. Coffee in Paris … gosh, there are a million cafes here, all essentially the same. It’s about where you want to drink the coffee mostly. Books: After8, my favorite bookstore in Paris and a treasure trove. I always highly recommend to everybody who comes to Paris to go to Le Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (Museum of Hunting and Nature). I know the name doesn’t sound promising, but it’s an amazing artwork of a place. Otherwise, Palais de Tokyo is fun, an amazing building with hit or miss shows. Pinault Collection, ditto. Mm, I’ll have a think. If we meet up, and that would be great, I can fill you in more on local things then. You can email me (denniscooper72@outlook.com) when you know your schedule and stuff. It’s morning here, and an okay one so far, and I boomerang its okayness to your AM/PM. ** Steve, Yes, I remember that stress and frustration very well. Everyone, Steve’s new reviews for your delectation are ‘an April roundup, with claire rousay and the Pet Shop Boys’ here, and a review of Fat White Family’s FORGIVENESS IS YOURS here. I just listened to the new Pet Shop Boys yesterday. On first listen, I thought it was their most perked-up one on a long time. The new script is very early on. We’re not building it in a straightforward narrative way. Right now I’m working two possible through-lines. One is about a boy whose only friend is a hand puppet he wears all the time. The other is about some teenagers who steal a ventriloquist dummy and use it to try to invent the perfect being. Not sure if they’ll hold, but what’s where we are. Thank you for asking. ** Harper, Hi. Joe Brainard is much more respected and influential in France than in the US, strangely. Edouard Leve, one of the best French novelists of recent times, was also heavily influenced by Brainard. Interesting about the attempted habit breaking. I’m pretty routine-oriented, although they’re routines that just kind of fall into place without me consciously organising them. I don’t think I could do the blog if doing so wasn’t a routine for me. I’m not routine about writing though. I just do it when I want to, and luckily that’s what I like to do the most, so it just happens on its own. So, I’m pretty sold on habits, I guess, and I don’t seem to get stressed when I have to break them for some reason. But I understand the jitteriness. I guess I sort of convince myself that what I’m working on in a routine way is more important than, I don’t know, going out and doing something else? Are you a person who needs to organise writing time to get it done? Do you have a lot distractions? ** Catachrestic, Hey. I think Perec is someone one should read or at least attempt to read. His work’s pleasurableness is pretty one-of-a-kind. I don’t know Fernand Braudel, no. He/it sounds pretty interesting. I’ll see what I can find. Great, then let’s meet up in LA. Oh, I’m really a day person, so we can find a time, I’m sure. I’ll let you know when we’re coming. It’s blurry at the moment. Thanks a lot for reading ‘I Wished’. I remember Essra Mohawk, but I don’t know if I know that particular song. I’ll link myself up and find out. Thanks, man. xo. ** Corey Heiferman, I think I saw your email, but I was too unawake when I saw it to dare open and understand it, but I will in a minute. Well, I gave Oscar some tips, and I can try to tip you in person, I guess. Nice gig at Les Instants Chavirés! I love that place. That’s one of Paris’s treasures, that place. So I think I’ll see you ultra-soon, no? ** Justin D, Hey, J. I’m somewhat less stressed, yes, thank you. We’ll see how long that lasts. Someone just told me my new book might be out as soon as June, but I haven’t gotten confirmation. I used to get serious crushes on/obsessions with pop culture figures, yeah, and I certainly used that in my work. But, strangely or not, I can’t even remember the last time I had a pop culture crush. I don’t what happened there. What about you? Are you smitten with anyone(s) in the spotlight? ** Darbyyy🥛🥩🥩🤮, Your emoji sequence is highly relatable. I’d like to wake up like that. I’m just a dense cloud looking for coffee. Yeah, your mom is … well, I don’t want to be rude, but … an ignorant moron. There, I said it. She doesn’t understand shit. I’m sorry, but she obviously doesn’t. Having an authoritarian figure who’s dumber and less enlightened than yourself is the absolute worst. I grew up with one of those. No, wait, two. And Zac and I have been under the thumb of a piece of shit with our film for more than five years. So, I hear you, pal. I hope your time between now and Friday, if that’s when I see you next, is utterly empowering. ** Uday, Hi. Well, you know, I’m, like, old, ha ha. You’ll have a whole lexicon of interesting past people yourself one day. No, the Meher Baba stint was embarrassing, it was. So nice about the dedication! I dedicate my novels to people, and I mean it to be meaningful. Being the dedicatee of someone’s writing is a great gift, I think. That’s so nice. ** Okay. I really like planetarium buildings for some reason, and today you get to look at 77 of them. See you tomorrow.
