This is the third of a series of posts related to my preparations which include the event itself and all the other social and cultural angles around it, plus my own exploration of the city.
I am going to be wandering the streets of Paris in July in between attending sessions, following in the tradition of the flâneurs of the past...
There is the influence of Georges Perec here - I've discovered there is a road named after him, which is actually just an alley and staircase linking two parallel streets, and without any houses on it, or any house numbers...
Perec had a sense of what constituted life, reality. It wasn’t what was remarkable, extraordinary or eventful. It was what happened daily, that passed without comment. The regular and banal, what was habitual and quotidian and therefore necessary in its tedious laying down of substructure, the strata of building, the substance that escaped notice, the element and condition he called the infra-ordinary.
https://bordercrossingsmag.com/article/georges-perec-soft-chalk-and-pigeons
It also seems that there is a new bench in the area where Perec did his observations.
You can also take part in a Perecian tour of Paris.
Newly inaugurated as Perec’s Bench, this place is thought to be the viewpoint from which author Georges Perec sat and wrote his lesser-known Oulipo text about ‘what happens when nothing happens’. Recently translated into English as ‘An Attempt At Exhausting a Place In Paris’.
His observations of Place Saint Sulpice from over forty years ago drew me into revisiting the place a couple of years ago (October 2014), and remarkably it remains a time-piece. A notable feature is its original mid-1800s decorative fountain which on approaching hits you with its monumental roar of cascading water; possibly the sound-fix for animating the structure’s stunning stone-carved lion figures.
A lovely piece in Border Crossings on Perec.
Other reading
Others have copied - sometimes in their own locations.
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/spoken-in-jest-on-the-lasting-importance-of-georges-perec/
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/161530214.pdf
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