Living Room

(15 m2)

 

Directly on the other side of the kitchen’s half wall is the living room, even though, as I’ve said, the role this half wall plays is more 1 of delineation than of outright separation. Since we’ve already considered, at the moment we crossed the doorsill, the feeling this room as a whole gives of being the heart of the apartment, we’ll focus rather on the living room’s 2fold function: the 1st illustrated by the table pushed against this side of the half wall, indicating a “dining area”; the 2nd by the couch placed against the far wall, indicating a zone for “living.”

Red Alert

On the table, its dimensions allowing 2 to eat comfortably, 4 agreeably, 6 easily, 8 possibly, and 10 irksomely (it’s been done), there’s always a tablecloth, which serves to underscore the table’s purpose. The tablecloths I have available for admiration number 4: 1 white tablecloth branded with the monogram C, which I use parsimoniously, due not so much to fetishism, per se, as to its undeniable signs of wear and tear, which do, however, give it an aesthetically intriguing nuance of ragged luxury; 1 white tablecloth with dark-red stripes that I haul out for parties along with its 12 matching napkins; and then the 2 most frequently used tablecloths, the red-and-white gingham 1 and the scarlet-streaked 1. (The color red dominates all of my tablecloths.)

Most of all, it’s crucial that this table never be uncovered because, despite its excellent design (1 pure 150 cm × 70 cm rectangle with 4 gray cylindrical legs), its white laminate structure is so crude that it absolutely has to be concealed.

A Moment of Domestic Grace

1:45. The coffeepot is on the table. It is full. The tablecloth is red. The hot coffee, bronze. The smell is wonderful. A slat of light slices across the floor.

A Moment of Disgrace

1:52. A sock is on the table. And so forth.

Dining Chairs

Around this table are 3 chairs that confirm that we are in a “dining room”: they have to be there (and they’re always there) to confer the reassuring, definitive stability to be expected from such a specific space. I own 5 of these mass-produced ’50s-style wooden chairs: elongated ovals creased like opened folders, their 4 legs splayed outward, bought at an antique store on the rue de Paradis for the sum of €150.

Write or Eat

Sometimes my desk (→ OFFICE) bores me and I sit myself down at the dining table to dream up some other forms of nourishment. I’m not sure if I write any differently here or there, on wood or on cloth, but how dumbfounded I was to learn that, in ’68, Patrick Modiano wrote the 1st pages of his 1st book on the patio of a restaurant in Var that my father owned in ’82, the brand name printed across his notebook and the grand name of this restaurant embossed across his glass of water consequently uniting with a sort of crystalline joy in the rhythmic syllables of “Claire Fontaine.”

Shared Table

For the sake of changing up my workspaces, I’m writing this text on a different, 3rd table, temporary, a card table, which I can put, depending on my plans, in any room, and which I’ll describe later, when we reach the rooms in which it tends to be deployed (→ OFFICE, BEDROOM).

Cushiongleton

On 1 of the chairs—the 1 on the long outward-facing side of the dining table—is a blue-tinted cotton cushion, its dimensions exceeding those of the chair’s seat. Nobody could accuse me of favoring this cushion—in my mind it’s somehow feminine—over all my others, for the simple reason that there are no others. It chose the chair that holds it; I could have sat on so many other symbols of comfort, but I’ve limited this set, C, to a single element; in modern mathematics we call such a set a singleton. My cushion’s nonmultiplication explains my philosophy of furniture more clearly than words could; I appreciate comfort, but I don’t cultivate it. This peacock-blue cushion is my 1 concession to the boardinghouse style; all the same, it often falls down, as a sort of mute protest, slipping from its platform too small to accommodate it, only to end up beneath the table, where it eats my dust.

Clue

Mrs. Peacock, in the dining room, with the candlestick.

The Planet on the Table

Describing this table, I’ve fallen into the trap of presenting an ideal and misleading view, just like travel agencies insisting there’s never any rain, or store catalogs showing off their wares as impossibly spic-and-span. This uncluttered table doesn’t fool me for a second; it suffers the waste and welter of the everyday. The necessity of living in an orderly world the better to counteract my internal disorder obliges me to present both sides of things at once: a space both tamed and wild. Which version of my table is most truthful? When it’s fulfilling its role, bearing some lineament or character, some affluence on its airport-runway of the remains of a hurried lunch, or rather in the rectitude of its immaculate rectangle?

Still Life

As I’m writing these lines, my dining table presents the spectacle that is the battlefield of the quotidian: on the whitish tablecloth, stained here and there with rings, are 1 chipped plate full of strawberry hulls, 1 bunched-up napkin with a gingham pattern recalling those country inns that bored my childhood self to tears, 1 greasy trivet, 1 small pot with scorched handle holding cold coffee dregs, 1 ragged chunk of bread, some cheese rinds, 1 blue plastic bag holding 1 package of jumbo Spanish strawberries, some eggshell shards, 1 crumpled ball of packing paper from the store around the corner, my Scandinavian mug with rim stained brown, and even 1 vase of wilting buttercups … The hidden materiality behind plain, austere Dutch still lifes—which I should probably clean up so I can get on with my work.

Tidy

Every day, he has to set the table, clear it, start his various machines, move the chairs and move them again, open the cabinets, plug things in, do the dishes, unplug things again, put away the dishes, shake the tablecloth out the window—time flies when he’s cleaning house. Tidying up, at 1st glance, seems a sublimely satisfying task, since it’s so easily accomplished; then, however, confronted with the job’s repetitiveness, he begins to feel the weight of domestic bondage. Before finally succumbing to the idea of doing a bit of work every day, he dreamed up all sorts of extreme workarounds: giving in to negligence once and for all—taking pride in it!—or living in a hotel. He fantasizes about running a housecleaning company, fixing the unemployment rate by recruiting 3,000,000 servants. Then, faced with the crumbs scattered across his floor, he gets out his broom and takes some pleasure in humiliating himself. Tidying up only drives him moderately crazy.

Untidy

The orderliness I keep with the exactitude of a Swiss guard stands wholly opposed to the domestic savagery in which some of my nearest and dearest live (my father and my partner). Disorderliness can of course produce convincing sculptural results, as in Jeff Wall’s photograph The Destroyed Room, in which I find myself recognizing the lairs of various people I know, but, for me, I find it antithetical to the superior orderliness of Literature. Yoking the “nobility” of writing to the “petit-bourgeois” tidying of each room, and mixing them with a folk rhythm. I have this inborn inclination for managing a household. Who doesn’t? What kind of mental disorder would make me prefer disorderliness?

Death in the Living Room

My living room is where disorder hurts me the most. Moot in the bathroom or toilet, unknown in the entryway, bearable in the bedroom, and welcome in the kitchen, where it’s proof that a feast has been prepared, disorder is the death of the living room. This is why I wanted it to be so sparse, empty as some ancient receiving parlor.

Wallpaper or Socialism

Should a living room be emptied out to receive guests, or, rather, filled up? That is, should precedence be given to guests or to set dressing? Wouldn’t too much of the latter crush the former? But, then, wouldn’t emptiness bother them? And what about intrusive wallpaper? What about a plain white lounge? I try to envision all the possible setups: patterned wallpaper seemingly diminishing the room’s dimensions but instigating urbane conversation by immersing the visitor in a convivial space; bareness that focuses attention back onto the guests but offers them no escape; even perversely white wallpaper that tries to resolve the contradiction by a 3rd way. Ideally, complex wallpaper (both understated and effusive) would be best, commingling amiable flowers and little narrative motifs intended to delight and instruct my guests (such as an Illustrated History of Interior Decoration or a Life of Pierre Goldman). As I await the advent of parlor socialism, I’ve set my sights upon decorative progress’s polar opposite: austerity.

Emptiness and Fullness

The center of the living area is empty; of course, that’s usually the case, the layout of such rooms having to allow for free movement. The few pieces of furniture set around this space define it by opposition. The lounge is centrifugal, radiating energy from its center, pushing my furniture back against the walls, flattening their voracious volume. Any other solution—such as grouping the pieces of furniture in the center of the room in order to walk around them—would be impractical. A tangle of furnishings would make them into a sculpture. Their functions forbid it.

Parody of a Château Owner

Making the biggest room the emptiest 1 as well calls for a concerted strategy. As financial constraints have expurgated my superficial desires, I aspire to a bare living room as revenge. (It’s only within myself that I can find the consoling poetry of boundlessness.)

Site Comments

“You haven’t put anything on the walls…”

“Walls aren’t just dead surfaces, you know.”

Before Us

The line before us is the edge of the back wall (the largest 1 by surface area, the load-bearing wall of the next-door building), and our eyes land on 2 adjacent elements, my dentist’s cabinet and my couch. But it’s something else entirely that leaves us speechless.