‘“My aim,” wrote George Perec (1936-1982) in the first page of the booklet An Attempt to Exhaust a Parisian Place, is “to describe what is generally never noted, what is never noticed, what is not important: what happens when nothing happens, but time, people, cars and clouds.” For Perec, a novelist, filmmaker, and essayist, famous for his dedication to “constrained” writing, the mechanism of space is a series of opening momentums with neither beginning nor ending: irregular cadences accentuated by a dark and opaque sky announcing misfortune in the weather, changing the plans for those who wanted to walk, or detaining some passer-by at a bus-stop. In this moment of sudden obscurity, the space is in mutation.
‘Space and place are enigmatic areas that are not to be measured, according to Perec’s ideas, but to be exhausted. Measurements are made arbitrary and the assumption that space and place are definite entities is way too illogical for Perec as he is looking at space as something unpredictable and way more inspiring. The observer’s perceptive operation is full of surprises, irregular phenomena, and furtive elements that make the world nothing but definitive.
‘In one of his most famous books, Things, Perec describes the world of everyday people, their interests and projects, some of their achievements. In scrutinizing the residence of a young couple who live in a stylish but tiny apartment, Perec reveals his talent to incorporate spaces or places: writing in excruciating detail, the French author describes a world devoted to materialism, an intimate and reclusive relationship between people and objects, commodities. Behind this wise, coherent world, there is a chaotic order: objects can be imitations; belongings are fake as well as ultimate aspirations of the protagonists.
‘The expert, sitting at a table, in a cafe, for hours, morning and afternoon, a ghost nobody is expecting: in front of him, the world is moving, in a cube, an appropriate space to gather liable observations as a request on paper: people appearing as specters, their concerns, their occupations, professions, careers, vocations, their affairs, responsibilities, duties for others, obligations, their problems, anyone systematically trapped in existential situations. Less interference between those existences; anyone individually busy, occupied, involved — if the reader prefers — absorbed in a world on the go. This industrious exercise is not an arrangement of facts but the perseverance of a chaotic build-up.
‘In trusting the absolute minimalism of life, the world becomes hospitable for the reader when he realizes how accurate and aesthetic Perec’s descriptions are: ordinary people, anyone’s routine, minimal operations, displacements are appropriate operators to understand a place. The result is an intriguing booklet with monotonous descriptions, a simple fabric of coincidence, a corpus of minimalist details, a curious and intrigued contemporary puzzling with scattered pieces.
‘In fact, any chronicle or narrative is in this work totally inadequate; the equilibrium of this strange exercise is nothing but persistent sharp descriptions with an intent to raise a world to something authentic and spontaneous in space and time. Through Perec’s lens, pieces of the world are distributed into something minimal and stylistic: an attitude that would give every painter a crucial authority.
‘The treatment of this detailed reality, the anxious composition charged with the details of everyday life, the collision of facts, the unexpected acts in the street is an audacious effort for the observer sitting in a cafe to become a painter, with words.
‘Here, the unpredictable facts are Perec’s contingencies detected in space, brought to light on his notebook, as it happens when one’s applying paint, pigment, color. But here the painter is a writer and his game of brushes is instead words reflecting descriptions; its surface is not a wall, a canvas, a piece of wood, glass, lacquer, or even clay, but paper.
