(9 m2)
Boundary of the Establishment
Reinforcing the boundary between the living room and the office, a chair identical to the dining table chairs has been—intentionally—positioned with 2 of its legs on the living room side and 2 on the office side: this literalization of “sitting on the fence” is an homage to every awkward situation in human existence. This boundary-chair’s act of straddling is also a wink to this text’s vacillations between fiction and document; it keeps wavering, keeps refusing to be just an inert chair.
Brinkmanship
We’re on the brink of the office, but still haven’t entered. We contemplate this room facing off against the living room. We admire the view it offers thanks to the window at its far end, which, 3 meters away, overlooking the street, seems far bigger than it actually is. Because of this open border with the living room, the office may be seen as a wing of the latter, a draft of fresh air, of added space. The lack of a door is a positive boon. On the floor, between the boundary-chair’s legs, runs the mark of the erstwhile dividing wall. I could have hidden this scar on the floorboards by replacing it with a slat, but I prefer leaving it visible, like a rift, a dangerous precipice.
Conquest of Space
This office didn’t exist before (my predecessor was a hairdresser). In bringing down the dividing wall, I ran the risk not only of turning what had been sold to me as an authentic Parisian “3-room” apartment into a questionably “2-/3-room” apartment, but also of destroying the prospect of seclusion that a workspace offers or even necessitates. But the benefits of this opening were immeasurable; in adding to the living room’s surface area by connecting that of the office, I brought together 2 spaces already connected by their parquetries’ solidarity. And bringing down this wall was, above all, what allowed the light pouring in both from the street and from the courtyard to flood the entire space. This doubled source of light hits my office wonderfully from both ends. Thanks to a little demolition work, I was able to make this space wholly my own.
Threshold Threshold Threshold
Despite opening directly onto the living room, the office is set back enough that it’s a distinct space. As I’m not the same man when I’m eating and when I’m writing, I have to maintain a separate space in which eating is wholly forbidden: this distinction—in addition to my leaving the traces of the fallen wall in the floor, and building the squared-off portico with its 2 pillars recalling nothing so much as the entrance to a temple—is yet another way of marking out the otherwise intangible boundary between the 2 rooms. Because of this, and even though it’s right there, the office seems to be behind an invisible wall, so much so that I’ve even had people ask my permission to enter this open sanctuary, to cross a threshold that may not exist materially but certainly does symbolically. It’s also notable that, when I’m having guests over, they keep their distance from this sacred space, as if they sense that they would be entering a territory that isn’t meant for them. All the more reason for me to make that clear.
4th Chair
Now we have a better idea of the 4th chair’s role—its 4th dimension, if you will—which is essentially that of demarcation. At a remove from those in the living room—except when I’m having guests, at which point it returns to its original status—it usually holds files and papers that need to be dealt with. Today it’s colonized by a folder full of essays to be graded; tomorrow it’ll be covered with unruly piles of random papers. Seeing it so ill-used, as an extra flat surface that can’t be sat on, is a torment to me; I just really want to free my chair, to unburden it of these papers, to restore it to its original purity of function.
Suspended Motion
But then I stop: Where else could I put this stack of essays? Moving objects from 1 place to another presupposes open spaces that I simply don’t have, except in my daydreams, where I hang each chair by cables from the ceiling … And while I do sometimes make a few middling attempts to rearrange my apartment in hopes of suffering a little less in this 50 m2 space that so constrains my dreams, I always end up having to concede that I don’t have the know-how to turn those fantasies of spatial comfort into reality. I’ll just have to leave such sorcery to those gifted with the requisite ability.
When reality is measured in square meters, the writer in his room must take his revenge with an infinitude of intangible constructions.
Musical Charms
I don’t take any particular interest in this exact chair, which is identical to all the others. On my way past, I decide to replace it with 1 of its clones: it’s no good for this space to always be occupied by the same chair. The game of musical chairs is a perfect metaphor for this egalitarian vision of interchangeable roles—a game I’ve only played once, as a child, though the memory is still clear in my mind: I’d been invited to eat at the home of 2 girls, and ended up musically lost because I’d fallen in love with both at the same time, suddenly unable to decide between Delphine and Léa, between 1 seat and the other.
Erotic Chair
As I walk up to the chair to grab it, I notice that my gut is at the exact height of the large circular opening in its back: this horizontal gap calls out to me, and I find myself with an erection. I simulate sex with the chair, gripping it with my 2 hands as I thrust into it, looking over the chair’s 4 legs, its alluring aperture, its warmth, its fleshy hue that transcends the wood out of which it was carved. I could pick it up, put it in various positions: even considering that chair is the French word for flesh, this chair’s eroticism still catches me by surprise; I plop my ass squarely upon it. Didn’t Saverio Lucariello, in an extraordinary video, once try to seduce a chair by shimmying around it to disco tunes?
Effaceable Trace
Just above the folder on the chair, along the pillar of the temple arch, are some brownish traces of friction. I’ve taken great pains never to lean the chair against this support, but to no avail, the furniture’s traces seep into the space all the same. Modernity’s white interiors are always being contested by life—filthy, sweaty life. Whiteness, that vast beautiful deception, practically begs to be blemished. My 1st, housekeeperly instinct is to cringe at the sight of this blemish and then get to work erasing the trace as best as I can—which only ends up making things worse. I’m still torn between the purity of modernity and the crimes it inevitably invites: stains and cracks, scratches and marks. Who wouldn’t love never to leave a trace? Even the glass house Paul Scheerbart dreamed up as an antidote to the bourgeois home leaves traces behind. I can’t hide what I am: my interior is an autobiography in glass that’s been dirtied by an entire archive’s worth of particles, signs, and lines, each 1 betraying my hopes of purity. It would take a true criminal to efface the traces a bourgeois-artist, a decorator-writer, had carved into this space.
Where to Begin?
Which should I introduce 1st, the flat-topped piece of furniture that gives this room its function or the enormous fortification full of books that fills our view and turns this office into more of a library? The product or the process? That which furnishes or that which is furnished? To sidestep my neurotic hesitations, I might instead sing the praises of the white frieze hiding the electrical wires up above, or maybe a paper clip or some bit of grit stuck in the crevices between the floorboards, but no, the aforementioned masses still dominate this space: directly ahead, my desk calls to me like the Homeric Sirens; while to my right, my bookshelves unfurl their tendrils to ensnare me and draw me into their world.
I’m disoriented enough that I can’t take a step in any direction. The sheer scope of my task has stopped me dead. In front of the threshold where I set down the 79 cm × 79 cm portable card table that currently holds my computer, I am overwhelmed by vertigo. The mind reels.
Rolling Dice
To solve this dilemma, I decide to roll dice to pick the 1st object I’ll describe: the desk if I roll 1, 2, or 3; the bookshelves if 4, 5, or 6. But where can I find a die? I know there’s 1 around here, a gift from Julien Prévieux, an artist who loves playing tricks of all sorts: it’s a perfect sphere! But I’m positive I’ve got a normal 6-sided die somewhere too; I vaguely remember playing a game of 421 here at some point, maybe I left the die in some forgotten corner of the kitchen? The wine case full of cleaning products, yes, maybe …
He Gives Up, But …
He keeps rummaging around but can’t find the die in question because he’s mixed up this kitchen with another 1 in 1 of his former homes. Then he realizes that every room in his apartment that he had presumed to be autonomous and solidly separated by walls is in fact always already haunted by its brethren of earlier days, that this kitchen blurs with all other kitchens, this bedroom with all other bedrooms, and this living room with now-dead living rooms—that his apartment contains all the apartments he’s ever known, that the entryways he’s entered have only served to multiply the times and spaces he had always presumed to be divided by his seclusion. Behind these white walls he sees other white walls in succession, covered with burlap or wallpaper from his childhood; his nicely waxed floors lead him to even more nicely waxed floors, which lead him like a surveyor to all the houses he’s ever known. How many apartments are hidden behind this 1?