The Fa____ of the House of Ush____

On the rightmost part of the large bare wall, and even broaching the perpendicular wall that looks out over the courtyard, are enormous paint blisters that bulge across 3 or 4 square meters, like some horrific disease resulting in 20 cm buboes swelling and threatening to burst with gangrenous filth. As a whole, it’s not unlike those de-compositions by Michel Blazy, an artist in the medium of organic putrefaction, vegetal rot, and germinal exuberance. It’s possible to court disaster and, in a gesture that no gallerist would ever allow, run your finger along this interconnected crazing, these immoderate fungosities, these pimply molderings that warp the wall, flourish like leprosy, even exposing a bit of natural stone beneath the tatters of mural flesh, and find, in the once-damp crevasses, semi-spongy yet dry mounds, lesions, and a putrid sort of eczema, all resulting in the plaster sloughing off the wall. Only a specialist in extreme dermatological disorders, a Huysmans of impetigo, could adequately describe the catastrophe this wall has involuntarily undergone—which insurance companies have baptized with the more sober name of “water damage.”

Copro

I have to complete this near-coprophilic story of coproprietorship as seen by this apartment building’s inhabitants themselves, attesting to the poverty of our imaginations when it comes to our collective home, thanks to the cult of private property, which loves to compartmentalize everything, and loves no less dreaming up all the subsequent legal battles and litigation. It took 5 years for the property management company supposedly in charge of “my” building to figure out the cause of this leprosy assaulting my chief room. Though an acolyte of art galleries and their famous white-cube design, I meekly accepted this mycological ruination of my inner façade, this moist psoriasis that proliferates in slabs. I neither disdain my wall’s illness nor delight in it, as might those aesthetes who would call such a formation “beautiful.” I simply put up with it. But I am far less willing to put up with the sluggish machinery of a profession I disdain, property management, which after so many investigations, missed appointments, shifts of blame, and discussions, suggested these potential causes in succession: (1) some leaks in the courtyard drainpipe that, being attached to this part of the wall, seeped into this nook; (2) the next-door building’s gutters overflowing, which resulted in a lateral leak that landed, by pure chance, precisely on the 3rd floor (my neighbors having mysteriously avoided this fate); (3) some error in the restoration of the inner courtyard … all these hypotheses calling for years of further observation without action, even as the blisters swell to fantastical proportions.

Heterogeneity

I wanted to inject some heterogeneity into modernism. Well, voilà.

Dentist’s Cabinet

To the left of the cataclysm, adjoining the doorframe leading to the office, stands 1 metallic cream-colored piece of furniture, bought at an antique store on the boulevard Germain that’s long since been shuttered. With a height of 130 cm and a width of 90, this ex–dentist’s cabinet is made up of 3 parts: 2 cupboards form its base, while 9 drawers make up its middle portion; the whole is topped by a thick black glass plate, upon which sits 1 20-cm-deep hutch protected by a sliding glass panel. Its dual materials—metal and glass—its whiteness from which 11 black Bakelite handles protrude, its ’60s neoscientific style, both functional and elegant, all conspire to give it prominence in the room. And, moreover, there’s a delicate, enduring, yet barely perceptible odor about it—a touch that speaks of its former life, hinting at the soft, pink antiseptic aroma of dentistry.

Impure Purity

But this Anglo-Swiss object’s hermeticism is kept in check by the many objects that have colonized it, betraying the icy purity of its lines. At the risk of damaging it, I exploit its organizational capacities to the fullest, much as happened with Le Corbusier’s Unités D’habitation, which were refashioned by their inhabitants to suit their tastes and needs, reappropriating the too-straight lines, the too-sharp angles, the too-white whites. Life is theory worn down by practice.

Visible Parts

Literarily speaking, I divide this unit into 2 parts, visible and invisible. At its summit are 3 piles of “current books,” the 1s I’ve just bought from stores, borrowed from libraries, or had lent to me by friends, and which await—sometimes for a long while—their moment under my eye. These hillocks of books, being as they are away from their natural place in the apartment, have the disadvantage of obscuring a 25-cm-high and 50-cm-wide stretch of wall and presenting the least interesting parts of their physiognomy, which is to say, the lower edges of their derrières—all in all, an ominous symptom of my home’s chronic malady, its invasion by books, a steady encroachment I’ve failed to curtail, and such an insistent assault that I know I’ll succumb to it, someday.

Mah-Jongg

Next to these 3 offending columns, I’ve set down a dark-red wooden Chinese box as a diversion; it sports 6 drawers and oval side mirrors and is actually an old mah-jongg set brought back from China after a short trip there in October 2010; I bought it in a flea market in Beijing but have never opened it. Indeed, I rue having acquired this curio, which just takes up space, and which accuses me, in Mandarin, of being a traitor, an idealistic petit bourgeois with exaggerated affection for his interior. That said, mah-jongg is 1 of the most beautiful games I know, and I absolutely adore teaching my friends how to play. But there, that’s the 1st obstacle: I don’t have any friends! Or, to be more truthful (since that last sentence is funny but false), I don’t have any friends who would play mah-jongg with me. In any case, now that I’m in my 40s, my days of playing mah-jongg have passed, and I do see how the motives for such an acquisition might be regressive in intent, since I last played mah-jongg many years ago; by buying this set, perhaps I was hoping to regain something lost forever, now a mere specter: the time when I had time (to play mah-jongg).

That means this real object’s heft is 2fold, since added to its physical weight (600 grams) is the weight of my past. So it takes all the mental strength I have to disencumber this red wooden structure, to free it of the associations bound to it, such as the memory of all the madcap or poetic possibilities held in the game’s logograms, bamboos, and dragons, which delighted me so much at 20 years old that I wrote a short story called “A Game of Mah-Jongg,” which ought to be somewhere in my archives and which retold, if I remember right, the star-crossed fates of various players in a Durassian or Morandian tone. Nobody could deny that mah-jongg is a literary game, but the ultimate proof would be that I picked up this game while in the company of … Catherine Robbe-Grillet!

Cold Owner

The other method for downplaying the presence of an undesired object consists of changing its orientation. I turn the box to its profile, which makes it seem smaller. Thus do I give it my own cold shoulder.

Oh, My Little Window …

Behind the 2 sliding glass panels, I’ve set up all my notebooks, like a small museum display, private yet accessible. The vitrine plays its double role of intimidation and stimulation quite well, provoking attraction at the same time as presenting an obstruction—“objects under glass” having been the inspiration for so many artists, no matter how wholesome or whoresome. If the eroticism of the showcase is so well established, its inherent charm must be in its capacity to intensify as well as reflect our interest, since it’s an object of objects that’s valuable both in itself and in what it offers up for discovery. These museum or peep-show aspects exude such an undeniable aura that I’ve seen people put on their own tiny exhibitions under glass: porcelain families, statuettes, knickknacks all somehow worthy of their devotion. I distinctly remember this 1 touching character, a boy who was certainly old for his age, who had set up 1 of these wood-and-glass structures in the heart of his living room and, in order to ennoble his incredible army of alabaster figurines, had even installed a network of tiny spotlights around them: as soon as he activated a little mechanism, light was cast as much upon his miniature museum as onto his peculiar 19th-century eccentricities. But it’s certainly possible that I’m cut from the same cloth if I take such wretched pleasure in my own “collections.”

Notebooks

My notebooks, set snug together, originally took up only ⅓ of the shelf; to their right was just a big void. In this way I created a spatial image of expectation, implicitly assuming that all the time I would spend writing, all the books to come, would be incarnated by this empty space, like those wild spaces at the edge of civilization waiting for human development. Alas, the persistently unused space wound up irritating me, if not outright infuriating me, and so I watched as this void gradually got filled by other things—1st by a small box of gray candles acting as a notebookend. I only saw the significance of this unintended prop later on: all that paper, filled with my daily notes, leaning against the threat of fire (a strictly symbolic threat, as candles have never burst into flames spontaneously). The idea that my literary apparatus could be set right next to what might destroy it didn’t entirely displease me; and then, who’s to say that those allegorical candles might not, 1 day, be said to correspond to the flames of genius buried within my notebooks?

As for those notebooks, I can’t reveal their contents; not because I have any predilection for keeping secrets (something that couldn’t possibly be more alien to me), but because they’re the source of several of my ongoing or future projects: in 1 of them is the idea prefiguring the text you’re now reading: a jotted-down injunction “to describe my apartment.” In order to give some idea of what they’re like, however, I can classify them for you: there are spiral notebooks on the left, and bound notebooks on the right. The former hark back to an era now long past (much as in the William Sheller song “Spiral Notebook,” a reference that no doubt won’t mean very much to my non-French readers…). I don’t much like those iron spirals, they give me a sense of impending pain—the pain of a leaf being pulled off a tree. The pocket notebooks I’ve used since my spiral days are most useful for setting down my 1st “inspiration” (I don’t like this romantic word), or rather the 1st spurt (I prefer this dynamic word), of an idea to be fully fleshed out. On their covers, white labels bear the year of their vintage, attesting to the care I bestow upon this museum of myself.