‘There is an intriguing link with Perec’s descriptions and the mid-19th-century realist painters, many of whom found their inspiration in the life around them: think Courbet’s or Manet’s Parisians at ease in restaurants, in parks, or on boats; think Pissaro’s concerns for everyday factual matters in Parisian landscapes, river scenes, and the immediacy of life on the streets; think Manet’s free sketchy brushwork and broad patches of color juxtaposed without transition, making the sketch dynamic and lively. Interestingly, not only are the themes similar to Perec’s interests but so is the composition, which neutralizes emotional expressions.
‘For Perec “every painting is an attempt to possess the world”. In fact, between his twenties and thirties, Perec explored the notion of realism in art and in literature through one of his favorite painters, Paul Klee. Klee’s vision of the world is one of chaos that has to be “removed” through the work of the artist. The quintessence of reality lies for both artists, the writer and the painter, in the question of space, an entity that has to be fragmented, that has to be built. While it is difficult to escape from the ordinary, Perec’s reality is conceived from “very little things of everyday life,” what he called (and made one of his best opus) the “infra-ordinary.”
‘His aptitude to describe fragments of universes, or spaces, or places, in every detail abolish every frontier of reality: making a place his protectorate, committing to unrestricted details, engaging the reader to feel every corner, every part of those universes. Perec lets us view the poetic power of realism. Any conceptualization is useless. The high intensity of details compensate the low level of conceptualization: the operation of exhaustion consists then, of a simple tyrannical attempt to reach and exacerbate the real with nothing but simple words: “I have the impression that if a painter had influenced my work, it would be Paul Klee, but I don’t know exactly how,” said Perec in an interview he gave in 1979. As a reply, this wonderful quotation from Klee: “to look at a painting, you need a chair…”
‘Perec sat, in October 1974, in Paris, on a terrace in Saint Sulpice Square, in front of a place, and painted with words… ‘ — Samuel Neural
___ Saint Sulpice photos by Jean Francois Delaware
Georges Perec : Prix Médicis pour “La vie mode d’emploi”
Retour sur un lieu parisien
____ Interview, 1965
Question: Things? It’s a puzzling title, easily misunderstood. Haven’t you really written a book not about things, but about happiness?
Georges Perec: That’s because there’s a necessary connection, to my mind, between modern things and happiness. The prosperity of our society makes one kind of happiness possible–you could call it Orly-joy, the joy of deep-pile fitted carpets; there is a current form of happiness that means, I think, that you have to be absolutely modern to achieve happiness. People who think I have denounced consumer society have understood absolutely nothing about my book. But that happiness is only potential–in our capitalist society, what’s promised isn’t delivered. Everything is promised; well, advertising entices us towards everything, to having everything, to possessing everything; and we have nothing, or we have just tiny little things, tiny little bits of happiness.
Q: Sure, but aren’t your characters wrong to accept having those tiny little bits?
GP: What keeps them from being despicable is that they have at least one positive feature–they have a gift for happiness, they possess as it were an appetite for happiness, they’re waiting for it, watching out to grab it. They take it wherever they can find it.
Q: But that’s a pretty empirical kind of happiness….
GP: Modern happiness is not an inner value. At any rate, I didn’t want to see it as an inner value. It’s more like an almost technical relationship to your environment, to the world….
Q: Not to the world, surely, but to objects….
