Practical Exercises

They came across this lovely man called Georges Perec. They never actually met him but some of them felt like they knew in more than just name. They though that his thought was simmilar to theirs.

He died of lung cancer four days short of his forty-sixth birthday in Paris, in 1982.

These are some practical exercises they did:

Practical Exercises

Observe the street, from time to time, with some concern for system perhaps.
Apply yourself. Take Time…

Nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see…

Make an effort to exhaust the subject, even if that seems grotesque, or pointless, or stupid. You still haven’t looked at anything; you’ve merely picked out what you’ve long ago picked out…

Force yourself to see more flatly…

Detect a rhythm: the passing of cars…count the cars…look at the number plates…distinguish between the cars registered in Paris and the rest…

Decipher a bit of the town, deduce the obvious facts: the obsession with ownership, for example. Describe the number of operations the driver of a vehicle is subjected to when he parks merely in order to go and by a hundred grams of fruit jelly…

The people in the streets: where are they coming from? Where are they going to? Who are they?

People in a hurry. People going slowly. Parcels. Prudent people who’ve taken their macs. Dogs: they’re the only animals to be seen. You can’t see any birds – yet you know there are birds – any can’t hear them either. You might see a cat slip underneath a car, but it doesn’t happen.

Nothing is happening in fact.

Carry on
untill the scene becomes improbable
untill you have the impression, for the briefest of moments, that you are in a strange town or, better still, until you can no longer understand what is happening or is not happening, until the whole place becomes strange, and you no longer even know that this is what is called a town, a street, buildings pavements…

p. 50, The Street
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec (Penguin, London, 1997)