Obituary

Some of the notebooks pertain to the obsessions I had in my childhood, such as the mortuary notebook in which I jotted down the names of writers who had died, grouped by age, from 20 years old (Radiguet) to 100 (Fontenelle)—a habit from when I was 25 and was already thinking about myself in historical and posthumous terms. Marking the dead, like a hiker marking the pines he walks past in a forest, was my way of affirming that I was still alive, as a record keeper, and considering myself a potential, if still active, member of the list.

What Do I Know? Everything.

Resting against the Clairefontaine notebooks and the candles is a minuscule portion—39 titles—of the immense Que sais-je? collection. This proximity between my notebooks and the volumes of such a famous educational series can be explained by my concept of Literature, which is to express the totality of my world. Encyclopedism excites me. I own such bestsellers as The Koran (no. 1245) and Elementary Particles (no. 1293), as well as lesser-known works such as Inertial Navigation and Hygiene in Daily Life, which together contribute to a troubling psychical mosaic …

Invisible Glass

The lower part of the cabinet is made up of disappointingly mismatched glass shelves, since 2 of them were broken during my last move. The glazier insisted that it was impossible to reproduce the desired sort of warped glass, akin to the clouded variety found in my bathroom, and it’s just this sort of detail that we might use to gauge the shortcomings of any ideology of authenticity that would condemn the fragile steward of such vitreous beauty to eternally lament the impossibility of its reproduction, not to mention the failure of just such fanatics of standardization to insist on uniform tiles in entryways, uniform windowpanes, and so on. Be that as it may, these supporting shelves are at least invisible.

Peekaboo

“Dental” is actually a useful term for any sort of cabinet, implying, as it does, their 2 contrary functions, revealing and concealing. The upper half bares its teeth; the lower half keeps its lips sealed. If I ever open the 2 doors at the bottom of my cabinet, I immediately want to shut them again, because I’m depressed by the complete disorder they reveal: books piled in haphazard clusters, folders shoved any which way, files about to burst apart. To deal with all this, a set of radical solutions comes to mind: elimination (that is, downgrading the status of everything to trash), donation (but who would want the most recent book by X?), relocation (the grand dream of this entire book), or, finally, occlusion (which is always my ultimate decision). All told, I mainly like to meditate on the iron door’s sleek elegance, and the hopeless morass groaning behind it—it’s like an inverse skeleton, in which a hard surface of bone conceals the agitation of the organs within. A cabinet is a body near to bursting.

Nonbooks

Whatever could justify such dejection? The fact that my cabinets are filled with books that I don’t like at all, and that I don’t want to be part of my library. There are more and more things I don’t like about them too: the space they take up; the weakness that forces me to keep them; the hesitation that keeps me from throwing them out; the doubts I have about the literary status quo; the irreverence, bordering on contempt, they betray toward Literature; the idea that my own books might, in the hands and homes of similar readers, meet the same fate; their seeming ineradicability, since I don’t want to simply throw them out, but I know they’re unsellable, by virtue of being both shopworn and uninteresting; the perverse usefulness they still retain, at least some of them, which keeps me from chucking them because I might page through an old issue of Temps modernes from April 1965, and find a good article on the Livre de Poche series of paperbacks; the ugliness of their disorganized accumulation; and certainly many other reasons too, not least of which is that the books have generally been given, if not outright written, by people I know, and respect, and sometimes even love, and whom I can’t help but think I’m somehow snubbing by ostracizing these gifts that I go on to snub anyway. And now I do understand those old writers who ended their lives surrounded by just a few volumes—the 1s they’ve decided, at the end of an otherwise more tolerant and welcoming existence, are definitive.

All the contradictions inherent in the way in which I fetishize the book-as-object are here on display: after all, if everybody got rid of their books, there wouldn’t be any more writers, because the object that justifies their activity would no longer be supported by anyone. Thus, this shelf of rubbish functions as a hidden counterpoint to my official bookshelves: an underworld of mediocrity, which finds justification as a contrast to my office’s bookshelf rows of excellence, just as honest men are proof of humanity’s range of possibility.

Cowboy/Chiasmus Showdown

This room ain’t big enough for 2 messes, so I’ve decided to put these 4 shelves in a chiasmus: in positions A (top left) and D (bottom right) are the books, while documents and random papers go in positions B (top right) and C (bottom left); if I take 10 paces back, that’ll draw a cross doing its best to make up for a collection that I’m closing shut now. I’m not kicking in the cabinet door like some cowboy would, although I’m using my foot all the same …

On Darkness

Coming back to the surface, there’s real beauty in the black glass sheet at chest height that forms the cabinet’s top surface. More disorder often disgraces this blackness that’s so beautiful—so perfectly riveted at both ends—when allowed to remain uncontaminated. Whenever I return to my apartment, this is where I immediately plop down the following things: my métro pass, my current notebook, my cell phone, my watch, some Kleenex, and, in a yellow ashtray—a gesture I particularly enjoyed, back when I didn’t carry a wallet—whatever small change I’ve accumulated. This act of casting off 1’s possessions was, apparently, characteristic of François Truffaut, who, upon coming home, felt a physical need to empty his pockets: he even filmed this personal gesture and attributed it to 1 of his fictive doubles in a film the hero of which I, in turn, have come to imitate in his imitation of my imitation.

Ashes and Diamonds

Toss that change in the yellow ashtray. My relationship to money is a scorched 1: I spend it without joy, and the cold ashes of the remaining coins give off no pleasing scent.

The Promontory and the Projector

On this ledge there’s also 1 small 10 cm wooden block with a slit in it; I lodge letters, invitations, and other reminders of my exterior life in this crack. Liberated from a Toulouse café where it diligently held menus, it presents me with my present as effectively as a window dresser assiduously updating his display. It’s a small promontory, its lighthouse the silver-plated metal lamp 58 cm to its left boasting a swiveling head and a heavy base but providing scant illumination. I aim its paltry beam at the nearest corner: I project a small light so I can admire what I own.

Minimalism & Publicity

The middle part of the dentist’s cabinet comprises either 3 columns of 3 drawers or 3 rows of 3 drawers each. Each handle, black and gleaming—finely rendered eyebrows, Nike swooshes, minimalist sculptures—unfurls from ivory bedrock.

1st and Last Numbers

How should these drawers be numbered? It doesn’t matter, but I do want to say that numbers 1 and 9 are indisputable: the others change their designations according to the method, whether vertically or horizontally, by column or by row, used to numerate them. Only the 1st and last really count.

Not-So-Secret Compartments

The bottom of each drawer is 1 thick glass plane originally intended to hold the dental practitioner’s blunt instruments. These days, they welcome items ranging from mere stationery to the wholly ambiguous: envelopes, notecards, blank notebooks, future munitions in my arsenal. The fullest 1, in fact, serves as a virtual cemetery of information, both official (restaurants, useful addresses, business cards) and unofficial, as in the case of a simple torn-off slip of paper with a phone number hastily scribbled down, along with a 1st name that’s usually feminine. Their accumulation proves that life, uh, finds a way. The most Ali-Baban drawers contain various odds and ends, such as ink cartridges, foreign coins in a small bag, rubber bands, perfume samples, Indian lip balm, batteries, etc. (this word, strictly speaking, should be verboten). Every so often I like to pretend I’m playing my old childhood game of rifling through the magic drawers of grown-ups, drawers I used to open with a pleasure mixed with curiosity and fear, hoping to find some treasure within. Now that I’m an adult myself, however, I tend to open these drawers fearing nothing but some wasted time.

Coasters

These depths aren’t as deep as they seem: a particular collection of card-stock coasters lingers there. I’d once attempted to assemble a full set, but that collector’s impulse has long since gone. Now I touch these white shapes with yellowed brands stamped on them, and feel nothing so much as a faded longing that briefly shines its light and then disappears almost as quickly as did the vague desire that started all this.

Abolished Baubles

39 coupons, which my Chinese dry cleaner foisted upon me, are also scattered here, ultimately redeemable for a massive porcelain vase (maybe even 2) that I’ll never claim from him. These small squares of pink paper represent a significant economy of space compared to the ugliness of an earthenware pot made in Zhengdong. I’d never let those baubles—which are supposed to reward my textile fidelity, but may not actually exist, for all I know—overwhelm my living room: still, I don’t want to take my business elsewhere, so if they pester me about this, I’ll cash in my chips right before Christmas.

Ash Fire

In number 6 (or 8) I’ve left a package of cigarettes I bought 11 years ago, and in 5 (or 7) a Bic lighter bought 11 months ago. I could have united these 2 accessories in the same drawer, but I wanted to separate them: thus is tobacco addiction staved off by this distancing of its instruments, as if the 1 might die off without the other—maybe this method of conscious “dissociation” actually succeeds in freeing people from their addiction. (If so, maybe I’ll get around to registering the patent someday.) But then why keep this package of Royales, with its coffin-shaped warning message, SMOKING KILLS, when tobacco holds no sway over me? As a souvenir of spring 2002, when, at a loss, I decided to take up smoking for the sake of all the things I’d never done (a wise strategy against melancholy): at the very age when so many people fight to give up this drug, I wanted to try it, and for several days I smoked the few Royales I had at hand, removing them from this package, which now holds just 4 cigarettes. Likewise, along with the idea of smoking itself (which quickly loses its luster), the notion of being able to give a cigarette to fellow smokers intrigued me for its conversational opportunities. This caprice soon passed, without even giving me the least bit of pleasure; all the same, I kept the package of Royales in case someone ever wanted to smoke at my place. The lighter doesn’t seem to hail from any particular era, it’s red and anonymous and allows me to pull off a performance called “The Poor Man’s Serge Gainsbourg,” which I could only explain through some medium that isn’t paper.