GP: Well, it’s a very “bodily” value. Bodiliness is very important, you know! I decided voluntarily to restrict my characters to an everyday quest; I didn’t make them conscious of the fact that happiness is a new idea, a new idea that has yet to be imposed. As soon as they start wanting happiness, they’re caught, almost in spite of themselves, in a kind of logical sequence. Happiness is a process that in the end is the same thing as accumulation–you can’t reach the end of being happy. My characters would be quite prepared to be satisfied with their lot if they got different “messages” from the outside world. The main point is the relation between contentment, work, and convenience. The messages society gives us of work are always negative, always connected with the idea of obligation. Everything to do with convenience, from the simplest level of domestic gadgetry up to the most sophisticated form of upper-class luxury, is conveyed through highly positive images. There’s even a point where the switch occurs, where convenience metamorphoses into an art of living, an ideal of life where having becomes a model of being, where accumulation turns into an exemplary style of living.
Q: What kind of accumulation are we talking about?
GP: It’s as if there existed true bourgeois values over and above capitalist ones, not the value of saving but its opposite, as if collecting knickknacks, heavy things in gold, silver, pewter, brass was a purely aesthetic matter, an art of living–not at all a matter of accumulation. What poisons the lives of Jerome and Sylvie is the tension between these minor moments of real happiness and the art of living they dream of. They only escape when they’ve partly put that kind of dream in check; my book is the story of moving from the conditional to the future–and to the present. In a word, a process of mastering dreams.
Q: So your conclusion is optimistic?
GP: The ending is neither positive nor negative. It opens on to ambiguity; to my mind it’s both a happy ending and the saddest conclusion you could imagine, it’s a logical ending…. What could be more natural than working to earn a living? For a young intellectual, there are only two solutions, each as desperate as the other–to become a bourgeois, or not to….
Q: It’s not just the end of Things that is ambiguous, it’s the whole book.
GP: That’s right. I don’t deny the ambiguity. For me, it’s a way of asking a question to which I do not know the answer. All I hope is that I’ve asked the right question. I must say also that the book was in the beginning two different plans: first an exercise on Barthes’s Mythologies, that’s to say, on advertising language as it is reflected within us, then a barely heightened description of a particular social set, which happens to be my own. That’s perhaps why it took me three years, not to write the book, but to extract, from everything I had written, the 120 final pages of my book. Because everything was a problem: should I give the characters individual, specific lives? Should I have them talk to each other, and about what? An author has little freedom with respect to his characters. He can be above them, or inside them. I chose to stand beside them. Maybe it’ll be held against me, like an easy way out; but I’m keen on keeping my options of drawing closer to them or moving further away from them, as I wish.
Q: Doesn’t that distance necessarily imply coldness?
GP: Definitely. That’s undoubtedly my greatest debt to Flaubert. The essence of Flaubert is that tension between almost epileptic lyricism and rigorous discipline. It’s that kind of passionate coldness that I wanted to adopt, without always managing it.
Q: It’s your main debt, you said, but not the only one. Apart from the Flaubertian attitude towards your characters, and sentence rhythms constantly reminiscent of Sentimental Education, there are whole sentences lifted from Flaubert into Things, like collages.
GP: That’s quite right, and I stand by that. I used Flaubert on three levels: first, the three-part sentence rhythm, which had become a kind of personal tic; second, I borrowed some exemplary figures from Flaubert, ready-made elements, a bit like Tarot cards–the journey by boat, the demonstration, the auction, for instance…. And third, there are sentences copied over, purely and simply pasted in.
Q: What is that really about?
GP: I don’t know for sure, but it seems to me that for some time now, in fact since the surrealists, we are moving towards a kind of art that could be called “citational,” and which permits a certain progress, since the point where our predecessors finished up becomes our own point of departure. It’s a device I like a lot, that I like to play with. At any rate, it helped me a great deal. At one point I was utterly stuck, and the act of choosing a model in that way, of inserting cuttings, so to speak, into my material, got me over my block. For me, collage is like a grid, a promise, and a condition of discovery. Of course, my ambition isn’t to rewrite Don Quixote like Borges’s Pierre Menard, but I would for instance like to rewrite my favorite Melville story, “Bartleby the Scrivener” It’s a text I wanted to write: but since it’s impossible to write a text that already exists, I wanted to rewrite it–not to pastiche it, but to make a new Bartleby–well, the same one actually, but a bit more … as if it were me who’d done it. It’s an idea that seems to me invaluable for literary creation, much more promising than the mere business of writing well that Tel Quel and other reviews of that kind go on about. It’s a desire to place yourself in a line that acknowledges all the literature of the past. So you bring your personal museum to life, you reactivate your literary reserves. Anyway, Flaubert is not my only model, not the only thing I’ve collaged. There are less obvious models. Nizan and The Conspiracy, Antelme and The Human Race.
