'“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
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Saint Sulpice
photos by Jean Francois Delaware
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Further
Association Georges Perec
Georges Perec @ Oulipo
'How Georges Perec’s lost first novel has finally come to be published'
Georges Perec @ Editions P.O.L.
'"Je me souviens" par Georges Perec'
'Il aurait eu 80 ans aujourd'hui : Georges Perec, mode d'emploi'
'Le Grand Palindrome
de Georges Perec (1969)'
'Reading Georges Perec' @ Context No. 11
'I Remember Georges Perec'
'The Infra-Ordinary', by Georges Perec
'Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books', by Georges Perec
'Georges Perec en plein vertige taxinomique'
'Pretzel'
'Perlaine et Verec : à propos des Micro-Traductions de Georges Perec'
'Ellis Island — Georges Perec'
'A Renaissance for Belleville’s Georges Perec, Master of the Lipogram'
'Avoided: On Georges Perec'
'Georges Perec: Soft Chalk and Pigeons'
'Les Lieux de Georges Perec, une œuvre éclatée'
'The Nouveau Roman and the Refusal of the Real', by Georges Perec
Buy 'AN ATTEMPT AT EXHAUSTING A PLACE IN PARIS'
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Extras
Qui était Georges Perec ?
Georges Perec: La vita istruzioni per l'uso [Intervista 1976]
Georges Perec - Mi ricordo [Je me souviens]
Georges Perec : Prix Médicis pour "La vie mode d'emploi"
Georges Perec Google Doodle
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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
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
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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. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, David. It's still kind of unbelievable and shuddery to me that you went through that. Thank fucking god that you emerged entirely yourself. ** Jamie McMorrow, Mm, how do I compete with yo-ho-ho? That's tough. Merry Christmas, Jamie. That's no competition, but its weird randomness has a slight charm? Plans for today, me? I might actually have a work-free day. I finished what I need to finish for the brief time-being yesterday, so ... I'll probably work on my novel. And see something out in the world. Art, a park, something. You're on a break too, cool, synchronicity. I love that the song is making you feel like a classical sculptor. Deftness is a ship of fools. It's the 'can't quite do' but 'tried my best to do' things that are where the originality pops in. Or maybe I mean the freshness. I know back when I used to interview rock stars and stuff a lot when I was writing for Spin Magazine all the time, I would ask some rock god how he/she did this one totally genius thing in some song, and, 9 out of 10 times, they'd say that thing was a mistake and a lucky break. Oh, South of France. Nice down there. There are some way decent castles down there too. But, yeah, if you ever get through the big P, hit me up. I'm totally with you on the homeyness of Paris. I'm one of those people who just felt simultaneously at home and in wonder -- a nice combo -- as soon as I got here. I do have an archive, yeah. It's at NYU in NYC. Technically, it's in Fales Library, which is NYU's 'special collection'. They only have my stuff up to about 2002 because I've been too lazy to organize all the stuff since then and send it to them yet. I have to do that some day soon. But my writing-related stuff from childhood to 2002 or so is there. Lovely to message with you too indeed. I hope your Tuesday has a super amazing impact. I mean, it's possible. Love, Dennis. ** Steevee, Hi. No, it's a real park. It's not even that outlandish, man, but I'm a theme park sucker. Yeah, re: your friend, my brain immediately went 'xanax', but I don't recommend recommending that. I've been known to love xanax, but it can be a little evil. ** Bear, Hey, Bear! Well, thank you, it's a great pleasure that you're here for this place and for us and for me. Your play sounds very intriguing, of course. NYC is nerve-wracking central to do almost anything ambitious, I think, except maybe write poems, but even then. Do you have a venue in mind or lined-up? A cast? I'm guessing you'll direct the play? Maintain the momentum: truer words hath rare been spoke. (Or however that phrase goes.) Yeah, exactly. I'm having the same self-rule with this TV show project. I didn't get to check out Genesis yesterday because I was deadlining and cutting off my peripheral vision, but it's the first thing I'm going to do once I post this post. I'll definitely check out that podcast and the archives. Thanks a lot, Bear! I hope your today is a smooth path. ** MANCY, Hi! You did pretty damned well from inside that unpleasant fog. Thanks about the post. I hope the fog is down to a mere mist if even that today. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi, Dóra! Precisely, yeah. Well, the birthday 'girl' was Gisele with whom I'm doing the TV show, so, unfortunately, it was kind of like a business meeting with cake, but it was fun anyway. You'll get it back. Don't worry. But I hate when that void appears. Being in that artistic/energy void is like when you're a kid and your parents say you can't do something you really want and feel like you need to do, and you know they're wrong and just being control freaks, but they run the show and pay for everything, so you can't do it. But the muse always comes back. And usually it's suddenly for no logical reason, and you're like, 'whoa, it's back, when did that happen?' Your day does sound like it was okay enough. My day was pretty frying, yes, but I finished the first draft of the TV show's second episode, so it was worth it. Now I have a short break while Zac goes through the draft and makes his rewritings and revisions. How was your Tuesday? Did the muse at least peek at you from far away? ** Tomkendall, Hi, Tom! Yes, I got the post, which is super great, and I set it up, and it will launch here on this coming Friday, if that's okay with you. Really appreciate it, and the book sounds extremely interesting. I'm going to get it. Nice reading you're doing there, cool. Thanks