Papers

The 9th drawer, on the bottom and all the way to the right, holds more durable things: 1 Banque populaire checkbook, a payment method that, like so many other of my countrymen, I use less and less. Checkbooks haven’t disappeared outright, of course, but they’ve certainly made themselves scarce, content to sit and wait, like very slow-growing trees still hoping, 1 day, to bear fruit. Once modern, they’ve become obsolete without even garnering the sympathy due to obsolete things.

The other “important” item here (even though I don’t really believe in an item’s inherent importance; each 1 is only valuable in terms of my relationship with it) is my gorgeously Bordeaux-red passport. I don’t really have a passion for travel, so it can’t compete with the papers of devoted world travelers, but, then again, the overwhelming variegation 1 finds in the pages of their passports has never made much of an impression on me. There’s only 1 country I’ve ever visited properly, and that’s the apartment I consider my home!

Is the Lounge Passé?

To the right of the dentist’s cabinet, not even a hop, skip, and jump from it (1 20 cm channel separates the 2, to let the space “breathe”), my “lounge” finds its function incarnated in a contemporary couch. For some, lounges are on the way out, owing to the 19th-century lifestyle they presuppose, which is made manifest in the couch itself. Did I buy a modernist model to negate this potential obsolescence? Is the lounge passé? It might be, but when it comes to interior decoration, preferences vary: a given client’s “request” doesn’t mean anything, but rather signals everything and nothing. And, true to that complete nonspecificity, a lounge both implies worldly conversations and can serve to drive people away when they have nothing to say, which is often. But my acquaintances are less like carps than like koi, and I love talking to myself.

1 Couch for 4

My Habitat couch takes up most of the back wall it’s set against. As it’s 206 cm wide and 65 deep, 4 humans can sit on it. I picked it for its restrained style, reminiscent of the ’60s, and I never use it as a bed; in fact, I hate how a portion of the population, overwhelmingly drawn to the prospect of having totally modular homes, considers that prospect a selling point. I want beds to be beds, and couches to be couches. Tautology is the fate of all good furnishings. There’s something honest in an object devoting its entire life to a single task; in contrast, the multipurpose style amounts to nothing more than a simpering flattery of its user. Objects with multiple applications are only seductive at 1st, as when we hear some furniture trade-show salesman insisting that the chair of the future will show the time on its armrest, or tell your weight as you sit down …

To the best of my knowledge, nobody’s slept on my couch save for 1 Italian baby I saw for maybe 10 minutes when I rented out my apartment in the summer of 2006 (€300 for 1 week) while staying at my girlfriend’s place in the 6th arrondissement—an experience I won’t repeat, not because it went poorly (though it’s true that Paris’s city council has hunted down several homeowners supplementing their income with this under-the-table subletting), but because the idea of strangers living in my place, even temporarily, for rental purposes, bothers me.

The Awkwardness of Having Friends Stay Over

Better not to have any guest rooms.

On the Couch of an Artist or Snob …

This couch’s purity of form, thanks to its faux wood structure and the charcoal gray of its cloth, as well as its black metal base, looks good against this white wall. And it doesn’t bother me that this couch-cum-bench is only a replica of a more famous model; on the contrary, I’d be reluctant to scorn the intertwined qualities of comfort and design on such a meager basis. As such, this couch is, if you will, neoclassical, or neomodern, both of which are absolutely intolerable in literature or in art; when it comes to furniture, though, I’m much less interested in “classification,” in “labels,” than I might be in those other spheres. There was no museum here before I decided to assemble this 1. And in the same vein, the couch of a snob has to assert its values upon its uncaring surroundings, whereas an artist’s couch is self-sufficient—for better or for worse. (And the artist shouldn’t be confused with the aesthete. Their respective apartments are proof thereof.)

Brief Dialogue Between These 2 on the Couch

“Real artists care about their art, not about their apartments.”

“Real artists inject their artistry into everything, even their homes.”

“No, because to have art in everything would mean the end of art. Nothing could be differentiated.”

“My painting isn’t negated by being hung on a painted or wallpapered wall!”

“It’s diminished, though.”

“Pass me a Coke.”

“In a Lalique glass?”

Purity Furnished

The couch’s perfect lines suit its immaculately dark cover, which has never—knock on wood, as they say, and specifically the wood of this armrest—suffered any stain or blemish. And on that front I recognize a concrete component of my personality: conscientiousness, being far more respectful of possessions than are many members of the human population. It’s the antique collector’s fantasy to keep an object intact indefinitely. My couch will certainly survive its owner. Its purity is, all the same, tainted by the presence of the magazines I’ve heaped in piles on its left side (where I never sit), and likewise by the television, which is situated more or less in front of them. These peripheral couch-zones offer up moments of fleeting distraction: casual skimming, inattentive listening. I do indulge from time to time.

The Guests Haven’t Arrived

I invited Walter Benjamin and Paul Scheerbart for aperitifs, but they never came. I also invited Ernst Bloch, but I made a mistake and called his homonym who, even so, didn’t get the invitation. I ended up all alone, like a fool, on the couch sipping from my champagne flute. I thought back on all the parties I’d hosted, and I shut my eyes.

List of Famous People Who Have Visited My Apartment

N.W., J.C.M., J.P.A., D.W., V.M., Q.B., L.G.T., A.O., F.A.-T., E.S., O.S., J.M., P.B., J.B., B.S., T.S., J.P., S.R., E.R., S.B., S.B., A.B., A.B., E.L., B.C., J.C., J.P., J.P., T.C., T.C., M.C., M.C., J.M.C., V.A., J.M., B.C., S.D., J.C.-F., M.F., G.D., J.M.F., L.F., M.-E.F., B.G., L.G., S.G., S.G., C.G., M.G., P.G., N.H., F.C., V.L., L.J., S.M., J.L.J., F.L., F.H., G.L., M.T., F.M., A.L.-R., P.B., A.D., A.T., F.F., S.R., M.B., M.K.

Marxist Illumination

On the floor, a huge, luminous white plastic ball is both decoration and illumination. A cord connects it to an outlet behind the couch, but the light switch on the right when 1 enters the room turns it on and off. The distance between the lamp and its controller is about 3 meters, and they’re not even at the same height: a banal sort of magic that suffices to unite mind and matter. In fact, the ball’s position on the floor corresponds to my preferred approach to illumination, from the bottom up (and, as per my diatribes against ceiling lights, not from the top down). As far as illumination, as in so many other domains, I believe the lowermost things define the uppermost. Marxist illumination is far more effective and noble than aristocratic illumination with its sad hanging chandeliers scattering lifeless light over yellowed rooms on late Sunday afternoons. I love it when light, like joy, rises.

Ball of Nerves

Touching this ball, even when the light is off, is soothing: spherical forms, globes, round objects all create an atmosphere of warmth. Still, nobody would ever want to live in a house-sphere. Circles on a grand scale are unnerving.

Gender Inequality

As I contemplate this ball, it reveals a luminous truth. Interior decoration is design made mundane. Design exists for its own sake, but as decoration establishes its dominion it still can’t erase that unnerving, uncontrollable trace of its triviality. Decoration barely hides the crime of its nature. And as if the gender embedded in these French words were playing out on a human scale, the femininity of la décoration has a seductive hold over its masculine rival, le design: an unwonted, almost sexist, certainly French lust keeps pulling me toward those objects that, in my language, are always feminine—la lampe, la radio, la carafe—to hug them close.

Spatiovoracious

Right in front of the couch’s left side, set on a black plastic Tam Tam stool, is my television, a gift my friends Quentin and Emma Bajac gave me after they purchased a flat-screen. The block jutting out behind these older models is considerable; old technology simply devours space. Sony-branded, gray-colored, square-framed, pockmarked with holes for emitting sound, its screen has, even when turned off, an indefinable pond-bottom color in which are reflected the occasional magazines on the couch 10 centimeters away: thus is the written press reflected in television’s dead screen, a perfect allegory of journalism today.

The years of my childhood were bathed in anti-television iconoclasm, but I switched ideological channels for a time, only to return to the 1 of my youth, when the images I devoured were (as they now are again) of wholly other kinds; it’s unthinkable that I would sit in front of this box, which I barely watch except for sports (soccer/tennis) and TV news (like the fastest-aging part of the population), less to inform myself and more to feed on leftovers: no dish offers such an immediate array of flavors, ranging from horrid to divine, revolting and delighting the palate.