Q: So, despite what’s been said, then, that way of looking at literature has nothing in common with Robbe-Grillet?
GP: That doesn’t matter. Robbe-Grillet keeps to the surface of things, he uses very neutral words, what Barthes calls a “transitive language,” or else psychoanalytically loaded words that recur in his books like obsessive themes. What I wanted, on the contrary, was for my words to be “injected” with meaning, loaded with resonance. Fitted carpet, for instance: for me, that phrase conveys a whole system of values–specifically, the value-system imposed by advertising. So much so that you could say that, in places, my book is a piece of advertising copy; but, obviously, with distance, and with the irony that distance brings. The words I use do not designate objects, or things, but signs. They are images. Things is the story of poverty inextricably tangled up with the image of wealth, as Roland Barthes wrote to me.
Q: What is also very striking is a kind of uncommittedness in your characters. But several times you say they are “on the Left.” Why?
GP: Oh well, there’s the Algerian war, after all. As students they are naturally, spontaneously engages in the struggle against that war. At a time when the Latin Quarter was patrolled, under siege every day, you couldn’t forget the war. But when Jerome and Sylvie stop being students, the war, which hasn’t stopped, remains the sole surviving constituent of a “hard” political awareness. It is for them the totality of political action. When the war ends, or even when Jerome and Sylvie grasp that it’s going to end, their awareness of being on the Left becomes an empty conscience. When they lose the Algerian war, they lose their sign of identity. They never find new grounds for opposition.
Q: In a word, they’re retired activists; would that be why some people saw themselves portrayed in Jerome and Sylvie?
GP: Yes, you could say that. I think the reader feels challenged for another reason–because the book describes not people but a relationship. And since we all have a pretty similar relationship to objects …
Q: But in that case, doesn’t this book about everybody become nobody’s book?
GP: Maybe. In any case, a book that does well is always suspect. It must have been “recuperated.” The author can’t do anything about that. The dominant ideology always finds a way of annexing him. Especially when the book is ambiguous, like mine.
Q: And will your next book resolve the ambiguity?
GP: Not really. Because A Man Asleep is in a different place. As it stands at the moment, it describes the dark side of a reality shown in Things exclusively on its glittering side. It’s no longer fascination … I’m concerned far more with words like indifference, solitude, refusal, giving up. And paradoxically, whereas in Things the details were autobiographical without the book as a whole being so, in my new book I’m trying to recover a particular period in my own life by using elements that are not autobiographical themselves, or not very much….
Q: Proust is in fashion this year….
GP: The title comes from Proust, at any rate. But don’t make me say any more. I feel as though I’m moving the camera with which I’m taking photographs.
___ Book
Georges Perec An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris Wakefield Press
‘Long neglected by English-speaking scholars and Perec devotees for the author’s other, more flamboyant endeavors, An Attempt… has remained a kind of secret treasure for those interested in Oulipo- and Situationist-inspired tracts of Paris. Marvelously simple and deceptively well-designed, Perec’s slim volume presents itself as an artifact of the street, ushering the reader into a spontaneous phenomenology of words, conventional symbols, numbers, fleeting slogans, trajectories, colors, and, as he more technically describes them, means of locomotion, means of carrying, means of traction, degrees of determination or motivation, and body positions.’ — Erik Morse, Bookforum
____ Excerpt
There are many things Saint-Sulpice: a town hall, a chamber of finance, a police station, three cafés (one for tobacco, a cinema, one a church in which Le Vau, Gittard, Oppenord, Servandoni and Chalgrin worshiped and which is dedicated to a chaplain of Clotaire, Bishop of Bourges [624-644], and for whom there is a holiday on Jan 17th), a publisher, a funeral home (entreprise de pompes funebres), a travel agency, a bus stop, a tailor shop, an hotel, a decorative fountain next to the statues of four great Christian orators (Bossuet, Fénelon, Fléchier, and Massillon), a newspaper stand, a market for selling religious objects, a parking lot, a beauty school, and yet many other things.
