Spoken in Jest: On the Lasting Importance of Georges Perec
Reading Perec’s collection of essays Species of Space broke me out of the impasse I had found myself in. I packed up my haunted river book, accepted it as lost and melodramatically threw it off a pier into the sea, and I began again; this time writing an entirely new book about the past where terrible, wondrous and everyday stories would be told via the conduit of objects, thus bypassing the perils of direct disclosure. Written in a month-long bloodshot frenzy, after three or four years of involuntary suspended animation, Inventory was guided by restrictions as well as the friendly ghost of Perec. The idea was to treat it not as a book but instead a collection that I was merely assembling from the hoards of junk in the attic of memory.
Darran Anderson on how Georges Perec inspired his new book, Inventory.
Poem Brut #105 – Poeme Publique
These typewritten poems were initially conceived of as a joke (at the expense of the 20th century?) and should probably be considered as such.
They, unadvisedly, wilfully inherit from the theories of Jiřà Kolář and Group 42, though to their credit possess little in the way of Habsburgian nostalgia.
Repeatedly hitting the same key on a typewriter over and over is surprisingly dissatisfying as a means of ‘writing’, and in fact starts to hurt, so the author would not recommend it.
In the 105th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Ben Britton.