"Many, if not most, of these things have been described, inventoried, photographed, written about or itemized. My intention in the following pages was to describe what remains; that which we generally don’t notice, which doesn’t call attention to itself, which is of no importance: what happens when nothing happens... See more
“What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines. Railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers that are killed, the more the trains exist... How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs ev... See more
Why is this important? Because, Perec argued, if we can learn how to “speak of these ‘common things,’” which he describes as “the banal, the quotidian, the obvious . . . the background noise, the habitual,” we can stop doing what we default to, which is to “sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep.” Instead, we can give the fundamental elements... See more