A great number – many – of these things have been described, inventoried, photographed, related, and even recorded by census. My goal for the following pages has been rather to describe what others have missed. What is not generally noted hasn’t been noticed and is irrelevant (n’a pas d’importance): this is what happens when nothing happens; otherwise, time, people, cars and clouds.
I
Date: October 18, 1974
Time: 10:30
Place: Tabac Saint-Sulpice
Weather: dry, cold. Grey sky. Minor flashes of sun.
Sketch of an inventory of some things strictly visible:
-Letters of the alphabet, words: “KLM” (on someone’s carrying bag), a capital “P” designating “parking”, “Hotel Recamier”, “St Raphael”, “money adrift”, “taxis arriving at the station”, “Rue du Vieux-Colombier”, “La Fontaine Saint Sulpice brewery and bar”, “P ELF”, “Saint-Sulpice Park”.
-Conventional symbols: signs under the “P” of parking lots, one slightly angled toward the ground, the other, towards rue Bonaparte (on the Luxembourg side), at least four signboards seeming to speak, that is, interjecting (a fifth reflected in the café window).
-Numbers: 86 (at the crest of a bus of class 86, indicating its place of origin: Saint-Germain-des-Pres), 1 (name plate no. 1 of rue Vieux-Colombier), 6 (here to indicate that we are in the 6th Paris arrondissement).
-Fleeting slogans: “From the bus, I spy Paris”
-On the ground: a pile of gravel and sand
-Stone: sidewalk edging, a fountain, a church, houses…
-Asphalt
-Trees: (leafy, yellowing)
-Quite a large piece of sky (perhaps 1/6th my visual field)
-A cloud of pigeons suddenly pounding the central platform between church and fountain
-Vehicles (their inventory remains to be taken)
-Human beings
-A type of basset hound
-Bread (A baguette)
-Lettuce (wilted?) protruding from the top edge of a shopping bag.
Trajectories
:
96 goes to the Montparnasse station
84 goes to the Champerret Terminal
70 goes to Place du Dr-Hayem, headquarters of O.R.T.F.1
86 goes to Saint-Germain-des-Pres
Ask for the truth into the green oval of the Roquefort Societé
No water sprouting out of the fountain at all. Pigeons sitting on the fountain basin edge.
There are benches on the (central) platform, benches doubled by a strange pilaster. I’m able to count six from my position. Four are empty. Three bums gesturing classically (drinking red wine from a bottle) on the sixth.
63 goes to the Muette Terminal
86 goes to the Saint-Germain-des-Pres
Cleaning up is good; not getting dirty is better
A German bus
A Brinks delivery truck
87 goes to Champ-de-Mars
84 goes to the Champerret Terminal
Colors:
Red (Fiat, dress, St. Raphael, one-way)
blue sack
green footwear
green raincoat
blue taxi
blue 2CV
70 goes to Place du Dr-Hayem, headquarters of O.R.T.F.
Green Méhari
86 goes to Saint-Germain-des-Pres
Dannon: yogurts and desserts
Ask for the truth into the green oval of the Roquefort Societé
many people with at least one hand occupied: they hold a sack, a small case, a shopping basket, a cane, a leash with a dog on the end, the hand of a child
a truck delivering beer in metal barrels (Kanterbrau, the beer of Master Kanter)
86 goes to Saint-Germain-des-Pres
63 goes to the Muette Terminal
A “Cityrama” bus with two levels
A blue Mercedes truck
A brown Printemps Brummel truck
84 goes to the Champerret Terminal
87 goes to Champ-de-Mars
70 goes to Place du Dr-Hayem, headquarters of O.R.T.F.