Voices in Both Ears
He spent his 1st months at 1 rue de Lille: he remembers being a baby and hearing those thin walls exhaling the complaints of Jacques Lacan’s analysands, as well as the master’s replies, since his practice was at number 5.
From then until he was 15, he was able to walk the halls of a 14-room apartment on rue Mirabeau—a spatial experience never to be repeated—then, from 16 to 23, he resided at 5 rue de Quatrefages, where Georges Perec once resided, and where his voice still echoed. Then, after a stint in a cave on the rue de Paradis, he came back to the rue de Quatrefages, albeit to number 10, where he nonetheless heard again the voice of the author of Things. He then moved to rue Saint-Maur, next to the former women’s prison at La Petite Roquette, where his great-grandmother was briefly imprisoned; then, on September 11, 2001, as the 21st century was so rudely ushered in, he landed where we are now.
Parisian Numerology
So, in order: Paris arrondissements 7, 16, 5, 10, 5, 11, and 10, which adds up to 64, divided by 7 = 9, the next arrondissement I’ll live in? And maybe, since the French word for new, neuf, is also the way to spell out the number 9, my new arrondissement will be a clean break from all the old 1s.
Literal
But enough of these mathematical flights of fancy. I’ll be literal now: the piece of furniture that gives this room its purpose comes 1st. Solid like a bull, the weight of his desk drags an artist down to the level of an employee, a bureaucrat, a paper pusher … And yet, how could anyone try to jettison the very thing that gets a writer writing? A desk jockey is nothing without his desk; players play, assassins assassinate, writers write. The Romantic poets never needed any desks; I, on the other hand, have made this the site of production.
Bureaucracy
I work at a massive and mass-produced desk made out of oak, the kind that used to be de rigueur for provincial government offices. This piece of furniture—which isn’t in Louis XIII style or Empire style or Art Deco, but simply “Bureaucratic” style—has such a vast work area (137 cm × 77 cm) that I could lie down on it, stands at a height of 77 cm, has 4 drawers on each side and 1 center drawer at torso level, and can be fully disassembled. A deep cavity where I can stretch out my legs and set them against the desk’s back panel. This desk, both brutish and warm, beautiful and practical, has an entirely unpretentious presence; it commands me to work (nothing is more childish than a small desk). I bought it eons ago for ₣1,500 at a long-since-forgotten furniture store on the street my maternal grandmother lived on. However, though I count it among my most indispensable pieces of furniture, in the sense that it enables the primary activity of my existence, I’m not as attached to it as some might think, and I’ve occasionally considered selling it in order to get a more modern version, the only problem being that I still haven’t found the ideal replacement. I’d love to betray my desk—and it doesn’t suspect a thing. On top of this faithful friend many equally faithful pieces of paper keep it anchored in my office.
By My Green Candle
To the right is 1 green glass lamp, shaped like a mushroom and shining a weak, bifocal light (25 watts), with 1 bulb in its shade and the other ensconced in its translucent base: when it’s turned on, all the green glass gleams. It’s fragile, and I worry that I’ll never manage to break it, because the only objects that I tend to shatter are the 1s that I worry I’ll shatter, thanks to a sort of logic that amounts to a blindly self-fulfilling prophecy. This 40-cm-tall lamp did once suffer some damage due to my complete imp(r)udence, but I managed to find a replacement for the original cone-shaped base; if the same thing happened today, however, I’d be completely out of luck. The green light the lamp gives me is more agreeable in principle than in reality, a discrepancy that annoys me by reminding me of Théophile Gautier’s horrid theories. But when I acquired it more than 20 years ago, my decoraïveté was precisely what drew me toward this cloven object.
A 2nd green glass object echoes this lamp, a translucent square paperweight that was bequeathed to me by my friend Laurent Goumarre, and I take heart in its luminous density as well as in its weight; I think of it as a lucky charm, just like everything else my friends give me. I keep this object around less for practical use and more for its mere presence, but I do now grab a sheet of white A4 paper and slide it underneath. Bringing together this white and this green is enough to make me happy, and I stop worrying about specifics, about whether the paper is under the weight or the weight on the paper.
Just a Bit Farther to the Left …
About 10 centimeters to the left, a metal cup holds a dense thicket of pens, scissors, pencils, markers, and other points, including a thin silvery letter opener reminiscent of a Shakespearean dagger, which I use to open my mail (except when I’m in a rage and tear up every piece of junk mail with my hands). If it’s a bill, I aim the letter opener at my heart and declaim 2 or 3 choice lines from the Bard: “On, lusty gentlemen…” As for the writing implements, I ask nothing of them save that they work. And I can think of nothing more delightful than grabbing a thoroughly used-up pen and throwing it right in the trash.
3 Black Fountains
My preferred pen is a simple Parker fountain pen, the Jotter model (€12), 12 cm long, divided into 2 equal and evenly balanced sections and thereby lending itself to an equally equilibrated sort of writing. The downward-pointing arrow clip on its cap lets me keep it in the inner pocket of my jacket. I hate having to hunt for my implement and I’m terrified of losing it, and so I have 3 versions at hand (red, black, silver): all the same, I spend quite a bit of time misplacing and hunting for them. The Jotter has been discontinued; I stop into every stationery store I see in hopes of finding the last 1s still in circulation.
Modified Pen (Courtesy of Anne Bonnin)
The blue ballpoint with a red cap.
Sinistral Lamp
I’m hemmed in by a 2nd lamp on my left, the counterpart to the lamp on the right: besieged on both sides. This heavy Fase lamp from the ’50s, pleasingly ocher, has a metal base that supports a huge curved piece of wood (which serves as a counterweight) that unfurls 3 parallel chrome stems at the end of which blossoms the single, overhanging hexagonal head. This lamp, which inclines toward the horizontal, and which produces a tight yet respectable circle of light, is connected to the outlet by a thick white cord; it’s lit with a push button embedded in its base. This push-button switch is a beautifully simple design decision: there’s no ambiguity at all between on and off.
Resistant Reality
I trip over this cord that likes to coil up and get in my way; I crouch down to pull—actually, yank—its firm male head out of the socket: there’s no safe way to open the door to the bedroom, otherwise, because the cord gets wedged in the groove … and yet there’s no other way to arrange things: I have to work with reality, pure and simple.
Telephone 2
My 2nd landline is within reach of both my left (princely) and right (pauperly) hands. In contrast to the 1 in the living room, this Alcatel is useful for making calls. Part and parcel of a Free telecom package, its sound quality is average. Like millions of my fellow citizens, I surrendered in the face of all the purported savings Free offered, being able to call a certain number of numbers (but not all) for “free” as part of the monthly €35 rate that’s turned telecom CEOs into multimillionaires by a diabolic extension of the principle of property applied to time: every second, in the world we live in, is now accounted for—which is why I now compose far fewer Dial-A-Poems than I used to.
Assistive Device
I picked out a phone with oversize buttons in a store for the blind because nothing used to bug me more than those old rotary dials made for fairies’ or children’s fingers and which only multiplied the likelihood of my misdialing. Why should skinny fingers be a prerequisite for accuracy? Why should impatience impede our pianistic virtuosity? My phone’s 9 buttons are 3 cm wide, and the only patience required in using them is during the time it takes to move my fingers from 1 immense button to the next. The safety and quality of various devices has become increasingly the prerogative of the infirm; able-bodied people have the right only to junk: as such, I think, it’s a case where society has given all the more consideration to the downtrodden so as to be better able to forgive itself for its total indifference to the well-being of the majority. Take my advice: buy your appliances at stores for the elderly and disabled.
