Georges Perec’s Work-table

Last night I was reading (slowly) Georges Perec’s Notes Concerning the Objects that are on my Work-table. Even though the objects that Perec reports on are static, I was most struck by the movement in his piece.

When I arrived at this paragraph it was like putting my thumb beneath a granite paperweight.  It sat like a big stone, the paragraph, and I could not argue with it.

“Thus a certain history of my tastes (their permanence, their evolution, their phases) will come to be inscribed in this project. More precisely, it will be, once again, a way of marking out my space, a somewhat oblique approach to my daily practice, a way of talking about my work, about my history and my preoccupations, an attempt to grasp something pertaining to my experience, not at the level of its remote reflections, but at the very point where it emerges.”

(Species of Spaces and Other Pieces Georges Perec translated by John Sturrock Penguin Books.)