96 goes to the Montparnasse station
Darty Réal
63 goes to the Muette Terminal
Casimir, master caterer.
Carpenter transit
Berth France S.A.R.L.
Drawing of Le Goff with beer3
96 goes to the Montparnasse Station
driving school
Coming from Vieux-Colombier, an 84 turns onto rue Bonaparte (towards Luxembourg)
Wallon relocations
Fernand Carrascossa relocations
Potatoes in bulk
From a bus of tourists, a Japanese woman appears to photograph me.
An old man with half a loaf of bread, a woman with a bundle of cakes in the shape of a pyramid
86 goes to Saint-Mande (it does not turn onto rue Bonaparte, but takes Vieux-Colombier)
63 goes to the Muette Terminal
87 goes to Champ-de-Mars
70 goes to Place du Dr Hayem, headquarters of O.R.T.F.
Coming from Vieux-Colombier, an 84 turns onto rue Bonaparte (towards Luxembourg)
A bus, empty.
Other Japanese people in another bus
86 goes to Saint-Germain-des-Pres
Braun art reproductions
Calm (from weariness?)
Pause
*
p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I have no idea if Marilyn finished that book. I was hoping she’d pop in here and say, but alas. With my books in French there is always a lot of consultation with the translators to try to find acceptable alternatives. I assume love is also sad about LDC’s further transformation from twunk into DadBod Dad. Love making a big meeting today with our film producers give us the answers we are demanding without turning into an ugly battle, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Fit brother! Great! A couple of friends recently ran or rather outlasted the Paris marathon, but I don’t the money went to such a good cause. ** Dev, Me too, re: the twink book. AC, whew. Virtually no one has AC in Paris because until the last few years it was never needed. Crystallizing rabbit holes is a great way to put it. My French is pathetic. I just can’t seem to learn it. I can watch TV or movies in French and basically get it, but, in conversation, I’m hopeless. I say definitely learn French if you can. It’s a hell of a language if its literature is anything to go by. ** Misanthrope, Maybe I should start doing stand-up. I wonder when the term ‘twink’ started as a go-to term. I don’t remember it being used even back in the 90s. Pee isn’t store in your balls?!?! Well, then … wha … where … how …?!?! ** Charalampos, Not sure what the twink cut off date is. Men call themselves boys even in their fifties, although when they have any self-respect all at, they write ‘boi’ at least. I don’t think I know a single Aaliyah song, so no. I really should have learned French in a concentrated way, but I’ve prioritized my writing and projects over everything else my whole life, and I just couldn’t spare the brain space. Lurve from ici. ** PL, Hi, P. I haven’t got stoned since, uh, maybe 2000 if even that recently, but maybe I was fun stoned, I can’t remember. That’s a scary vision. My mom, who was more than kind of nuts, used to tell us kids that a giant ghost in the form of a Halloween pumpkin used to hover over her bed at night and have conversations with her. I know ‘White Worm’ and ‘Laura Mars’, I’m not sure about the others. Fun stuff. Customized t-shirts? That’s very cool. Yeah, I want to see them. ** Mark, Hi. Cool, I’ll look for it. ‘TPJ’, I mean. I’ve never been a comic book person, not even as a kid, I don’t know why. Nice day there. Oh, yeah, Wayne is a total trip in the best way. I didn’t know about his new book. I’ll venture towards it. ** Justin D, Yeah, the Twink -> Daddy trajectory is very interesting. Once in a very rare while you see it in porn where some porn star manages to have a multi-decade career where he transitions from pretty bottom to hot-to-trot muscle top to sleazy old guy fucking twinks. Is 25 the cut-off? That does seem to be around the age that, say, twink escorts start lying about their ages. Stress is re: from complicated to explain current problems re: the film, which ideally will be solved today. I’ve seen the name ‘Problemista’. Cool, I’ll look for