Regal Apple
The king of my office, upon which I’m writing these lines, is my Apple iBook G4 notebook computer, bought on credit for €1,500 (3 installments). While I have no great passion for computers, and care even less for those who build their careers around the sale and repair of these devices, it is nonetheless necessary—with regard to the instrument upon which I do my daily work—to temper my technophobic temperament. When I acquired this 32 cm × 23 cm apparatus in November 2005 (which is to say, in the language of computer technicians, prehistory), it was the ne plus ultra. I’ve always been faithful to Apple, just like the majority of “intellectuals,” and I do take some pleasure in the fact that its share of the worldwide computer market is distinctly in the minority. While the PC signifies the world of alienated labor, Apple, with its flat form and its white lacquered-plastic housing, is the apple of every nonconformist’s eye—the global icon of a bitten apple signposts the sort of home office where inventiveness is truly possible. Actually, I reject this notion of “inventiveness,” since it’s so ludicrously contemporary and refuted by every real artist, but the fact is that the computer, that antiromantic appliance, puts a new spin on the myth of a perfect tool, of a divine creator. Steve Jobs’s death left me wholly cold; my desire for technology is that it be authorless, that it negate all biography. My ideal would be for men of science to disappear behind their own inventions.
Curved Angle
Sympathetic forms
Have rounded corners.
Authoritative forms, right.
Center
However portable and transportable my computer may be, it still spends the vast majority of its time at home. I only export it on (working) vacations. Contrary to its design, I treat this object as an immobile piece of furniture: it holds court over the office. I’ve come to realize that writing happens only at the center: it’s a centered, central activity that necessitates 2 equally sized spaces on each side. All the rest falls into place around it.
Stolen Soul
The 1 other place in my apartment suitable for my computer is the sanctuary where I store it when I’m away. This spot has to remain secret, so I won’t say anything more about it; I don’t care how many real-life apples thieves make off with, but if 1 of them were to filch my Apple, that would be like stealing my soul—really, I ought to praise my burglar for having been more interested in my watch than in a machine that clearly struck him as beneath his notice … Or maybe he just didn’t see it because it was sitting in plain sight on my desk?
Suprematist Composition: White on White
Pressing a sheet of A4 paper onto the screen.
Parent Company
“Home is the most important place in the world,” declared IKEA; but Apple retorted that, these days, people live online. With a distinct advantage over libraries and other such enclosed spaces, computers lead to a hyperspace. The object itself is perfectly solid if I open its lid; but within its few inches is contained an entire, intangible universe (which isn’t for public display). Computers hold so much in so little space that they almost seem boundless. The computer overflows with realms; maybe it’s everything an animal isn’t.
Wireless
My computer is, alas, wired. 1st to the printer, which in turn binds it to paper; then, on its right side, to the power outlet, which keeps this beast well nourished. Its battery barely lasts 2 hours, so it has to be fed, like an elderly shut-in, through a plug with an oblong end (which resembles, in miniature, the entryway’s ceiling light), which draws energy from 1 white square block, often quite hot, that connects to the computer via 1 long cord. I know that the newest computer models do away with nearly all wires, and I’m delighted because I hate those things. Wi-Fi has already weaned us off the main yellow cable. When, at last, every cord is cut, the future really will be now. And as if it could hear me, my power cord, drawn by a fundamental force, slips across the desk and lands on the floor like a dead snake.
Tumbles
Thus does my mute apartment succumb every so often to a fleeting animism; a tumult over which I have 0 control wrecks every object. A bulb will simply pop, who knows why (though, when I was a child, I myself was why: I once poured water over a bulb I worried was overheating: the glass’s abrupt shattering terrified me, and that image of bodies maimed and ruined by my mistakes turned me away from medical practice altogether). The mysterious tumble of a book, a bag, or a bit of food creates some magic in the heart of the everyday. There’s no rhyme or reason to such occurrences. And yet, if I listen carefully, I can hear my belongings’ political demands: they protest the close quarters I keep them in, want to reclaim a bare minimum of space in this city where there’s practically none. The uncooked spaghetti on the floor becomes a giant game of pick-up sticks.
Sacred Left
The desk comprises 4 drawers on each side for a total of 8, in perfect symmetry, though I’d hoped to reserve the left side for what I consider sacred, and the right for what I consider profane, thereby establishing a sort of monument to opposition.
The left side is the empire of the archive. The uppermost drawer, the most accessible 1, since I can open it without my left hand (the 1 I write with) exerting any effort, is for work currently under way. (The presence of my “more present” hand and the “currency” of my current work have a relationship I couldn’t necessarily explain, but which I simply know must be the case; clearly 1’s body is always in the present tense.) I also keep my cell phone charger in this drawer. 1 could be forgiven for considering this dainty black appendix to be so purely an accessory in our era that it’s just about worthless, seeing as they’re given away for free with every new phone. And while it might call to mind the age-old tradition of knotting a string around your finger to help remind you of something, the many knots that keep cropping up in my charger’s cord only serve to draw attention to how thin and shoddy it is, its reach being reduced with each successive use—if my cell phone rings while it’s charging, the cord isn’t long enough for me to maneuver, and I have to adopt an awkward, almost painful pose that amounts to me slumping toward the ground and twisting my neck toward the phone, stuck in that position so I don’t yank the cord out of its socket. It would be better to kneel, I think, although that would make such conversations still more bizarre, even if I, being opposed to videophones, were the only 1 to know it, so the best solution is to set the charging phone on a low shelf and to let the cord hang slack.
In his poetry, Francis Ponge liked to give such mundane objects a voice; sometimes, though, I think he might have done better to let them keep their mouths shut.
USB
I also keep my 2 USB thumb drives here, although “keep” might not be the right word: they’re so small that they always and immediately get lost in the depths of the drawer (45 cm deep, 12 cm high); the moment I want to grab 1, I’m forced to pick up various folders and rummage blindly through the undergrowth. I don’t know what USB stands for (although I have a feeling the S is for “security”); Fear and Prudence drive me to always keep duplicates of such items—objects whose loss would be felt far more keenly than those of greater proportions: alongside the small 6 cm Emtec with its transparent cap revealing its metal connector, I have a 2nd drive that’s 8 cm, brand name PNY, in gray aluminum with a translucent pink window that displays the beautiful French word attaché, befitting this thing that keeps our lives on a leash. These 2 drives contain all the texts I’m currently working on, about 100 of them total. They are as small as their potential is grand!
Technology: Gender-Neutral
As I focus my attention on these drives, I find myself mentally associating them with both clitorises and penises. Their size, their smallness, their power all remind me of the combined delicacy and strength of female and male genitalia, and so I wonder if technology’s gender isn’t perhaps simply Neutral, making it equally desirable to our entire species.
Genesis of 1 Apartment
In the 2nd left-hand drawer, which I can still reach without moving, is another set of colorful folders containing multiple texts, organized by genre and title, such as 1 Apartment, the 1st draft of the book you’re currently reading, which constitutes its genesis, and which I will preserve for future researchers. Although I have a particular aversion to the genetic criticism that literary theory, completely overwhelmed by the formalism of the ’70s, saw fit to make the foundation of a new religion, exhuming masses of ur-texts and alternate drafts, I can’t in good conscience rebuff the gravedigger’s impulse, and I’ll even facilitate their task by saying here that the flat, preliminary title above was quickly replaced by the 1 that wound up being final. After all, Voyage Around My Room was already taken, and moreover wouldn’t be accurate in terms of the surface area covered by my book; as for My Big Apartment, well, I’m not too keen on the ironic approach.
