Three entries

from Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book. If Barthes and Perec were both reading this, it would explain certain similarities between their writing that I've always been curious about (probably not very deep delving into the question would get me a satisfactory answer - I will follow up on this when I am back in New York).

Refined and elegant things - A girl’s over-robe of white on white over pale violet-grey. The eggs of the spot-billed duck. Shaved ice with a sweet syrup, served in a shiny new metal bowl. A crystal rosary. Wisteria flowers. Snow on plum blossoms. An adorable little child eating strawberries.
...
Cats – Cats should be completely black except for the belly, which should be very white.
...
Endearingly lovely things . . . Things children use in doll play. A tiny lotus leaf that’s been picked froma pond. A tiny aoi leaf. In fact, absolutely anything that’s tiny is endearing.

26 locations

Places Jami Attenberg slept over the first six months of this year.

(Reminds me slightly of some notes of Georges Perec in my favorite Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.)

For an even bleaker account of the financial woes of the forty-year-old novelist, read Benjamin Anastas's gripping and horrifying Too Good to Be True.

The superiority of classical restraint in writing

At the Paris Review, Harry Mathews on translating Georges Perec and Marie Chaix:

The photograph of Marie Chaix on the back cover revealed a woman of thirty-two and great attractiveness. When John Ashbery first saw her, he remarked how pretty she was, then corrected himself immediately: “No, not pretty—beautiful.” Her beauty was not that of any stereotype: strong-featured, full of energy and passion. From the start I fantasized about having one of my noncommittal affairs with her. I knew ahead of time that I was safe from any deeper involvement, since she was married and the mother of two little girls. What I did not know was that she had never cheated on her less-faithful husband but now felt inclined to indulge in a small infidelity of her own.

Our interest in one another had preceded our meeting. Two months before, in the hope of one day winning her, I had composed a four-page handwritten letter intended for her, in which I deployed every seductive wile my experience as a writer could supply. I was pleased with the results and confident that they would dispose Marie to think of me as someone more than her translator.

It then occurred to me that this was a shabby way to approach the woman I had come to know in her book: an intensely serious and compassionate human being who had generously taken her readers into the intimate, moving world of her feelings. I tore up my handwritten letter and replaced it with a page containing a dozen typed lines of a formality for which written French is perhaps uniquely capable (“Madame, I have the honor and pleasure of being the translator of your admirable book…”). This was the letter I mailed her.

Marie’s reaction was not what I had foreseen. She later told me that her first impulse was to drop everything and get on the next train to Venice. She wanted to see this mysterious American who had unexpectedly appeared in her life. It was as though my original letter had been encrypted in its typewritten replacement. (This incidentally delighted me as definitive proof of the superiority of classical restraint in writing to the rhetoric of expressionistic overtness.)

This side whimsy

I thoroughly enjoyed Misha Glouberman's collaboration with Sheila Heti, The Chairs are Where the People Go, after an initial round of disappointment that came to an end when I realized that it was completely unreasonable of me to expect this book to be exactly like and as good as Georges Perec's "Species of Spaces". I think it was the book's title that made me feel I'd be getting something so much along those lines: and no, it is not as good as that paragraph I just linked to indeed or that whole work, but it is very much worthwhile nonetheless (Perec sets an impossibly high standard).

Most attractive to me were the thoughts on groups and their working dynamics; Misha has had an interesting and unusual career thus far teaching improvisation and doing odd and highly imaginative sorts of classes, and his descriptions of this stuff really spoke to me. Interesting things to be gleaned here by anyone in education or the arts, I'd say, with particular focus on the productive tension between verbal and non-verbal forms of art, the nature of collaboration in a group and a cluster of related topics, including ephemeral art forms, games and the relationship between participation and performance (games and group dynamics being central topics of interest to me in BOMH). (Sheila Heti has done an interesting and imaginative job shaping the material into a book.)

Here's one of my favorite bits, a list of "some hard Charades clues" that emerged from years of teaching a workshop on charades (this is the sort of counterintuitive class in which Misha has specialized):

the Symbionese Liberation Army
Sum 41
"The more things change, the more they stay the same"
Guam
Being and Nothingness
Sometimes a Great Notion
the Dutch tulip craze of the seventeenth century
Fletch
Soren Kierkegaard
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice
the Koran
"Bootylicious"
"The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two adjacent sides"
E Pluribus Unum
Vinnie Barbarino
Koyaanisqatsi
Troilus and Cressida
the lambada
1984
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
Mr. Snuffleupagus
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife"
"Que Sera, Sera"
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
Godel, Escher, Bach
Soylent Green
shock and awe
The Metamorphosis
"'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe"
trickle-down economics

Also, some very wise thoughts on conferences and why it is a pity that their current structure "doesn't just ignore the existence of the Internet, it ignores the existence of the printing press":

It's a medieval idea about how information should be disseminated--to imagine that if you want to know what someone thinks, you have to go sit in a room with them while they read out loud to you their thoughts. But at a lot of conferences that's the primary thing that happens.

Finding out what someone has to say in their paper isn't a reason to travel across the country and stay in a hotel room. A reason to travel across the country is to have conversations with people and actually form human relationships. Most of the stuff that happens at a conference not only does not help create that, it hinders it.

La disparition/A Void

The French original is by Georges Perec; the translation is Gilbert Adair's.

Anton Voyl n’arrivait pas à dormir. Il alluma. Son Jaz marquait minuit vingt. Il poussa un profond soupir, s’assit dans son lit, s’appuyant sur son polochon. Il prit un roman, il l’ouvrit, il lut; mais il n’y saisissait qu’un imbroglio confus, il butait à tout instant sur un mot dont il ignorait la signification.

Incurably insomniac, Anton Vowl turns on a light. According to his watch it’s only 12.20. With a loud and languorous sigh Vowl sits up, stuffs a pillow at his back, draws his quilt up around his chin, picks up his whodunit and idly scans a paragraph or two; but, judging its plot impossibly difficult to follow in his condition, its vocabulary too whimsically multisyllabic for comfort, throws it away in disgust.

Lipogrammatic

Franklin Bruno on HiLo hero Georges Perec.

The discovery of Uqbar

Now I want to teach a class that will start perhaps with Kafka and then move through Beckett, Borges, Nabokov, Primo Levi, Georges Perec, David Markson...

So - Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius":

The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) "primitive language" of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty - not even that it is false. Numismatology, pharmacology and archeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also await their avatars...

"The same goes for the bed"

From Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (translated by John Sturrock):

We generally utilize the page in the larger of its two dimensions. The same goes for the bed. The bed (or, if you prefer, the page) is a rectangular space, longer than it is wide, in which, or on which, we normally lie longways. 'Italian' beds are only to be found in fairy tales (Tom Thumb and his brothers, or the seven daughters of the Ogre, for example) or in altogether abnormal and usually serious circumstances (mass exodus, aftermath of a bombing raid, etc.). Even when we utilize the bed the more usual way round, it's almost always a sign of a catastrophe if several people have to sleep in it. The bed is an instrument conceived for the nocturnal repose of one or two persons, but no more.

Two by Perec

The first image is from Portrait(s) de Georges Perec; the second is from Ian Monk's translation of "The Exeter Text" in Three by Perec.