Georges Perec and the "Infra-ordinary"

My Context of Practice course has resumed - I had a year off because I'm a part-timer.

Our first lecture featured Georges Perec, a French philosoper, film-maker and author of some "post-modern" books which sound, erm, interesting.

For example, one of his books, La disparition, avoids using the letter "e".

Perec describes another of his books, La Vie mode d'emploi,  as "novels" plural.  It describes the rooms and stairwells of a fictitious Parisian apartment block and tells stories of its inhabitants.  In the end, it's revealed that all of the action occurs at a single moment in time.

More on Perec's background in his Wikipedia listing here.

Anyhow, Perec created a "collection" of his writings entitled "L'infra-ordinaire" that points out that we don't notice a lot of the stuff we encounter every day.  And this was the focus of a lot of the lecture.

Personally, I don't see this as much of a revelation.  Our brains make sense of the welter of stimuli hitting our senses by screening out the expected and focusing on the unexpected - the stuff that stands out from the noise.

I tried to make this point by suggesting that autistic people have problems doing this and can get overwhelmed with "irrelevant" stimuli.  Think I should have kept quiet!

Part of our homework is to find some detritus, draw it and annotate it with text from Perec's writing or do the reverse - find a text in Perec's writing and find an object that "completes the narrative" (whatever that means).

I think the text we're meant to focus on is in "Species of Spaces and Other Pieces" which Perec wrote in 1973 .  A translation by John Sturrock is on sale as a Penguin Classic.

An extract of this was published on a website called Day-to-Day Data, so I'll go with this, and I'll pluck out "Question your tea spoons" as my starting point, because I've got a bit of a fetish about tea spoons.

Here's a selection from our kitchen drawer -  I'll number the 9 spoons from the left.

• I always use 1 for making drinks and eating stuff like ice-cream.  I appreciate their design and quality.  I like the way they look and feel.
• I always use 2 for eating muesli.  It's a bit bigger than 1 and the design is okay.
• I always use 9 for eating avocados, for practical reasons (the pointy-ness).
• I won't use 3 and 4 under any circumstances.  I really dislike the look and feel of their round handles - so much so that I won't let them share the same compartment as the 1s;  if I discover one lurking there, I move it.
• 5 and 7 were our regular spoons before we went up-market with 1s - I no longer use them.
• 6 must be a grand-child's spoon.  It could have been left here for future use, or my wife might have bought it.  Something is plucking at my heart strings.
• I think 8 is a spoon we inherited.  Old fashioned looking.  I would never use it.

So, questions for those teaspoons:

• 1, do you feel the same about me as I do about you?
• 3 and 4, do you hate me as much as I hate you?
• 2, are you fed up with muesli all the time?
• 6, what's the story behind you being in our drawer?
• 3 and 4, do you long for the days when you were my regular teaspoon?