again so much for the post, buddy! ** Cobaltfram, Hi, John. Ideally this place functions in such a way that people can come in and out as they feel like it and never feel like they have to be here or anything gross like that. Hard to say much about the new novel 'cos I'm still sorting it. At the moment, most of it is in the form of an impassioned autobiographical evolving rant that is emotionally honest but not entirely factual. Interrupted by related flights of imagination. Yeah, pre- a big move like that, I can't see expecting oneself to get much of anything creative done. I live in the Marais now, between Bastille and Places des Vosges. It's nice. Zac is doing awesomelessly, and I think the rest of the gang is in one piece and doing varying degrees of great. I've heard nothing about Gaspar making a movie with Ryan Gosling, but doesn't mean it isn't true. I'll ask. I knew long ago when I met Bret that he was not a complete square or even an incomplete square. Why, he seems like a complete square to you? Oh, you kid. Never mind. Things are lovely enough. I hope they're lovelier yet on your side. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben, Yes, I saw your email in my box this morning, and my eyes lit up and flashed and twirled around in their sockets and stuff. I'll open the email and set the post up and get back to you right away. Thank you, Benster! I'm excited and grateful! ** Tender prey, Yay, Marc! For me, it's like ... it wanted to be Xmas here, but Santa Claus hadn't arrived, and now he/you have! And, yes, it's like Halloween too because what would life or here or anywhere be without a hint of Halloween, I ask you? Ditto on your voice, man! Ah, still in London, good. I like that. I can only imagine that the break from your working has been okay. Those times when your body is prevented from making work and your imagination feels like it has to do double-duty to make up the difference and 'close' the physical space conceptually are some of the best times, I think. If that makes any sense. I like the sound of the Raven Row show. Yeah, that sound-art show we saw there was wonderful. I do know Leslie Thornton's work. Mainly 'Peggy and Fred in Hell' but a bit else as well. Wow, I should do a post featuring her if I can find enough stuff online. I'll do/try that. It would be so great to get to visit. It's been tough finding a place to show the film in London. We just almost got a really great gig/venue last week. I probably shouldn't say where. It was basically getting set up, but then it turned out that the big, overall director of the space/venue, who normally never interferes with the film programmer's programming, hates my books and demanded to watch our film before he would agree, and he hated the film, so that was that. We're gonna to apply to another place there that seems theoretically like it would work this week. Fingers crossed. Oh, if you have ideas, that would be great! No, it doesn't need to be a cinema at all. We're talking to art spaces, galleries, clubs, etc too. It just needs to be able to show a film comfortably is all. 'The Ventriloquists Convention' is a bit easier to tour, yes. There's barely any set, but, on the other hand, it's a large cast. It's been a really big success so far. Probably our biggest. We have tons of offers from all over the world for it. The problem is that most of its stars are the repertory company of Puppentheater Halle, and the agreement we made with the theater is that they can only do so many shows per year because of their commitment to the theater there. We're constantly having to try to coax the theater director to allow them to tour more. It's annoying. Anyway, I hope 'TVC' will get to London. So great to be back in close/blog touch, Marc! ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Thanks, man. Me too. Sharesies? Yeah, thanks, re: the release date thing. Bleah, but we're resigned now. It definitely would be far, far more ideal if you can watch 'LCTG' in your pal's home cinema. It's really made to be seen in a 'theater/projected' context, although I guess it works on a computer screen if it has to. Very lucky you to get to see the restored 'Chimes at Midnight'! What an incredible film! Welles's most poetic, I think. It's so underrated. There are things, moments in 'CaM' that are just totally mind-blowing in that way that only Welles can be. I think I've only maybe read an essay or two by Eliot Weinberger just sort of randomly and now and then. Huh. Okay, I'll try to get that New Directions comp. Thanks, Jeff! ** Misanthrope, It is? Oh, I can see that. You have the weirdest imagination ever, George. I'm sure you've heard said that before. Need I say, 'weird' is not a negative term in this case. In most cases, come to think of it. Poor misunderstood word: 'weird'. Oh, I see, re: Noah Matous. I still think what you're asking of him constitutes slavery. Well, unless you want a whiny, irritable, restless Noah Matous as your property, you'll have to give him what he wants. And maybe what he wants is to never have sex again in his whole life, so bored and sick he is of having sex already at his young age. I'm just saying it's probably a little tougher than it sounds. 44! When is the bear's birthday? I'll mark my calendar. RIP: Doris Roberts. I don't think I ever saw her in anything, but her face is ultra-familiar. ** Bernard Welt, Hi, B. Aggravating, oh. Sorry, I was hoping for sad. It was selfish of me. Your sadness of the particular sort that I imagined those two weeks inspiring looked pretty in my mind's eye. You did tell me that Disney story. I was all agog inside when you told me. That is a story that one, if one is me, doesn't soon forget. ** H, Hi, h. Oh, well, that's a good mood. Cool. Yeah, Bear seems cool, for sure. 'Rivers and Mountains' is wonderful, I agree, of course. Nice. Thank for the work week wishes. My favorite person is visiting his cousin in Bretagne for most of the week, but I'll make do. Have a fine week yourself, work-filled or not, as you wish. ** Right. Today I'm spotlighting a very wonderful book by a very, very wonderful writer, and I hope you enjoy the show. See you tomorrow.