Remote

The TV is now inseparable from the Freebox-brand router and cable box on its right, which is controlled by 1 of the 2 remotes I keep on the TV’s housing, the other being the remote for the TV itself. Remote controls count among those modern objects practically devoid of any special aura, having by now been produced in such large numbers by the industry that their magic is all but gone. When remote controls 1st appeared during my childhood, I remember being mystified by the “magician” who, having hidden his remote, turned his television on and off by snapping his fingers in front of my stupefied eyes.

An Inquiry Concerning Propinquity

What can I do without moving? What is the full range of actions available to me without changing position? On the couch, it’s switching channels while flipping through a magazine; in bed, it’s grabbing a book from the mantel, picking up a pencil behind the lamp, aiming that lamp, drinking from the bottle at the foot of the bed, pulling out the tissue hidden in my pillowcase, tapping on my cell phone; in my bathtub, it’s using some soap or shampoo, adjusting the water with my foot; sitting at my desk, it’s surfing the Internet, with a glass in my hand. Moving around bits and pieces of my home.

Telefairy

From the beginning, television was something out of a fairy tale: for almost all children of my generation, a primordial wonderment radiated from the set. Now it’s been supplanted by the Internet, its presumably unique empire having been proved unexceptional, and I suppose its relative decline contributes to the particular sympathy I feel for this old plastic dinosaur with all its pathetic vainglory, turned off more than on. The television is like an outdated future—obsolete as only a truly backward machine can be—whose posthuman, maybe even postapocalyptic character can be seen in the dust that’s settled on the screen (I almost never “clean” my television). Even its blocky form—modernity was never so angular again—is undeniably dated. So it’s safe to say I’ve foreseen the fate of this idol with feet of clay set upon the round plinth of my lightweight Tam Tam stool (far lighter than the TV itself).

Support

The Freebox cable box rests, physically and consonantly, upon a cardboard box that acts as a low table. This box’s 6 faces are covered with a trompe l’oeil design of piled-up books: this little piece of nonfurniture was a gift from my brother and sister-in-law, and echoes the very real books that furnish my apartment—an ironic allusion to my bibliomania. I accept such things only grudgingly, if they’re an imposition—“beware Greeks bearing gifts,” and all that—but the affection I feel for the aforementioned people made it easier to break with convention on this point (I guess my conventions aren’t very serious). It goes without saying that the place 1 lives in is always going to be shaped to some degree by others, which is why I’m taking the time to point out the provenance of any objects I’ve received as gifts, as well as naming their givers, both out of a partiality for precision and because, after all, intimacy is also extimacy.

The bookish cardboard base and the cable box on top of it serve to connect the 2 dominant medias of our time, literary and audiovisual, which I’ve never dreamed of pitting against each other, unlike certain literary hacks who, at this point, are hardly worth mentioning.

Fetterbox

Honestly, I don’t have any respect for this Freebox device (or for the eponymous company), for the simple reason behind all my primary objections to technology—it’s not straightforward. If I want to watch TV, I now have to perform 3 actions, in stark contrast to the simplicity of old: 1st, I have to wait 10 seconds—during which the time showing on the box’s little screen, in ugly greenish letters, is followed by equally useless, redundant words I never asked to see, like rock-n-roll, video, television, and even network—for the Freebox to start relaying the channels; 2nd, I have to turn on the set; and, for my 3rd gesture, I finally press the button for the desired channel. More than 30 seconds to achieve a result that once took as little time as the miracle of electricity itself … Which is how I’ve missed, thanks to slight miscalculations, various crucial moments: soccer-game kickoffs, for example, or the faces of people in politics or in the end credits—all thanks to a crew for whom the term “sons of bitches” is wholly inadequate, leaving me to nominate the term “computer scientists” as our insult of preference. Because this doesn’t even take into account the numerous times the whole system has completely crashed, whereupon my best-laid plans for a measly night in, watching TV, filling a prime-time slot in my equally measly existence, have gone awry.

Strings Attached

This highfalutin box that purports to be free is actually chained by a quagmire of wires leading to a power strip, itself connected to another power strip plugged into a wall outlet that somehow still works despite the rampant humidity in this corner of the room. I almost never venture over there. I do like prowling around my apartment, but I steer clear of danger zones like this, where the cords are clearly a trap.

Networks

And here is where I happen upon my 1st spiderweb, a real 1 woven among the electrical twists and turns. I leave it alone, with its small 8-legged occupant untouched.

Making Some Noise

Standing right behind the television is the 60-cm-wide span of the wall separating the 2 living room windows. Bathing the room in strong light despite taking up only a small part of the wall, both face the inner courtyard, just like the 1 in the hallway-entryway, which makes it possible, when there are 2 people here, to talk from 1 window to the other without occupying the same room, thanks to the properties of all right angles. Conversations held in this manner are playful but short-lived: the fact is that the entire courtyard is open not only to light but to sound, whether at 4th-floor-Chinese-neighbor volumes—the 2 of them speaking at such a different acoustic level from myself that they always seem to be yelling at each other—or at the virtually ultrasonic volumes utilized by the mysterious character on the 2nd floor whose hysterical outbursts regularly erupt and must surely overwhelm the poor management consultant on the other end of the telephone line with screeching about how such and such a business’s profits aren’t even coming close to meeting expectations.

The Bad Glazier

These ancient 6-pane windows with espagnolettes—which the man installing my double panes, using the old-fashioned argument that things should be kept new-fashioned, tried in vain to convince me to replace—boast blemishes in each pane. When I pointed this fact out to him, hinting that this might be a problem he’d have to fix, he put a stop to his spiel straightaway, suddenly realizing just how a life with these flaws in the glass was actually a more beautiful 1 for these imperfections; and as I felt the stirrings of regret at having allowed him inside, I hurried him out.

Waiting Area

Both the windows have curtains made of the same white cotton as the 1 in the entryway, and both have an inner sill that serves as a shelf. On the farther-back window, by the couch, I’ve set a 45-cm-high Altuglas lamp with a white lampshade; it gives out a gentle light, and next to it are a diverse collection of catalogs, programs, booklets, brochures, and photo albums that anybody at the left end of the couch could just reach out and take to read in the natural light of the window or the artificial light of the lamp. In short, it’s a “waiting area” that has aspirations toward being a saloon, despite not having most of the requisite trappings: a piano, a cactus, a few little chickadees, and some brandy.

OCD

I lean toward the lamp and twirl its shade so that its seam can’t be seen anymore.

The 2nd Window (or the 1st)

Leaving the couch, and wending my exaggeratedly slow way like a performer making his entrance, I walk past the 2nd window—unless it’s the 1st. This unquestionably pointless distinction isn’t actually all that pointless, since the rearmost window is the 1st for anyone exiting the room, but the 2nd for those entering: to write this book, I take inspiration from Bruce Nauman’s artistic method, which consists of exploring 1’s own space, not in toto, but room by room.

Window Box with Flowers of Evil

This particular window is the 1 the burglar came through to get into the apartment. As such, it’s accursed. Most of the time, its curtains are drawn. An ever-growing number of books practically prevent it from being opened anyway, so it stays closed and generally untouched. In addition to this ridiculous double protection of the books and the locked-shut window, there’s also the window’s exterior wrought-iron bar, to which the burglar, limber as a monkey, secured his rope, and which allowed him to climb up from the 2nd floor, break the lower-left pane of my window, pop open the espagnolette, and enter my apartment. This black bar now holds a box full of flowers that have lost all their innocence (to get rid of the bar entirely would cost €150 [off the books])—after all, it’s demonstrated to me the unlimited ingenuity of evil. Whether we’re arrogant owners or all-terrain thieves, we all take advantage of every possible opening.

Courtyard Spying

The 2nd window doesn’t show exactly the same part of the courtyard as the 1st: it offers a direct view into a bathroom belonging not to a buxom neighbor but to a sexagenarian. At the risk of belaboring truisms, I find myself abstractly philosophizing that the view offered by a given window can’t, of course, anticipate the viewer’s position (much less that of the viewed), and that the various perspectives that can be observed therefrom depend wholly on the viewer’s exact placement. In this concrete instance, the most diagonal of his possible perspectives goes all the way into my bedroom, such that when I’m lying in bed I can spy on 1 transom on the 4th floor, from which I myself, in turn, surely must be the object of a corresponding surveillance.

Telephone 1

The main function of this waiting area is the “telephone function.” On this sill, which I’d prefer to be cleaner, I’ve draped 2 small lengths of linen and velvet, leftover cloth from hemming the doorway curtain, as sill covers akin to tablecloths. Corded phone number 1 (the 2nd being in my → OFFICE) rests atop this further demonstration of my textile fetishism—an admittedly “grandmotherly” touch meant to … muffle conversations? This bottom-of-the-barrel Doro-brand phone and handset is just as touching and repulsive as its own coiled cord writhing in empty space, but I use it so often that I’ve just accepted that I have to keep its long wire plugged into the phone jack (← ENTRYWAY). It’s a bit too long for the width of the sill, so whenever I use this phone, I have to hold the base in place with my fingertips as I talk, to keep it from falling, especially when things get animated. If the conversation drags on, I usually sit down in the armchair; generally, though, I stay on my feet, there by the window, where it’s more common for me to be seen talking on the phone than looking out at the courtyard myself: I go blind, so to speak, when the voice on the other end of the line takes me far away … as befits the very word telephone.

