An Attempt at Exhausting a Place - Alex English

In my previous blog post I wrote about Lynda Barry’s simple template for listing the details of the day with her Daily Diary.

Now I’d like to introduce you to Georges Perec – a French novelist and filmmaker and member of the Oulipo group of writers, famed for their constrained writing (Perec famously wrote a novel consisting only of words that don’t contain the letter ‘e’).

In 1974, frustrated with newspapers’ focus on disasters and sensationalist stories (which rings very true with me at the moment – I almost cannot bear to read the news), Perec decided to shift his focus to the ordinary mundanities of life.

“The papers annoy me, they teach me nothing.” 

Georges Perec 

The result was a short (40 pages!) book titled An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, published in 1975. It consists solely of lists of every detail of ‘mundane life’ that Perec observed while sitting in a cafe on Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris for three days.

There's something rather beautiful and hypnotic in these simple lists, and it's something I've tried to get into the habit of doing whenever I have a spare moment.

The numbers in Perec's notes refer to buses.

Refreshments are allowed!

'Exhausting a place' is something I now do whenever I'm not sure what to write. There's no expectation of a finished piece, just an exercise in noting down details. And I do happen to live in Paris at the moment, but it doesn't have to be a glamorous-sounding location. Anywhere can be exhausted, all it require is pen, paper and (most importantly) your attention.

As a side note, during my research into Georges Perec, I happened upon this rather lovely short film An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Sussex by Jessica Bishopp, inspired by Perec’s book.

I also came across this intriguing creative writing workshop, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Leicester, on Tuesday 16 July.

Have you ever tried 'exhausting a place'?

Alex English is a graduate of Bath Spa University's MA Writing for Young People. Her picture books Yuck said the Yak, Pirates Don't Drive Diggers and Mine Mine Mine said the Porcupine are published by Maverick Arts Publishing and she has more forthcoming from Bloomsbury and Faber & Faber.
www.alexenglish.co.uk

The Outer Limits - Andrew Strong

Long ago, before most of you were born, I used to listen to music on vinyl.  A vinyl single was usually about three minutes long, and a vinyl album, or LP, twenty minutes a side.  When I started playing in bands, and writing my own songs, I thought it was best to write three minute songs, or to think in sets of songs forty minutes long.  The technology of playing music dictated what I wrote.

When I watch a film I wonder how the screenwriter’s plotting is influenced by a movie's eventual length.  If a film is ninety minutes long, each of its three acts gets to be thirty minutes.  People will feel short changed if a movie is less than an hour, and often complain if it goes on for too long.

But what dictates the length of a book?  I’m led to believe that publishers prefer children's novels to be shorter, but why?  Is it simply because huge books don't sell? Are they too daunting or too heavy?

The original draft of a book I’ve just finished was 120,000 words.  My agent insisted I cut in half. I did so, and although the book is neater, and sharper, I think it’s lost something of its rambling essence.  (Can an essence ramble?)

So, like a DJ who creates an extended mix, or like the Directors Cut of a movie available on DVD, I wonder whether it’s possible to publish both long and shorter versions of my new book.  And while I’m at it, I wonder if I could write an even shorter short one.  Take this to its logical conclusion and my book will end up as a short story, a poem, or even a tweet.  Perhaps it can exist, like matter, in a variety of states. The book is about music, so I suppose I could include a cd, or a link to a download.

These days so many of the contexts in which artists work are  in flux.  Writing is no longer confined to print, but to a myriad of forms.  We can write blogs of infinite length (that no one will read).  We can tweet pithy wisdom. (Nobody will read these either).  At sea in the online world, we have no limit to their imaginings.  I can write and record my music at home, upload it on to Soundcloud and don't have to concern myself with the memory capacity of the means of distribution.  The LP, the CD, even the concept of music of any finite length has been challenged by software such as Koan which enables music to be ‘generative’ – that is, the composer determines certain settings (key, pitch, tempo, arrangement) and the music unfolds infinitely.

As someone who trained as a painter, then spent ten years in music before writing books, I see many art forms suddenly released from their bonds, in freefall.  Of course it is liberating: there’s a new world out there, and it goes on forever. 

Writers have always enjoyed creating their own restraints: Joyce’s Ulysses, Georges Perec, the works of Italo Calvino, the Oulipo movement, they have all sought to devise structures to give their work some limit, a reaction to, perhaps, a sense of reality as too chaotic. 

Reality is too daunting to capture in its entirety, so we all need to be selective, to choose, to  limit.  But the boundaries of our reality are dissolving in the online world.  We get vertigo, we run to find the edges, there aren’t any.

And our security, like the security we get from good parents who give clear boundaries, is threatened.  It’s a brave new world.  It's daunting and exciting in equal measure.

So, if and when my new 'work' eventually comes out, maybe it will be in several forms, the least of which will be the printed book.  And if you miss most of them, please make sure you don't miss the tweet.