Past Clercs
Opening the 3rd drawer calls for 1 sideways shift and 1 slight hunch downward: as we tend to distance ourselves spatially from what’s become distant temporally, so this drawer contains older folders, already gone a bit yellow, that I barely ever look at: aborted or abandoned or abrogated projects that feel as though they hail from another era and only make me shudder in this 1. Then, in the final drawer, at the bottom of the desk, you’ll find the various notebooks comprising my diary from the distant epoch (’85–’90) when I wrote by hand. Although I’ve typed up the majority of those texts on my computer, I still keep these artifacts, not so much out of fetishism as out of a simple conviction that paper is at less risk of destruction than the contents of a screen: there’s no such thing as a paper virus, after all. Down here I’ve planted the seeds of a literary genre that draws its paradoxical prestige from being situated below most human beings: minor, infra-aesthetic, insignificant, bordering on the pathetic, in which the sublime is confounded with the trivial, in which literature gets into bed with daily life, and whose sole concern ought really to be the question of how best to verbalize a mass of facts that only the act of writing could ever dignify. I’m unlikely to publish my diary: Cocteau believed that publishing a diary during 1’s life ran the risk of revealing all the diarist’s inadvertent falsehoods, which is why I’m convinced that doing so would be an error in the eyes of truth, and as much as I might admire those who do go public with their private records, I know I don’t have such courage—which is exactly why I admire them. And on top of that, there are no great revelations to be found in my diary; the life that I’ve set down there could be of interest only to those who consider life to be a great revelation in itself.
Profane Right
The left hemisphere of my desk contains manufactured items, the right hemisphere the tools for such manufacture. And this very nicely satisfies my penchant for keeping realms distinct, hewing to the beautiful, symmetrical classifications of the classical era, as well as to my own propensity for militant inversion: as I’m left-handed, the sinister is my proper domain, and thus, contrary to society’s natural assumption as to which side is sacred, the domain of creation, in this case it’s—rightfully—gauche. Literature isn’t innately up-right: it’s imperfect, fragile, sometimes even a failure, and it finds success only in its own clumsiness and deception. The right side of this piece of furniture, therefore, is the 1 I’ve chosen to devote to the material and blameless domain of the secretary.
Paper Tiger
The 1st drawer from the top, the identical twin of that on the right, is devoted to paper of all sorts: sheets, cards, envelopes, etc. The 3rd drawer contains about 100 worksheets, 21 × 29.7 cm sheets folded in half, crosswise, on which I typically summarize the many books I’d have liked to write. The particular fold of these homely sheets allows me, by imitating the form of a book, to have a 4-sided sheet and not merely a 2-sided 1: what I lose in length I gain in depth, and this little paper ruse spares me from any confusion with the other, unfolded 21 × 29.7 sheets as I stack them and grab them without looking.
Price per Square Sheet
I pick up 1 blank sheet. I turn it in different directions. I could put some black on this white, to give it some value, but I can also fetch a decent sum just by setting it on the floor: if we measure its worth according to the cost of 1 Parisian square meter (€8,000), we get its price: €498.96. Its virtual cost is in 2 dimensions, whereas real wealth, of course, is in 3. What if the decrease in intellectual value were a direct function of the exorbitant price of surfaces? Then who would be able to hold a salon these days?
Otherworld Order
Any harried reader certainly will have overlooked how, in the terrible succession of descriptions I’ve inflicted upon her or him, I’ve jumbled the order of the drawers, going without any warning from the 1st to the 3rd, when it would have been more correct to list the contents of the 2nd drawer in between—but textual order and real order are 2 different things. My reason isn’t strictly a literary 1 (even though, notwithstanding how it may appear, this book isn’t meant to be a simple snapshot of my apartment, but really my apartment in written form), but rather lies in the violation of the principle I stated further up, when I decreed the division of prerogatives between the creative left and the performative right. As if this binary scission of space hadn’t done justice to these objects, I haven’t entirely succeeded at avoiding any confusion between the sacred and the profane.
Performance Drawer
The accordion folder that resides in this 2nd drawer is pudgy; its flaps break free of its black straps and its bulk hampers my attempts to get the drawer open; I yank anyway, denting the corner of the sleeve titled Performances, which I’ve willfully destroyed. When life annoys, irritates, or outright hurts me (I do have a delicate sensibility), I start in on this compensatory tic: opening and shutting the drawer several times, quicker and quicker, in order to make the damage even worse. By carrying out this conscious cruelty, I project my frustration onto the 1 expanding folder dedicated to my performances, an activity to which I devote a good portion of my writing time, and have done since 2007. The word performance suits this willfully repetitive gesture, which subjects my folder to exactly the same sort of activity that it serves to archive. And I’d like to end this digression with a theoretical problem that’s always bothered me: Does a performance require an audience? If I apply my definition of “performance” to this act of repeatedly opening and shutting a drawer, in order to execute the (minor) depredation of an object, is this really a performance, or is it so to only my eyes? X claims that brushing his teeth alone in his bathroom can be called a performance; for him, I guess, it certainly can, but to the degree that there’s no audience there to witness it or appreciate it, I would say that it only becomes a performance at the moment when it’s addressed to someone else, via some form of mediation. As such, my own performance—“The 2nd Drawer”—finds its raison d’être in its being recorded here, on pages 201–202 of Interior.
Profaner Still
In the most profane and profound drawer, the last, I’ve stuffed all my digital debris: computer manuals, ISP phone numbers, plugs, cords, external hard drives, and other accessories. I try to minimize to the maximum [sic] the problem of opening it, like so many other problems I’d rather keep thoroughly buried: and so this choice of the bottommost drawer is propitiatory, because I dread those “technical issues” a lack of proper education has left me perpetually unprepared to deal with.
Cleaning
The only item in this reserve that I attach any value to is the universal screen cleaner, 1 small spray bottle protected by 1 small cap, which I use to get rid of dust, bits of grime, fingerprints, and other signs of general wear and tear that assault the creamy purity of the iBook G4 that Stéphane Mallarmé, way ahead of his time, called “the white disquiet of our canvas.” I have 0 idea whether this cleaner is right for my Mac’s chassis, but I use it anyway, on the assumption that I can’t go far wrong simply spraying a product made in Germany on the surface of another from Japan. To finish up the operation, I use a former table napkin. Reusing and repurposing objects fills so many chapters in the history of art; this particular repurposing might be modest, even a bit degrading, but that’s the fate of cloth, this material made from next to nothing, born in splendor but ending in misery, and touching us with its similarity to our own destiny. In this same vein, to wax my shoes, I use old T-shirts or old mismatched socks, and to clean the apartment I put on old jogging pants that are as inelegant as the pantaloons that venerable dukes who had fallen on hard times and become pensioners wore with illusory opulence before accepting the rags of Welfare. The fantasy of pushing snobbery to the point of wearing brand-name clothes or expensive fabrics for menial housecleaning work gives me a peculiar delight in which I can still recognize my bent for subservience, humiliation, degeneration. (And to think that these base lips of mine once touched the napkin now consecrated to dusting off my sacred screen!)
Center Drawer
I open the center drawer, which is large and deep as a pensive belly. Among various articles for schooltime use (1 ruler; some tape; scissors; a pocket calculator that the Banque populaire gave me in hopes, I suppose, of becoming even more popular; 1 pencil sharpener; some thumbtacks and staples; etc.), all of them in a box that formerly held Turkish delights bought in Istanbul, the drawer holds 3 additional objects, talismanic in nature: my planner, my address book, and my map of Paris. My planner will take its place, at the year’s end, alongside the other black planners in the freestanding bookshelves (→ infra); other people may use iPhones, but I’ve stayed faithful to paper, which has never failed me. My address book isn’t, like my cell phone, errant; rather, it gathers all the people I know together into 1 space, along with their mailing addresses (how quaint!). As for my Paris map, it crushes Google by giving me an overview that isn’t so much local as global: I’ve never had to help so many tourists on the street as when the good old paper map was supplanted by electronics (and it’s quite clear they’d all rather have recourse to some random photocopy than be forced to interact with the likes of me!).
In any case, GPS, the death knell of spatial memory, is something I’ve managed to keep in abeyance with my map, with my love for my territory. For my part, I’ll leave my reader with a small floor plan of my home—though if our species’ memories of the spaces we inhabit go on blurring into nothingness, then maybe, 1 day, I’ll also include an appendix featuring numerous photos of this apartment (for a small additional fee).
Wastepaper Basket & Co.