This device is on my France Telecom line, and I use it to receive calls: I could make them too, but that would cost me €0.58, whereas my Free device, as its determinedly un-French name suggests, grants me all forms of communication free of additional charge. It’s a sign of the times that so few people use landlines anymore; maybe it’s a sign of my age, as well, that so few people call me now at all. I’m a good ways past my childhood, when I spent hours on the phone with my girlfriends or best friends. All this phone really does is magnify a not-entirely-unwarranted loneliness: a slightly sticky dust evinces how little I use this line that costs me €30 each month. Manager/administrators everywhere tell themselves that it’s useless to keep a landline when the dominion of mobile phones is absolute, a fortiori when a 2nd line is installed. Yet this small fee isn’t wholly futile considering the sense of security this landline gives me, not to mention the beautiful, classical, easily memorized 10-digit number indicating exactly where in France I’m located, which sits so nicely in my mind beside the numbers my hyperthymesia links to the people I love—so much more appealing than the monotonous and uninformative Free phone prefix that’s so hideous it actually discourages me from calling anyone who has it.

Such Numbers, Such Letters, Such Drawings

To the left of the phone, almost in a ministerial role, 1 notebook + pencil stand guard, ready for teleprinting, for preempting those little dramas of “Wait! Let me find a pen! A pencil!” A mini-exhibition of phone-call doodles on Post-its interlaced with information jotted down haphazardly (numbers, addresses, digicodes), which cumulatively comprise a paradoxical archive of forgetfulness, especially when the name connected to a given number has been lost. To exorcise my errors, I’ve also set a blue candle here, bought from a Guyanese witch doctor’s dispensary (which, for anyone who cares, is described on page 79 of another of my books, namely Paris, Museum of the 21st Century).

Checking My Box

A phone call: I’ll pick up (it’s so rare). A muffled voice asks me if I live in a military bunker, a 2-star hotel, a show home, a bourgeois pied-à-terre, a medieval castle, a company apartment, a luxury mansion, or a concierge’s quarters. I don’t know which box I should check off because usually, on a Saturday morning, the only calls I get are either from prospective tax consultants or someone trying to sell me new windows.

Decorating or Working?

That’s enough of using the phone as a phone. Now I’m playing with the handset, testing its sturdiness, and then I decide to arrange everything on this sill in a para-artistic way, starting by bisecting the space using the hardy telephone as a divider. Decoration is in my genes: Do I have to remind my inattentive readers that my great-grandfather was a painter of religious objects at Place Sulpice? On this piece of teal cloth, I’ve put together 1 of those little decorative embellishments I happen to adore, in this case a colorful row of small ceramic fruits and vegetables bought at the market in La Garde-Freinet, a town dear to my heart: kitschy but endearing markers of Provence in the form of a lemon, a clove of garlic, an onion, etc., in which all the South of France’s schmaltzy childishness and sensuality is on full display. These tchotchkes, swapped in and out based on the seasons, call to mind Matisse and Dufy and Marquet, those great decorators, bringing an additional sun-kissed touch to an apartment that many people already tend to insist calls to mind both the countryside and the south. So I don’t get tired of receiving the same compliments over and over, I switch out the trinkets for new decorations as often as I can.

Paris Salon

Farther to the left, the eye lands on a gray wire sculpture depicting 2 birds, the material for this having come from the hangers given to me by the dry cleaner to whom I entrust my dirty clothes. The overabundance of these hangers in my armoire (→ BEDROOM) led to these birds’ spontaneous creation, following 1 of those eureka moments common to all the great innovators—as if I were a Brancusi of the 10th arrondissement, or a Giacometti of the interior, or a Tony Cragg of the living room: the path forward was suddenly illuminated, and I was driven to recycle them.

Intending to throw away 1 of these hangers, but struggling to fit it 1st into my wastepaper basket and then into my all-purpose trash can, I started twisting it, infuriated that this piece of trash refused to fit in either container, but marveling nonetheless at the malleability of its metal alloy: the object quickly took shape under my hands, I fashioned it into the base and central column of a mini-sculpture, flattening and bending the hanger’s hook to make the head of a metal duck. I repeated these actions with a 2nd hanger, which I wove through the previous 1, and set the 2 ducks on the sill, 1 within the other, curled together doggy-style. I’m no sort of artist, in any literal sense of the term—I don’t know how to make or manufacture anything—but thanks to this serendipity (← ENTRYWAY), I was proud to have channeled my rage at 1 object into making an object of another sort, never mind the aesthetic value it might or might not have: considered from an art critic’s point of view, after all, my ducks could even be as lowly a creation as 1 of those artisanal-decorative artifacts found at every stall in folk markets, or at the feet of street peddlers in every major city. But I don’t care, my wire-hanger doggy-style ducks bring me a simple, pure joy more than worthy of their (temporary) display. Every time I look at them, so nicely put together, I debate whether I’ve merely decorated my home or whether I can say I’ve now done some serious artistic work. As I’ve been unable to decide on an answer, I pick up the phone and pretend to punch in a random string of numbers in order to ask the opinion of the 1st person I reach.

Colonel Mustard’s Armchair

If, worn out by our slow, meticulous progress, the reader of this book wanted to take a brief pause, he or she could find repose in the armchair placed in front of the window farther from the couch and closer to the entryway, almost jammed up against the radiator; on its right, the corner of the Freebox device also serves as a short coffee table. This low-slung armchair, its 2 back feet curved and its 2 front feet straight but twisted, exudes an impression of comfort and stability thanks to its heavy volume, its depth, and its plush armrests curving around the seat. Covered with mustard-yellow velvet, it evokes the identically named character in that game whose board reproduces the layout of a house …

Clue

Colonel Mustard, in the lounge, with the revolver.

Furniture Sculpture

Living room furniture is the only kind that might explicitly serve as sculpture; whereas most other furniture is stuck along the wainscoting, there’s some space for play behind these, between their backs and the wall with the windows. Indeed, the contrast between the solidity of these objects and the openness of all that could be done with and around them invalidates some of the stasis implicit in the very concept of “furnishing.” Consequently, whenever I walk around 1 of these pieces of furniture, I move it a few centimeters this way or that, much as the Renaissance-era owners of trunks and chests (cassoni) hid the erotic scenes painted on their backs by pushing them against the walls, hoodwinking their visitors.

Labiche Communism

I asked for this stereotypically bourgeois armchair as a present for my 20th birthday, a detail that still embarrasses me. I’m ashamed even to set it down in writing, since the idea of associating “the best time of life” with a squat armchair seems somewhat sinister, despite the chair’s quirkiness, and somewhat overbearing, despite the chair’s coziness, as if I were preparing for a future as a Labiche character. And would you believe me if I told you that the person who did lob precisely this same caustic remark at me 25 years ago was himself the descendant of Eugène Labiche? Probably not, but you’d be wrong. (Céline’s already denounced “Labiche communism,” which is to say a standard-issue attachment to standard-issue household comforts, to the ownership of identical mass-produced goods, populating all French interiors.) Anyway, whether or not this admission impugns my character, it’s true that I appreciate my armchair with all the amiability of a petit-bourgeois gentleman pondering some brilliant crime while sipping a very nice whiskey. The fact that it’s survived so many years, in contrast to nearly all my other furniture, is quite moving to me, especially considering that not even its seller has had such good fortune: an antiques dealer in Le Marais back in the ’80s who no longer himself surveys the decrepit rue Vieille-du-Temple where his store still stands. I do like to repose in this armchair from time to time; when I’ve “got company,” though, I leave it for some distinguished guest. As I settle myself comfortably into Mustard, a tagline from the series Alfred Hitchcock Presents pops into my head, something like: “Sitting back in a nice armchair? Got the footrest up? Now get ready to enjoy…”

Romany Art

Sometimes I use this armchair as a temporary coatrack. And in winter I use its back, facing the radiator, to dry my clothes faster; having thus turned my living room into a wilderness, I then turn myself into a stereotypical Gypsy, and in my fantasy I’m renting a luxury vacation home so that I can ruin it completely: do some barbecuing in the bedroom, clean and dirty clothes flung everywhere, tools lying haphazardly, food in heaps, all the TVs turned on, car parked dangling off the edge of the swimming pool, and so on. What a delight to wreck a house like this, a hotel room, a villa triste …

Meat on the Balcony

Sitting comfortably in the armchair and reading, in a position where ¾ of my back is facing the window, my mind carried away by fiction, my body stuck in fact, I suddenly sense, behind me—enough to distract me from this swashbuckling adventure novel—the presence of something that shouldn’t be there. I turn my head and, stunned, jump up at once. The top of the window has been engulfed by … meat!

