georges perec

February 4, 2011

Dear DMC

Here is one more quote: 

“The daily papers talk of everything except the daily. The papers annoy me, they teach me nothing. What they recount doesn’t concern me, doesn’t ask me questions and doesn’t answer the questions I ask or would like to ask.”

“What’s really going on, what we are experiencing, the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?”

It’s from Georges Perec’s “Approaches to What,” first published in Cause Commune, February 1973, later published in L’Infra-ordinaire, 1989, then in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Penguin Books, 1997, translated by John Sturrock.

Incidentally, the answer is to be found in the DMC’s website dullmensclub.com.

And there is much more in Perec’s oeuvre.

Yours sincerely

François Gojat
Wimereux, France

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Dear François

Thanks for this additional quote.

For our readers’ benefit, click here to get to the previous quite you sent to us, the one about the common miracle of the contentment that comes from doing one thing at a time.

Perec’s book Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, in English, is now in our aStore, click here.

Yours sincerely,

Grover Click
Button Down, Hampshire