it. Thanks, pal. ** Jabberwocky, Well, hello there. Yes, Michael Palin is the renowned expert at playing me. ‘Kite Runner’, heard of it. Huh. I don’t think I ever looked like a twink. No, thank you. ** Henry Taggart, Greetings. Thank you. I don’t think the blog has the veritable snowball’s chance in hell, and I have no idea what that prize even is, but the blog can dream. Wait, Take That are still around or are revived? Well, enjoy, obviously. ** Shirley, Hello. Thank you very much! ** Max Restaino, Hi, Max. Vassar, right. One of the only two girlfriends I ever had in my life went there. That must be why I was there. New manuscript, great news! That’s exciting. Well, I certainly look forward to its fruition. Good luck with the grindstone aspect. ** James, Hi! A long minute. I’ll look for your email. RT is borderline finished and should be finished at last any day now. Thanks! ** Steve, That’s a good question. I’ll try to find Marilyn and ask her. Yury is always watching super weird-seeming Russian dissident in exile youtube channels starring heavily disguised hosts. I’ll point him at that one, thank you. ** Uday, Hi. I vaguely recall that Lucy episode. My grandmother was friends with her, so I met her a few times. Me too, never been remotely a Christian or anything like that, although I was into this guru Meher Baba for a short time in my teens, but only because some boy I had crush on was into him. Happy Tuesday to you too. My goal for today is not to make a new enemy, but maybe I’ll get really ambitious and seek a new friendship too. xo. ** Oscar 🌀, Hello! Very nice to meet you, Thank you for entering this place. Thank you for the kind words. What’s your PhD about or in? Oh, um, what are you especially interested in, as far as recommendations? I’m happy to point at things. It’s a great city to just walk around in. But, yeah, give me an idea of, like, what might excite you, and I’ll be happy to figure out what would delight you guys. It’s great here. Hopefully you’ll get here before the Olympics start, but, even with that presumed mess, it should be nice. And if you guys want to have a coffee meet up while you’re here, let me know. Cheers from me. ** Darby 🚵♂️, It’s the thought that counts. Actually, I’m not sure if that’s true. No, I guess it is. I did not know that about missing kid things on arcade game screens, but that is very exciting news. Wow, I’m going to use that in something. I love those ‘aged’ missing kids flyers. They make one feel interestingly weird. think I did a post about the at some point. Thank you. Sorry about your Saturday. Uh, my weekend … oh, I saw the cover image of my upcoming little book, and that was cool. And then the usual. Louis Pasture was on the old French 5 Franc bill. See. My LA roommate told me the package came and is awaiting me, but I’ll make sure that’s the case because he does smoke a lot of weed. ** Catachrestic, Hi! That’s true. I think twinks are a particularly privileged genre, at least in their own minds, acting like they own the libidinal and everything, to grotesquely generalise.And they do seem to think they’ll live in twinkdom forever, which is maybe their most endearing and depth-providing quality. When you’re a bear, you get to be a cub too. But twinks have nowhere to go unless twunk counts, which I guess it does. You’re still in LA. We should meet up when I get out there hopefully very soonish to show the film to the cast/crew, if you feel like it. I vote for a windfall. I mean, they do happen, I think. Hugs from me. ** Right. Today I draw your attention to Georges Perec’s great and famous but little read novel/experiment, which is actually very interesting and fun to read. See you tomorrow.
* POSTPONED: May 27 – 31: Paris @ Théâtre du Châtelet: THIS IS HOW YOU WILL DISAPPEAR * POSTPONED: October (dates TBA): New York @ Brooklyn Academy of Music: CROWD
Georges Perec An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris
Now available in North America 
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