At the foot of the desk, my wastepaper basket alternates between 2 possible positions: either, as at this particular moment, with its back against the window, or else perpendicular to it. It’s always set on the right side of my desk, suggesting its dependence, and always gets full very quickly. I empty it regularly into a provisional paper bag, so its contents can be transported swiftly to the yellow bin in the building courtyard, which itself has its contents sent to a recycling center.
Dangerous Beauty
This gray iron-mesh wastepaper basket is shaped like an upside-down lampshade. It’s openwork all around, its rim and base crenellated with merlons in a ring of occasionally sharp points. If these rings weren’t made of wire, they would be absolutely perfect: whenever I grab the basket to empty it, however, I have to remind myself not to cut my fingers, as if the dangers of this workaday object were completely disguised by its fine structure. The theme of the prospectively benign but dangerous object was masterfully explored in 1 of my favorite films, Éric Rohmer’s La collectionneuse (1967), in which 1 of the main characters, an artist—Daniel Pommereulle, essentially playing himself—has a sculpture consisting of a paint can with razor blades affixed to it, so that it can’t be picked up without getting 1’s fingers cut. This untouchable object has since remained embedded in my memory as an exemplar of art as fortress: protecting and defending itself.
My wastepaper basket’s thin wire points hint at the dangers embedded in its delicate, metallic, airy façade, much like that of the Eiffel Tower. But, in contrast to the monument, nobody’s petitioned for my basket to be torn down, and it was in the area around Elle Décoration (a store on rue Saint-Sulpice that’s now gone) that I acquired it in a fit of frivolity. It claims its prestige from being the sole place in my apartment in which I allow myself to deposit unwanted paper, although it’s occasionally seasoned by empty ink cartridges or pencil-sharpener shavings as well, and so certainly outclasses the mere trash can. To keep it from getting ideas above its station, I also use it as a playground.
Shot
1 of my favorite sports when I’m letting my thoughts wander is a game that all bureaucrats play well: launching wads of paper into the wastepaper basket. It soothes the nerves, whether we’re talking about the occasional off-the-cuff throw (when I come home in the evening, I tear up any envelopes from that day’s mail, wad them up into balls, and shoot them into the receptacle), or else the slightly more involved game I’ve invented in order to keep myself occupied: it not being uncommon for me to make a wish 1st—such as for the success of this book, or of the woman I love, or of my close friends—and then, if I pull the shot off, to raise my fist with a triumphant cheer, just like the child I’ve never really stopped being. If I miss, though, I just give myself a 2nd try—this game of apartment basketball jolting an afternoon out of its doldrums. Even if I fail, I still manage to win, because I cheat ever so slightly, by shooting over and over until I finally get a basket, or else by wishing for things that it’s okay not to get, such as Stade Rennais’s winning a soccer game against Paris Saint-Germain, or a particular secretary of state being forced to resign.
Halftime
The austere labor of writing calls for endless subterfuges. The Internet does provide some distraction, but it only redoubles the problem of our dependence on that same old screen. The Frigidaire makes for a more delectable ally, although it can easily become a trap. Tea calms me. Naps tempt me. The phone distracts me. The window soothes me. The television diverts me. Sex drains me. The street roars at me. The toilet … does what it does. Nothing is as good as a leisurely stroll around my home.
Clue
Professor Plum, in the library, with the lead pipe.
The Immovable Object
In terms of volume, the primary piece of furniture in my apartment would be the bookshelves (which we might consider immovable). They are in 2 bodies: the main bookshelves that fill the full length of the right wall, transforming that flat plane into a dramatic bas-relief; and the small wing on the left that extends the former shelves perpendicularly along the wall behind my desk, to the right of the window—architecture that could be considered both structural and mural, that catches every eye peering in from the living room. What a thorough disappointment this literary monument must have caused my thief when he realized just what kind of person he was dealing with!
The Book of Books
Upon crossing the border into the heart of the Bookshelflands, a doubt assails me, or maybe a sense of vertigo, about the overall soundness of this project, which I’ll only be able to finish if I stick to the purely surficial method I described much earlier, although it now carries a measurable risk of overwhelming my discursive zeal, since the fact is that I own 700 books. It’s not their description so much as the relationship I have with each of them that could send this text spiraling into a Borgesian infinity: a volume that would collect dust in his famous Library of Babel under the title of The Book of Books and Grains of Sand. If his or her bookshelves are a writer’s true homeland, then their delineation really should constitute a full volume of their own, and that’s why I’ve decided for the moment to postpone setting down the series of descriptions that they necessitate, amounting to a row of Russian dolls containing not dolls within dolls but dreams within dreams … And I can already hear the objection that my devil’s advocates will make, to wit, that I always seem to shy away from the sheer scale of my project by avoiding this or that particular aspect (as I’ve already done with my archives), and, as such, that it would appear this voyage into the heart of my apartment is more than my meager talents can manage. (Indeed, my last book was devoted to annotating every street in Paris’s 10th arrondissement, and there’s no denying that I still have 19 other arrondissements to survey.)
What can I do but save this readerly documentation for my golden years, whereupon my work will have come full circle: I predict that my final book will be entitled A Personal History of My Books (to be published in 50 years).
Prominent Room, Missing Room
The extension to my main bookshelves has wedded itself to my desk, and this coupling, I’m all too aware, was completely foreseeable. Such obligatory pairs (armoire–mirror, table–chair, curtain–window, etc.) are thoroughly unavoidable. Making his way into this office, a nonreader would feel practically assaulted by all these orderly troops standing at attention, ready to launch into a battle for which he’s entirely unprepared. That’s why I would have preferred to give my bookshelves a room all to themselves—a more private, more personal room that wouldn’t just scare away ordinary folks … and I don’t mean to make myself sound grand: such intimidation inevitably does occur. But look, I’m always wishing for 10 more rooms; I might just as well dream of having a hacienda …
Shelves
In the meantime, however, I have to keep some order in this perpetually disordered interior I call my apartment, and face up to the impossible task of keeping my obsessions in check. The abovementioned number of books in my library, 700, is already null and void: glutting my shelves and overflowing onto any other available flat surface (the corsair’s and dentist’s cabinets, and the mantel of the fireplace in my bedroom), my library is an army teeming with new recruits who rarely ever die. My devotion to books is expressed through acquiring them, an act so indispensable to me that I feel, almost every single day, the same brute desire, comparable perhaps to an erotic impulse, to buy new volumes. Nothing seems more revealing to me than their glaring absence, which I’ve found as often in the most disadvantaged strata of society as in homes of the representatives of our contemporary neo-bourgeoisie. Whereas intellectuals proudly pose in front of their shelves, the businessman simply floats in his frigid space, and the poor man in his shack doesn’t bother at all …
Alpine Summits
While my shelves don’t go all the way to the ceiling, the air is certainly thin up there. The void above them makes the highest shelves float in a practically alpine isolation. I’m not sure that this was the right choice—maybe 1 more row of shelves should have been put up, so the tops of those volumes could have brushed the ceiling, making that the “natural” top of the bookcase; but, on 2nd thought, the already dizzying height of this little mountain library dissuades me from retrieving the uppermost titles—which is why some people tend to keep only their less respectable, generally lower-status books on their top shelves, in short, the books they’d consider 2ndary. It’s really not right, after all, to sacrifice authors from A to B (especially B) to those hinterlands. But as alphabetical classification is a system I am incapable of abandoning, I’ve adopted a solution that explains the presence, along the shelves, of my Tam Tam stool.
Mont Thabor
This fire-truck-red plastic Tam Tam stool counts among the various accessories in my apartment that I’ve rechristened. Since, in French, stools are called tabouret, I’ve given this 1 the nickname Mont Thabor or Montabour to differentiate it from the black tabouret that holds my TV in the living room; I never sit on this stool, but rather use it exclusively to give me a leg up when reaching for books.
