An Attempt at Exhausting a Library in the Suburbs

Finding magic in the infraordinary

I’ve always been drawn to places full of stories. Movie theaters, train stations, libraries — spaces that brim with a million different beginnings and endings.

When I started writing about place this month, I considered different settings for this essay and where each of them might take me. What story might unfold if I began at the train station, or the movie theater?

Writing is full of choices; every word is a decision. To write is to realize that you only have so much time, and you won’t get to everything — but you’re gonna try anyway.

So here I am, drafting this particular version in the library.

Over the course of three days in the fall of 1974, the writer Georges Perec sat in a Paris café and wrote down every single thing he saw. An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris was his effort to capture what he called the “infraordinary,” those humdrum details that tap out the heartbeat of everyday life. The result, Wakefield Press describes, is “a melancholic, slightly eerie, and oddly touching document in which existence boils down to rhythm, writing turns into time, and the line between the empirical and the surreal grows surprisingly thin.”

When I read Attempt I connected with Perec’s experiment immediately, because it feels like a stakeout. During my own Slow Art Day adventure earlier this year, I wrote, “I like the idea of being a detective investigating life. I guess that would make these my case notes, and art the clues.” There’s a similar energy in this curiosity-based surveillance, where the object of your investigation is simply the minutia of the everyday. “What happens,” Perec wrote, “when nothing happens.”

There’s something endearing about knowing your efforts will be futile, but attempting anyway. “The attempt to communicate everything, to describe everything — to exhaust everything — is always a sympathetic effort, however doomed to failure it may be,” translator Marc Lowenthal writes in the afterword. This observation reminds me of the feeling I get sometimes when I go to the library. How every now and then I look around all those shelves and think, man, I’ll never read all those books. But heck, I’m gonna try.

Most of all I’m obsessed with Perec’s curious little catalog because, like so much of the art I love, it feels like an invitation: What if you tried this, too? What might you discover?

So of course I had to make my own attempt — and what better place than the library?

I found a seat in the center of all those books and chairs and people and over the course of one hour, filled four notebook pages. Every person who walked by, every sound I heard, every small detail. I missed things — of course I did! — but I tried to capture as much as I could.

Interestingly, for that one hour, all other thoughts just filtered out of my mind. It’s as if, by devoting yourself totally to your surroundings, you can’t mentally hold anything else beyond the present. You give yourself over to the place, and in return the place takes your memories, and for that time you exist solely in the now. And that interlude is where the writing happens.

After I was finished, I went back through my notes to see how my attempt compared to Perec’s. Your individual perspective is always going to influence what you notice; even if I’d been in Paris with Perec for that same three-day stretch in 1974, my document would have been unique to me. I noticed that I wrote down a lot more sounds than Perec did; I imagine this was because I was looking down at my notebook so often, meaning that there were visuals I missed — but I was always listening.

When you pay such close attention to strangers, they become characters in a story that’s happening all around you. You become familiar with their mannerisms, briefly aware of their small daily journeys. (My favorite stranger was The Newspaper Man, who offered a way of marking time as he turned the pages of his paper.) It’s easy to create little narratives or incorporate questions into the text as you go.

The record you create is always a product of your own personality; it’s impossible to take yourself out of the text. So you create a portrait of a place, but in a funny way it’s a portrait of you, too.

After that day at the library, I kinda thought that was the end of it; I started writing another version of this piece. But the following week, we went to Beyond Monet & Beyond van Gogh, an immersive art exhibit that projects a shifting array of Impressionist paintings onto the surrounding walls. I had always been drawn to Impressionism — art that calls attention to the act of its creation through perceptible brushstrokes — and I was excited to experience paintings I loved in a new way.

That night, I realized the Impressionists were reaching for something similar to Perec. They shared an obsession with capturing the now — a fleeting moment, a certain slant of light — through the lens of personal perspective:

Photo taken at Beyond Monet

And I really understood, for the first time, why I’d always connected with those paintings in the way I did — that same magic thread that weaves together so much of the art I love. A celebration of individual point of view, always offering that same invitation: What if you tried this, too?

This isn’t just an invitation for artists, or for writers, by the way — it’s for everyone. Why else are we here, if not to find beauty in the ordinary? To dig out the stuff that matters from everyday life? To try and fail in capturing our specific, elusive now?

As I’ve written before, nobody sees the world exactly like you do. But they might catch a glimpse, if you create something.

Photo taken at Beyond van Gogh

Bonus Rabbit Holes!

• Try it yourself. Here’s a fun writing exercise from the Poetry Foundation if you’d like a bit of guidance in your own attempt to exhaust a place.

• Support small presses by ordering your copy of Perec’s Attempt directly from the publisher. Wakefield Press even offers free shipping if you live in the US!

• Discover more writers who experiment with language. Alphamaniacs turned up in my library catalog search for Perec, introducing me to 25 additional writers who expanded the possibilities of language (like Daniel Nussbaum, who retold classic literary stories through vanity license plates)!

• Find your next read in this giant list of books that take joy in the ordinary. Any crowdsourced list that includes my beloved Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life is worth a look!

• Watch a film that celebrates the simple beauty of everyday life. Perfect Days is a delightful little ode to analog joy and being alive, seen through the eyes of toilet cleaner in Tokyo. (Also taught me a new word: komorebi, “the shimmering of light and shadows that is created by leaves swaying in the wind. It only exists once, at that moment.”)

• Explore the traveling Beyond Monet & Beyond van Gogh exhibit. See if the immersive Impressionist experience is coming to a city near you!

• Witness the first film to be entirely oil-painted by hand. Loving Vincent is a film about the life and death of Vincent van Gogh, hand-painted start to finish by a team of more than one hundred artists. I also watched the making-of documentary and I still cannot believe it exists: 65,000 frames, each one an oil painting.

Publication news! If you enjoyed this issue, you’ll probably like my latest essay, too: I reference, among other things, the issues of McSweeney’s Quarterly that were composed of pencils, balloons, a tin lunchbox, and a stack of assorted mail!

The Autofocus anthology featuring my essay about unfinished projects comes out next month! Writing this piece changed my life, and basically every essay I’ve written since exists because Autofocus took a chance on me. So support a really cool small press and an awesome group of writers and order your copy today!

I love writing every Microfascination, but this was a really fun one, y’all. Thanks as always for welcoming me into your inbox, and I’ll see you again in July!