Before running up to the 4th floor for some explanation, I examine these long strips of dark-red flesh hanging in the air from a plastic hanger. Chinese pork or poultry held in place by tiny clothespins. A nightmare from above.

Inalienable Object No. 7

Just behind this armchair, anchored beneath the right-hand window, is the 1st of 3 electric wall-mounted radiators that I “own”: the largest 1 (60 cm × 44 cm), commensurate with the room’s size. This kind of device is a blemish on the reputation of any good bourgeois apartment dweller, for whom heating, as a criterion, is paramount, and therefore most legitimately incarnated in the form of heating known as central. A warm home is a good home: as I was 1st about to start arranging all my furniture, an architect friend of mine reminded me of this aphorism—1 that tends, if such work is begun in spring or summer, to be forgotten. The wisdom pronounced by men whose areas of expertise we know nothing about becomes like poetry. But it wasn’t due to a lack of foresight that I opted for electric radiators.

Charmless, Aimless

My electric radiator is disappointingly charmless. I look at it frequently, giving it another chance; on its best days it seems like a sort of infrasculpture, on its worst it’s simply itself, not even offering the pleasure afforded by a 3-dimensional wood-burning stove or a portable radiator on wheels, which can at least be observed from every side. Because of its relative efficiency, I simply judge it in terms of its function. If, feeling cold, I look to it for the heat I don’t have, I have to concede that it works: that, as with any heating device, immediate results are their most reassuring quality, but in this case, its sphere of influence doesn’t extend past a few meters. In winter, or “Novembapril,” I often spend stretches of time standing right in front of it, feeling the heat permeating my clothes from back to front, rubbing my hands, or dreamily drinking a cup of tea. There, I am observed by a chilly impersonality, calm, its gaze empty and aimless as its warmth radiates into my idle form, and soon I’m nothing but a mindless body, made torpid by the heat—a robot that has become 1 with this living room. Then the convection galvanizes me, and having been fortified with a healthy dose of heat, I can go.

Light Show

On the most dreadful winter nights, to better engage the enemy, I’ve come up with a thorough plan for mobilizing all the forces at my disposal: activating every heater switch in the entryway, and while their power builds, turning on my oven as well as its 4 stovetop burners, plugging in the teakettle, lighting my candle (→ infra), and flipping both living room light switches at once, so that its every inch is alight. A light show, an absolute spectacle, in which everything comes together to make the place blaze with luminous heat!

Getting Up from the Armchair …

Getting up from the armchair, where I’ve lingered for too long, I take several steps over the floorboards, which I’ve varnished attentively. This honeyed plain stretches through every room in my apartment—flowing into my bedroom as well as my office as a contrast to the white walls. The ensemble confers a perhaps uncritical but nonetheless profound sense of belonging to the austere fellowship of Parisians who prefer to strip away all deception. I see my communal condition reflected in the gleaming varnish of this glorious, persuasive parquet. I congratulate myself on having freed it from the immoral prison of linoleum imposed by its previous owner—a man of a very different social position from myself, who apparently lived in a hovel!

Image Found in the Lino

Pulling up the linoleum revealed a treasure: a color photo showing a man in swimming trunks, posed on a platform, during a summer performance at some ’70s-era Club Med in front of an audience of cheering women dressed in long tunics, among whom I immediately recognized, beyond a shadow of a doubt, my landlady, only 20 years younger—the photo an exact contemporary of the linoleum.

Banalities

If, as Poe insists, “a carpet is the soul of the apartment,” then my apartment has 0 soul. I’m well satisfied by the bare planarity of my floor, and I don’t want to add a 2nd layer to it with a carpet that would subsequently accumulate enough dust to constitute a 3rd. If I had to put in a carpet, I’d choose 1 with a design resembling dust … But whereas my white walls positively revel in their blankness and require no art to glorify them—notwithstanding the plaudits this wordsmith is now providing for you—my floorboards are so basic and banal that they welcome every possible banality by way of description: “home sweet home,” “tonal harmony,” “cheap bourgeois junk” …

The Corsair’s Cabinet

Now I’m nearing the wall 3 meters in front of the-armchair-from-my-20th, close to touching what is without question the most beautiful piece of furniture I own, so beautiful it surely must have caught my visitor’s eye upon pushing aside the linen curtain on the page he or she entered the living room. In fact, set in the middle of the wall separating the 2 entrances—to my bedroom on the left and to my office on the right—it’s front and center, intentionally set in a place of honor. This dark-brown wood piece of furniture on 4 sturdy legs, 160 cm high and 77 cm wide, is from the 16th century. It belonged to my father, who gave it to me. Person-size, it serves as a cabinet and as a set of shelves—in short, a repository standing a few centimeters off the ground. The upper half houses a vault sealed by 1 latched door; below are 2 23-cm-deep shelves; last comes the empty space between the 2 supports forming its base, revealing the floor between and beneath its feet. Its rough-hewn look defies my living room’s arbitrary modernity, offering a determined antithesis. Its murky, veined wood calls to mind a ship; I call this my “corsair’s” cabinet; I’ve been around it all my life, as it was a part of the apartment I lived in during my childhood in Auteuil—a place I’ve never seen again, in contrast to Lars von Trier, who, as you may know, bought his childhood home (an endeavor that in my case would be both difficult—considering that prices per square meter have multiplied by 200 since 1965—and psychologically reckless). Carrying its past life along with it, the “Corsair” imbued this space with a new splendor. I’d happily recount the complete history of all its owners from the 16th century onward, but since I don’t know all the facts, I guess the only way I could call the history “complete” would be if I filled things out with quite a bit of fiction …

It charms me to think that my cabinet existed alongside Rabelais or Jean Bart; a stranger to more refined eras, such as that of Louis XVI, whose style leaves me cold, it harks back to epochs that better suit my own idea of culture, vibrant 1s such as the Renaissance, which it celebrates in full measure. This piece of furniture is a metonym for my father, and I associate it with him not only because it stood in his office when I was a child but also because it emanates the same sort of compactness, of virile charm. Even though there’s no question that the cabinet is the centerpiece of my apartment, its aesthetic qualities have hardly condemned it to a merely decorative function: its uppermost section, shut, safeguarded by a small hatch reminiscent of a lip-height confessional, serves to hold my various liquors and liqueurs, just as it did (or so I’m told) for its previous owners. A warm woody scent, as if the cabinet were perspiring alcohol, seeps out every time I undo the latch that protects its contents. Next to some bottles of rum or Ricard or wine, my eye lands on a cocktail shaker, some napkins, some herbal teas, or some candy reinforcing the “secret stash” aspect of this unit that I imagine a priest or a pirate might have used to hide a ciborium, or some money, or a firearm. As for my father, he used it to hide away the Browning gun that so fascinated me when I was a child and, being both accursed and esteemed, anointed him with an aura of holiness, his life with an overtone of intensity—and what could be more important than the intensity of life?

Some years later, a woman I was in love with came to my place. She was as struck by the cabinet’s mysterious beauty as I was by her own, and she asked me what was behind its door, whereupon I let her see. Opening Pandora’s box, revealing Pulcinella’s secret, namely the secret that there is no secret (as in Henry James’s novels, in which characters wait entire lifetimes for revelations too irrelevant to ever come to light), I immediately regretted having obeyed her wishes, as if in doing so I had shattered the very image of desire, symbolized so well by the image of a box being opened that Titian himself depicted it in the middle ground of his Venus of Urbino, now at Florence—I never saw the woman again.