Horizontal Solution
A disdain for compromise drove Le Corbusier to make radical choices in terms of interior layout, especially where it came to ceiling heights, which he decided had to be relatively low, certainly lower in any case than the previous standards that we (we, the people who live in these buildings that Le Corbusier devoutly wished would be destroyed) are used to enduring. And it’s true that shelves that flowed from 1 end of a room to the other at human height would seem to be the ideal solution to avoid climbing up or stooping down to retrieve a given book: it’s a solid idea, but it overlooks the fact that such a reduced capacity would never be able to accommodate the ceaseless flood of new arrivals. Better to have more shelf space than books to fill it all; at worst, you wind up with immense empty shelves bathed in sunlight, akin to the stunningly pure, unencumbered planes of the Villa Noailles in Hyères, where space itself becomes exquisite.
Crack
My endless indecision about the height of my shelves found a concrete justification in the fissure on my ceiling that threatens the upper right corner of this room. It’s a result of my upstairs neighbors’ contempt for their floors, but I don’t know the exact cause: there’s a child running around up there, loudly enough that I sometimes have to go up to the 4th floor and ask the Chinese family there to tone down his playtime fun; I’d prefer that it were a stockroom full of boxes (they work in textiles) of unnerving weight. Still, whether it’s a result of a clandestine warehouse or that interminable stomping, this threat of this fault line growing larger is rather worrisome. Proust, irritated by a similar pounding of children’s feet above his head at 102 boulevard Haussmann, had felt shoes made for the kids so they would be less noisy. I’m of a less delicate constitution, so I’m just waiting for this family to move out—which will surely be after I do.
Neighborship
My theory of neighborliness: neighbors always cause us more frustration than we do them. Application thereof: in terms of water damage, my neighbors have clinched a 3–1 victory; as for myself, I don’t think I make too much noise, but then again I take off my shoes far less often than I should; I do listen to loud music, but only the popular kind; I do walk around shamelessly nude, even though there’s the inevitable risk of causing my neighbors shame, since my curtains aren’t shut nearly as often as they ought to be; I avoid conversations on the landing; I absolutely forbid the display of meat outside my window. If this crack in my ceiling is the death knell of cohabitation, it’s still a far cry from the Argentine film The Man Next Door, in which a crude neighbor comes and upsets the quiet peace in which his young, high-powered neighbors live by hacking through the wall that separates them.
Library of Exactitude
Obsessed by establishing order and conquering space, the author and the architect both create volume(s): the 1st conceives, constructs, plans; the 2nd plans, constructs, conceives. The former builds monuments out of a few scribbles; the latter builds his scribblings into another kind of monument. I’ve had these bookshelves built out of a material called “medium-density fiberboard,” a composite of wood fibers with a density certainly above medium and a chestnut-purée color; then I tailored my Library of Alexandria to exacting personal requirements. 1st, that every row be perfectly straight and solid: since nothing is worse than planks sagging under too much weight. Next, that there be very little space in front of my volumes, meaning that the edge of each shelf should coincide with the spines of my books, creating the illusion of fusion between container and its contents: in practical terms, a result fairly difficult to obtain, as not all books come in the same format. Similarly, the desire to display certain small curios here (which come with their own specific problems, elaborated infra) forces me to grant them a space of about 4 centimeters from the shelves’ edge.
Cover Price
Nobody would dispute that books make for an essential decorative element—aside perhaps from those idealists who think that decoration is irrelevant, or else those philistines who don’t even think about the existence of such things—but it’s not the book qua object that I care about. I’m not insensitive to that aspect of book collecting, but I do refuse that suspect relationship inherent in bibliophilia (which I tore to shreds in my 1st book, about Maurice Sachs). To be fair, the few beautiful books, or rather rare books, that I own are 1s that I keep less because of their market value than because of their rarity, pure and simple: a rarity that would make their disappearance quite definitive, in contrast to losing, say, my Garnier Frères edition of The Red and the Black, which would only deprive me of Gérard Philipe’s likeness on the cover. I couldn’t even guess what this or that book in my collection is now worth, as I have 0 idea what the market for them would be. The sole and somewhat sulfurous volume of value I can point to here is Céline’s screed Les beaux draps, which would probably fetch something like €100, but which no doubt will lose its value once it’s thrown off the shackles of censorship and been reprinted. I have several weathered out-of-print books from Gallimard, some early Minuit titles, and some books inscribed by their authors to me personally (including a few compromising instances with lines consequently blacked out), but ultimately nothing sensational. All the same, if I consider €20 to be the average price for a volume, multiplying that by the number of books here, well …
Multiformity
Taking into account the formal diversity of books, the idea of organizing them by publisher—as if I lived in a bookstore or the home of 1 of those French professors proudly putting their Pléiade editions on display to be noticed even at a distance—makes my heart sink. The varied hues displayed by my shelves, all the irregular sizes and shapes, the oldness or newness of those rectangles, all contribute to a tapestry as multiform and multicolored as Literature itself. Uniformity tends to transform bookshelves into wheatfields of Gallimard editions or snowscapes of P.O.L tomes, cotton plantations of Minuit volumes, or prairies of egg-yolk (practically canary-yellow) Garniers. A ’pataphysical solution would be to make personalized book covers for each and every 1 to give them a particular cachet; I have to confess, however, that I don’t have the courage to do so. I leave such eye-catching practices to the likes of Rodney Graham. Alphabetical classification, in the meantime, gives enough of an aleatoric aspect to this monument.
Habitation
The main part of the shelves is a block of compartments arrayed in 5 columns of equal width (78 cm, except for the last column on the right, which is narrower and just 27 cm, striking a very successful contrast with the rest) holding 9 shelves each. Each shelf has a uniform 16 cm depth. Only the leftmost column breaks this horizontal alignment, because it only has 4 shelves of books while its central space serves as a music center. So, in all, there are 42 units in this block, 40 of which are for books, resulting in a 90% occupancy rate.
Brief Note on the Art and Craft of Sorting Books
The problem of classifying books is classic, and Georges Perec discussed it with absolute class. With equal scrupulousness, I decided at the very start of my career as a sorter to order them alphabetically, which sorted out the question once and for all. By virtue of an exhaustion that all obsessives know intimately, the act of “sorting out a question once and for all” engenders a sort of inner peace. Clarity is the advantage of using the alphabet; its indirect charm is that of setting authors who have nothing to do with each other cheek by jowl: Homer immediately preceding Houellebecq imbues these shelves with a touch of the unexpected, elevating the whole above methods of organization driven by strictly personal considerations.
That said, some problems remain: anonymous authors, for example—I shelve them under ANON rather than before A and at the head of the entire library, as so many advocates for Barthes’s theory of the death of the author would no doubt prefer. They dream of literature escaping overly nominal frames of reference, but this is my library and author names remain the name of my game. Still, that doesn’t save me from the problem of reference works such as dictionaries or grammars, where I hesitate and waver between falling back on author names (of which these volumes sometimes have several) and the equally nonintuitive but generically useful term “Dictionary”: the Dictionnaire des œuvres, for example, is under the letter D, whereas I’ve shelved the Dictionnaire du cinéma under the letter L, for the name of its author, Jacques Lourcelles, for the simple reason that Jacques Lourcelles is the only credited author. Collective works present their own sorting difficulties, such as this psychoanalytic opus titled Le désir et la perversion, which has 5 authors, and which I’ve ended up filing under “perversion” rather than “désir” because it’s certainly a perverse book. Critical texts on particular writers are the iffiest 1s: 1 must choose between following strict alphabetical order, removing the object of the critic’s attention from the equation, or else forgetting that steadfast rule and shelving the book under the name of the author being discussed: should I put Gilles Deleuze’s Proust and Signs under the letter D, or the letter P? Wisest would be to put all critical texts alongside the books by the author being studied; but if I’m looking for Deleuze’s work and I don’t happen across Proust and S., will I remember to check the Proust section? Well, probably. (This example is theoretical, since I don’t own the book in question.) When the scholarly—or rather, I should say, extracurricular—volume doesn’t register in my mental files as an author’s own book, it would be better to shelve it alongside the subject’s own works; but this dispute will never end, because real books will always and inevitably get hidden among these false friends. I go back and forth: I’ve shelved my own book on Maurice Sachs under both C and S. And so my double role as writer and critic is evinced by a classification system that entails, appropriately enough, keeping duplicates of various titles.
