This is my a stand-in copy until I can afford a real one. She kindly let me borrow it overnight so I photographed every page, compiled them into a book and had it printed. Earlier this year I was teaching at Cranbrook School of Art and during a studio visit with a student, saw the book on her desk and leapt on it. I threw it away thinking I’d buy another copy then found out that instead of $20 it now costs $200 dollars or so because it’s out of print. The shovel made out of a road sign depicting a person shovelling is possibly the most poetic thing in the world.Įn route to America this book got wet and ruined.

Each item was missing and needed and so created out of what happened to be at hand. The objects beautifully describe both a problem and a solution in one thing. This book is a glorious collection of practical everyday objects made out of other everyday objects by Russian people around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Arkhipov: Home-Made Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts I think about Georges Perec and remember. When I start thinking “what’s the point of everything,” etc. I delight in Perec’s passionate quantifying of the world, and in the quality of attention he places on the minutiae of everyday life. The chapter headings are things like: “In the Boiler Room,” and “Under the Stairs.” Species of Spaces and Other Pieces is a book of essays including an account of all the objects on Perec’s work table. Life: A Users Manual is a record of everything that happened in every room of an apartment building in Paris over several generations.

I heard that Ouilipo is only allowed to have as many members as could sit around a particular table in a particular cafe in Paris which I am not Googling to verify because I like the story too much.Īn Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris is a document of three days spent sitting at a street corner in Paris looking at everyday life and writing down all the things that happened in various categories instances of numbers, details of bus routes, the flight patterns of birds. The unfathomable thing is that translated into English it also doesn’t have the letter E in it. Georges Perec is best known for the book A Void that doesn’t contain the letter E. He was a member of Oulipo – the French group of writers and mathematicians who write according to playful structures and mathematical equations. Georges Perec is a huge inspiration to me. I cheated already and am counting three books by Georges Perec as one because it was too difficult to choose between them. Georges Perec: An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris / Life: A Users Manual / Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

Lenka everything at once russian