Its 2 Shelves

The cabinet’s 2 shelves hold books that, because they aren’t on any coffee table, I wouldn’t consider coffee table books. It’s rather difficult to fit them in there, especially the biggest 1s; I have to do it like those movers able to angle furniture so carefully they can maneuver it through narrow porticoes or into an elevator cage—namely, in my case, pulling out X volumes in order to add in just 1. As such, I very rarely touch these cloistered possessions that enjoy such extraterritoriality in their distance from my official bookshelves that they don’t blink twice at the sound of language far saltier than a librarian’s stern “Shush!” Open to all onlookers, instantly accessible, these exhibit catalogs, magazine issues, curiosa, and other colorful printed matter (whose numbers I keep to an absolute minimum) have been brought together here in a wooden structure that surrounds them absolutely, completely, superbly. Which is not to say that there aren’t several actual books here that are quite dear to me, mostly on the upper shelf, though these sit alongside other books that inspire utter indifference, all in a disordered order whose chaos adds some spice to my pirate library, in accordance with its coarse and barbaric container: François Truffaut’s complete correspondence, a present for my 19th birthday, the same year he died; the catalog of Le Grand Jeu, Surrealism’s little-known rival group, the book that sparked my triple attachment to avant-garde movements, serious games, and 2nd-stringers; a collection of American objectivist poetry, which completely put me off of the French neolyricism of René Char and Saint-John Perse; various issues of Trafic, L’Infini, Trouble, Lignes, Poétique, and La Revue littéraire; and an orphaned middle volume of Le Robert historique (F–PR), as lonely as a blank alexandrine. The 2nd shelf parallels its sister: 8 issues (out of 12) of Perpendiculaire magazine appear alongside 2 issues of the Revue de littérature générale. Other scattered copies of Poétique, the NRF, and Fig complete this incompleteness peculiar to magazines, in which we must resign ourselves to browse at random, content to find, I don’t know, an article telling us that the boatloads of cataphoric pronouns in La Duchesse de Langeais are matched only by something wholly unconnected, like the number of Peruvian pop stars. Then there are the aforementioned exhibit catalogs, which I hardly ever touch: some on the American artist Shirley Jaffe, whose work is vivid and colorful; 1 titled 72 that offers up some “artists’ projects” even as the climacteric number “72” exerts a particular effect on me; it harks back to the year when I attained “the age of reason,” the year of my father’s downfall and my parents’ separation (I love when an event completely extrinsic to a book’s contents deepens 1’s interest in it retroactively); 1 collection of uncaptioned black-and-white photos by Hans-Peter Feldmann, drawn from various earlier books of his, making up a sort of massive tracking shot across his life; 1 biography of Dominique de Roux, whose fascist proclivities seem not to have hampered his decisive flair; 1 Polyphonix catalog celebrating the festival’s fusion of oral poetry and performance; and 1 Guide de Paris mystérieux, revised edition, given to me by my friend Bruno Gibert—which is odd, because my father kept an identical copy of this book in this same bookcase circa 1975. My own book collection was assembled partly out of a desire to refute my father’s, but there are still some points of convergence. If this bookshelf were a parking garage, and so each shelf a different concrete level, it would take a long, long, long time for all the old cars to drive away and be replaced with brand-new imports.

The Glass Chimes, the Candle Burns, the Aesthete Dies

Occasionally, at the top of this beloved cabinet, a long candle will burn in a glass tube adorned with a cross, which complements several other glass tubes kept down below with pseudo–Louis XIII elegance. The set is overshadowed by a terra-cotta vase decorated with white seahorses in ceramic medallions. Oh, the aesthete in me could just go to heaven!

Built out of Pliz

I clean this masterpiece with our version of Pledge, Pliz. Alas, my can of this concoction must have lost some of its strength, because a small brown mound has built up, nonetheless, by the spines of these books, as if some ghost were eating away at all this from within. Not termites—just the Corsair’s very slow decomposition, forcing me to come to terms with the ephemerality of all things. I’ve always lived in a dream of eternity, a denial of death, which means I like to believe that buildings, houses, furnishings, and artworks are all unchangeable. And so I keep dwelling anxiously on Paul Chemetov’s line: “By the time they’ve paid off their mortgages, their houses won’t be worth anything because they were so shoddily built…”

Lamp at the Foot of the Edifice Feet

By its left foot (which is to say my right) stands 1 60-cm-tall lamp with a round base crowned by an opaque white glass bowl which turns on with the pull of a little cord wired to a low switch. The juxtaposition of a unique piece of furniture with a workaday object is a proven decorative strategy, making for a wonderful effect that shows off each piece at its best. An apartment filled with nothing but unique furnishings would come off as rather loud in its over-refinement, whereas an apartment completely furnished with mass-produced objects would wind up rather eerie. I reject those homogeneous interiors set forward as models by “deco” magazines, which love to lavish their attention on wholly Milanese living rooms or homes filled with strictly ’50s-style furniture; setups that, as fashions change, will seem only trite and tired, while, for my part, it’ll still be the mongrel or faux Charles III articles, the future-folkloristic ornaments that go on catching my attention.

The Clue Game Board

I make my way through my apartment like a piece through a game of Clue, in which the value of each piece (and room/square) can only be deduced from the others. I don’t have any preference between regional pieces of furniture and anonymous pieces of furniture, or between the toilet and the bedroom. The game only progresses through the successive positions I take up. But, nevertheless, the murderer is always with us, peering out from every nook, ready to slash your throat.

Noble Rot

This lamp’s base is wobbly; it sways. The Corsair’s door is cracked down the middle; I can hear la phalle dripping. All my belongings are slowly decaying. I can’t be bothered to care, and in fact there’s some pleasure to be gained from this. A certain insistent tendency toward entropy in indoor life that 1 might call “noble rot.”

Switch Up

10 centimeters above it, the harsh light the lamp aims upward outlines in sharp relief the light switch that controls the office lamp. It illuminates its principle, in homage to what outshines it. On the edge of the square switch plate, I’ve attached a clothing label that hangs in uncertain balance. This bit of black cloth crowns the switch with a significance that escapes me.

Architectural Rhetoric

Walking along the boundary between the living room and the office, it’s impossible to miss the huge square arch that signals this transition: metallic I-beams that support the floor above, put in because of the Dantean consequences of the renovations I had done between October 2001 and January 2002. There used to be a dividing wall here, instead of this opening, closing off a room that its former owner used for storing hairdressing equipment. In order to make myself an office that wouldn’t be separated from my living room, I had this dividing wall torn down, but not before checking with the building’s architect, who went by the name of Tartaglia, and who assured me that I could do so without worry. And yet, as they broke through this dividing wall, the workers I hired realized that the ceiling was about to cave in. I frantically phoned the aforementioned Tartaglia, who called me back 5 days later and suggested that I put up supports right away. Since the damage had already been done, I was then fortunate enough to be graced with 1 of the most extraordinary feats of architectural rhetoric ever delivered by an architect, in this case from the lips of the forenamed Tartaglia, who in his attempt not to lose face after this proof of his incompetence cooked up the ad hoc concept of “half-load-bearing walls,” thereby extricating himself from any liability related to the removal of the obstruction that just 1 week earlier he had declared was irrelevant. In these sorts of buildings, he announced with expert poise, every wall is in fact more or less load-bearing. The endless work delays and accumulating costs were just the price of living here. My square arch hides the evidence of this misadventure in a “temple-entrance” style—and is, indeed, something of a miracle, all in all.

Looking at the floor, you can still see where the wall used to be. It was covered with a combination of slaked lime and gravel that streaked the parquet in spots. In such modest lodgings as these, the inhabitants tend to prefer not 1 large room but its division into smaller spaces that allow their things to be stored away out of sight: my broker told me that in the ’80s, 5 people lived here, which seems unbelievable. The concrete conditions of life have always fascinated me, and I wouldn’t have undertaken to draw up a thorough representation of my interior if there wasn’t, deep within me, the intimate belief that the fact of having is always punished by the mere fact of being.

Lighting Out for the Territory

Now we’re back by the left side of the dentist’s cabinet, which is separated by a narrow 22-cm-wide valley from the right side of the square arch. I haven’t wedged this cabinet firmly against the artificial pillar, in order to avoid the impression of overcrowding. On the floor, an electrical outlet powers the spherical ambiance lamp described previously. I’m practically at the territory between the living room and the office.

Continuum

An apartment is a series of walls with doors and a floor that leads to rooms with windows reflecting back the cabinets and cupboards that contain your things.

Swordsticks

Between the pillar and the left side of the dentist’s cabinet, a black cane leans on the diagonal. This Moroccan cane with sculpted handle has a band that unscrews to reveal its sword, which is pointy but not especially sharp, and the use of which is forbidden in French cities per the law of April 18, 1939, regarding knives and bladed weapons. For this reason I almost never carry this blade, save in mitigating circumstances, such as on March 24, 2012, at the Centre Pompidou, when I stood in front of an attentive audience and sliced apart books written by various enemies of mine.

The Doorbell Rings!

The doorbell rings again, but in vain, I’m not going to answer, I can’t let myself become a valet who answers every time the bell is rung. My hands distract me by toying with 2 objects lying on the dentist’s cabinet’s shelf—my watch and my cell phone.

Space-Time Watch

My watch can be counted among these free-range objects that have no definitive, assigned location; it floats around, here and there, resisting every prospect of taking root. This chromed silver Bulova came from the Ouen flea market and, before that, Switzerland, where it was made in the ’60s. I realize that “in the ’60s” is imprecise, but the fact is that I bought this used watch 3 years ago, to have it repaired by a specialist in my neighborhood; it doesn’t bother me at all not to know the exact assembly date for an object acquired to replace my alarmingly precise ’68 Pierre Balmain, which was stolen during the break-in.

No doubt the fact that I was born 3 years before the antiestablishment ’68 protests shaped my sensibility and spurred me to set my watch 3 minutes ahead.

Used

Refusing to buy used items because they might be haunted by their former owners is just as ridiculous as shoving a phoenix back into its ashes.

It’s Not Ringing Anymore

As if simply paying attention to my watch had managed to deactivate the doorbell, I suddenly notice that it’s not ringing anymore. Feeling superstitious, I leave my cell phone alone, which, of course, is also bound to no particular space; I put my faithful Bulova on my wrist, and, taking a few steps back toward the center of the living room, I turn and face my office.