Alphabetical Start Delayed by 1 Queer Consideration
The small left wing of my shelves contains, up high, the 1st volumes: the very 1st 1 ought to be the letters of Abélard and Héloïse, who would only have the phallocentric ordering of their names to thank for not having their book shelved under the letter H. To express my political dissatisfaction, then, I’ve moved this book to the latter letter, and so another book has been left with the burden of being “the beginning.” And so we’ve already found proof that every premise rests on principles that are immediately called into question, that have to be reassessed on a case-by-case basis. As so often happens for clerks and Clercs and other, generally clerical folks (except perhaps for those devotees of the Swiss preacher Zwingli), it’s a book by Stefan Zweig—which I’ve never read, actually—that closes out my shelves. Indeed, my shelves are occupied by a nonnegligible percentage of books that are still unread, and while I’d happily think up a shelving system that depended on this 1 operating distinction, I’d rather find a subtler way to indicate which books I’ve merely leafed through. The danger, in effect, would be of giving myself away: I might adopt such a system of organization only to find out that I haven’t read practically any of my books!
Alphabetical Start
I own 64 As, which take up all the 1st shelf, a fact that doesn’t displease me, because here the perfect relationship between container and contents offers an eye-pleasing harmony. As for the letter B, which contains a plethora of 1st-rate authors, including several favorites, they lead from Balzac to Brautigan by way of Baudelaire—and I wouldn’t dream of passing over the complete works of Barthes in silence, considering that I’m a specialist in his work. The 1st B, all the same, is Bachelard, whereas the last A is Aymé, which enables a French pun based on aimé being the word for “loved” and so gives all due respect to the eminently sympathetic author of The Poetics of Space. As for C, there are 106 inhabitants: the 1st is Cadiot, the last Croce. The letter D, which starts with a book featuring the Dada writers, contains an extraordinarily striking case of neighboring authors, thanks to Dustan (Guillaume): it was so that he’d come right after Duras (Marguerite) in bookstores and libraries that he chose his pseudonym—a literary and spatial homage of which I know no equivalent. The D/E switch hinges on Duvert/Eisenzweig, a pedophile novelist and a theoretician of literary terrorism; E/F collides Exbrayat (who, if we’re to believe the cover bearing B.B.’s face, must be a ravishing idiot) with Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, whose French title is “Alone in Berlin,” and which I bought when I was, myself, in that same city and same situation. The last F is, inevitably, Fromentin’s Dominique and the 1st G is Galbraith’s Money. We pivot poetically from Guyotat to Haiku (an anthology). In H, the Odyssey of Homer, the 2nd book in the world, glitters with undeniable beauty, whereas the Iliad, which would be the 1st chronologically, merely leaves me amazed. After The Cattle Car by Hyvernaud (Georges), Iacub (Marcela) asks What Have You Done to Sexual Freedom? The letter I is typically underpopulated, so I’ve slipped in a Quick Method for Learning Italian to bolster the ranks. If my mother had offered me a copy of the I Ching in English, it’d be here, but as we’re both French to the core, I’ve shelved the Yi Jing in Y, while it’s Itard who rounds out the section, before Max Jacob, who’s rather difficult to dethrone from his spot at the head of J. Juvenal/Kafka make strange bedfellows practically begging for a punch line. With Kundera/Labarthe, then Luzi/McCullers, we’re in the belly of the beast. The most dissonant volume, its green spine sticking out like a sore thumb, is Langelot et les espions, by Lieutenant X, the only survivor of my old green and pink shelves, sparking vivid memories of my early, indeed earliest, childhood readings: Enid Blyton or Georges Chaulet greeted me long before Flaubert or Molière ever did, so I’ve retained here 1 master of children’s literature, whose motto “solitaire mais solidaire”—solitary yet in solidarity—seems to me the most apropos statement regarding 1’s existence as a social organism. The 1st N is Nabe, and nipping at his heels is Nabokov, an especially invidious collision, while Novalis/Ollier is, on the contrary, a very “literary” conjunction. The letter O, always unaccented, closes on Ovid. P, with its hordes of warriors, ultimately sets Proust (but of course) snugly next to Quincey (Thomas De), while opening with Pagès (Yves), and then, in turn, Quintane prepares the way for Rabelais, who counts Racine as his antipode. R’s heel also counts as the end of the built-in bookshelves, and their turn to the freestanding shelf to be described farther down. I encourage the reader to hurry there (→ infra).
Kult
As my hands glide over the dregs of my little library, I can’t deny the stamp of intellectualism everybody insists on imprinting upon my person—or, worse, that of “a writer’s writer.” How could I dispute it? There’s 0 sense in talking about my “literary side” because I don’t draw any distinctions between 1 side or the other; rather, literature plays such a large role in my life that to conceal it would be a betrayal not only of my being but also of my very conception of art. If I wanted to sum up in 1 phrase the role that Literature plays in my life, I would say that my readings have been far more decisive than my experiences. Even in the tenderest years of my childhood I saw the world through books and found a kinship with all the other clerks and Clercs and generally clerical folks (sometimes dead, usually living) out there who attached the same value to the experience of reading; I found my original sentiments, which were already deeply rooted, multiplied almost to infinity by the inexhaustible feast of books I devoured, discovering in reading and then in writing an infallible way of intensifying, of amplifying my life. I was never much taken with those drugs and distractions that so many people succumbed to out of a sheer need to escape the conditions imposed upon them, and pledged myself instead to the cult of Words, the singular divinity with 2 faces (reading/writing). From the beginning (which itself was a kind of ending), I felt that there was a distinct difference between myself and other men, those for whom reality, in and of itself, sufficed to provide a satisfaction that I myself could enjoy only on the basis of some fundamental misunderstanding. Of course, to write, 1 must desecrate literature, but to become a writer 1 has to have thoroughly consecrated it 1st! And intellectual as I might seem to some, I’m by no means unquestionably so in the eyes of these same intellectuals: they’re convinced that something vigorously resists my aspirations thereto.
Musical Interlude
To my left, as I face the bookcases, my music center clearly juts out beyond the shelves: it protrudes. Deeper than the other shelves, because an LP is bigger than a book, this 1-m-tall, 60-cm-wide nook has 3 compartments: the 1st 1 holds my turntable as well as the LPs I’ve kept despite the industry-wide shift of the ’80s that brought about the advent of the CD. After a very long period of disuse, I recently had the machine repaired at long last (€30) so I could take some pleasure in the clicks and pops of my childhood. Rediscovering and restoring to use an object by rescuing it from the purgatory technological advances had consigned it to is my small way of playing the hero. All that this Technics-brand device is missing is its original protective cover, which I lost; however, the black plastic circle meant to play 45s is still in its place.
It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me
Organized as they have to be—vertically—my LPs are among the most ambiguous of my objects of affection: the undeniable affective charge they give me, drawn from the memories that my life in the ’80s carved just as deeply into me as these songs have been carved in the records’ grooves, is at odds with a general indifference I haven’t shaken off, for a couple of reasons: for 1, I just don’t have the same mania for rock and roll now that I used to have between ’78 and ’85, and then I’ve already parted with a number of my records as much for financial reasons as out of incipient disinterest. I do regret this absurd act that’s altered my record collection, and which I’ve repeated several times—the act of declaring that a given period of my life has come to its end, thereby manufacturing for myself a reason to rid myself of whatever seemed to have embodied it. In much the same way I’ve dispensed with the 1st novels I wrote, my complete collections of pink and green children’s books, my G.I. Joe figures, my Yamaha organ, my working-class cap, etc. I wonder what the next things I’ll abandon will be.
