Cara Blue Adams at The Baffler:
OVER THREE DAYS in October 1974, the French experimental writer Georges Perec sat in cafés and a tabac in a Parisian public square called Place Saint-Sulpice and jotted down everything he saw. His observations became a book called An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris, in which he sought to capture the small details that often elude us: “that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds.” Long invested in a playful embrace of constraint, Perec was a member of the Oulipo movement, which used radically restrictive rules to shape literature; for example, Perec wrote an entire novel without using the letter e, an absence that referenced the loss of his mother in the Holocaust and his father in the fighting that preceded it. Perec was also a champion of what he called the “infra-ordinary”: the more than ordinary, the ordinary observed so closely that it becomes transcendent, edging closer to life itself. He wanted to widen art’s vision; he wanted to accomplish this by focusing it.
more here.
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