Counterhistory of New Wave
The vast majority of my 70 records belong to the rock genre, and more specifically to the subgenre called New Wave, which was my favorite during the ’80s, the decade in which this style gained currency. I was the perfect age for this musical style that was born at 1 specific moment, the very moment of my childhood—which has to be the reason for the “affective charge” that I just mentioned and that draws its profound significance solely from the intersection of its creation and my childhood. Here we can find the leading figures of this movement: Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, the Cure, the Jam, the Clash, the Ramones, or the ska bands that made my whole body vibrate, like Madness, the Specials, or the Selecter. Next to some records by David Bowie, whose Lodger is the best representation of this whole era, I have some favorite records, like Blondie’s Parallel Lines or Kraftwerk’s single “The Robots,” and although I’ve had the foresight to keep several albums by the Boomtown Rats and Stiff Little Fingers, I still rue the impulse that drove me to sell off the B-52s’ very 1st album, along with Siouxsie and the Banshees’ debut, and then had me loan the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks to some idiot. The ranks of this faltering army will only swell once more if I summon up the courage to undertake the short Counterhistory of the New Wave that I’m sure is hidden somewhere in my future.
Amplification
Under the turntable shelf is, at desk height, the shelf for the Tectronic-brand amplifier that used to belong to my brother Jérôme—in 1 sense it still belongs to him, but as the saying goes, possession is 9/10 of the law—and it’s worked without even the least hint of any trouble since the ’70s, as if the metallic simplicity of this heavy rectangle (silvery on its front side, black on its top and side faces) betokened this amplifier’s uncomplicated nature, its range of functions thankfully kept to a minimum (1 on/off button indicated by 1 red light, 2 slider knobs for adjusting intensity, 2 buttons for sound and balance between the speakers) demonstrating the excellence of particular smaller brands despite the blatant yet, alas, commonplace injustice that sees their better-known counterparts so frequently applauded merely for having more features than their shadowy competitors, despite none of these bells and whistles being well implemented. All in all my preference is for a modestly outfitted device that does its job so well that it turns austerity, paradoxically, into an amplification.
Amplifiction
I set down the tone arm, the turntable starts whirring, the blinking orange light turns on, the speed is set to 33 rpm, I watch the record spin, I set my cell phone on the platter, the rotation is gentle and silent, contact has been established between Nokia and Technics, I watch the 2 devices turn like a merry-go-round; distant eras collide, and a new 1 emerges.
HP, I Hate You Profoundly
To the right of the amplifier, practically within reach when I’m sitting at the desk, yawns the paper-stuffed maw of a gray Hewlett-Packard printer. I can accept its aesthetic nullity, but even so, I hate using it. It’s muscled its way into a subcategory of objects that are indispensable to me, and yet this infuriatingly slow bitch of a machine makes me livid every single time I use it, mainly because I have no way to stop it from printing a test page every single time it’s turned on. After trying in vain to call customer service (because this business won’t provide a physical address, undoubtedly because it wants to forestall its customers from murdering its employees), only to find my call redirected to a country in the Maghreb where an operator unable to understand my questions answered me in an HP French that was equally incomprehensible, I assigned 2 local specialists to the case who smirked at my idiocy but frowned when, after more than a half hour of coming at the problem from every direction, they themselves couldn’t make any headway in deactivating this function clearly devised to drain half-used ink cartridges empty. A TV broadcast revealed that French factory sites were closing. Secrecy must be the byword for all these companies; every honest autobiography is the enemy of society itself.
Crushed Sound
My 2 huge speakers (60 cm × 32 cm) fill their allotted space so thoroughly that they’ve practically merged with it. They hark back to a distant era when the size of acoustic devices was seen as amplifying their quality. They’ve been hamstrung, however, thanks to an odd spatial arrangement, hemmed in 7 cm in front by the desk’s right flank, which dampens their sound to the point of practically crushing it: an aficionado of musique concrète would certainly appreciate the effect of hearing a big deep bass sound horribly compromised and compressed by the narrow channel it has to push through. If nothing else, 1 could look at it as a small revenge against music itself, an art form that fills the public sphere these days so aggravatingly that it brings a smile to my lips to see the wind taken out of its sails.
Brown Noise
Over time, these hefty brown speakers protected by their microscopically woven fabric—also brown, but closer to a chestnut hue—have taken on an incredible aesthetic superiority. The artlessness that undergirded their manufacture has, paradoxically, become an unintentional style of its own, which places them somewhere between objet d’art and stark furniture.
Fragile Freebox
On my Freebox—the Internet box, since the television box has already been accounted for (← LIVING ROOM), sitting atop 1 of the speakers, I want only to see the 4 glowing numbers indicating the time, which means that “it’s working”; if I see anything else, I risk seriously losing my cool. It’s enough to consider the sheer cost of these devices, as well as their less-than-absolute reliability, not to mention all the hours inevitably wasted dealing with the repairs, fine-tuning, setups, and resets they constantly necessitate, and the various hiccups they constantly experience: the sudden death of applications that I find have “shut down unexpectedly,” disruptions, failed connections that wreak havoc on my well-being and my day with a simple click … Seeing the fragility of these devices, it would appear that power and strength are not at all the same thing.
Twilight Zone
Snug between the desk and the bookshelves, overlooked in the apartment floor plan, is 1 of those bleak spaces that escape the control of every resident. This 8-cm-wide, 80-cm-deep stretch is like a narrow, dark ravine, and contains a horrifying morass of cords and wires: those of the green lamp, the computer, the scanner-and-copier, the speakers, and the amplifier, as well as the Freebox and the phone. I hate having so many crucial functions buried in a single zone that’s cramped and almost completely inaccessible, dark and dusty, like the RER tunnel to some clogged suburb. I do everything I can not to go spelunking in this space, but I really do need to go in there with a headlamp soon, because my 5-outlet power strip, for some unfathomable reason, isn’t working anymore.
Site Comments
“It’s hard to see in here.”
“No, it’s hard to see everywhere.”
Façadism
I get back up and, positioning myself in front of the main wall of shelves, I take 1 step back, as might a couturier proud of the dress he’s designed, the better to assess the woman wearing it. I become absorbed in contemplating a world, an analysis of form. Setting aside the 7th shelf on the bottom, with its lesser height (19 cm high), the entire façade is unanimous in accommodating books.
68 45s
To the left of this atypical shelf, right up against the recessed music center it mimics, is a set of 45s that suffice to confirm what some might call the atrocity, and what others might call the eclectic nature, of my taste, because there are classic records here, such as Gainsbourg’s “La Javanaise” or the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black,” alongside far less accomplished platters such as Afric Simone’s “Hafanana.” I think it’s safe to say that rock takes up the lion’s share of this part of my collection too, in contrast to the limited array of French music here; testing this hypothesis, I grab the whole stack with both hands. My love for classification confirms the score: Anglo-Saxon pop 44, French singers 24, making for a total of 68 45s bracketed by my hands. The set has been bounded.
(Though, thus bounded, both ear and turntable are out of bounds—and so, quickly, I unbind them again.)
CD? More Like Cee-Die
Just as my vinyl collection summons up memories as intense as the beauty of these objects derived from black gold, so do the few CDs in my possession leave me indifferent. The smallness of this assortment shows how little I’ve invested in that medium—which should also be clear from the absence of a CD player here, not to mention the absence of any of those aesthetically intolerable “CD towers”—tempted though I was by them when they 1st appeared on the market, their small square shapes promising to save me who knew how much space: O economy, where is thy victory? As for the argument about which medium has better sound quality, I’m sure I’ll never give CDs their due, since I have trouble ever believing that tomorrow’s technologies will be better than today’s. The CD will die before I ever cede that point.
Farther Right
Farther right is a red forest of books enumerating legal codes (Penal Code, Civil Code, Forestry Code, etc.) that I pulled out of my apartment building’s trash, where they had been abandoned in a bag by a neighbor for whoever found them—which was me. Recent but already outdated, these volumes pander to my punctilious side. Reading utilitarian texts is an efficient way for me to relax: laws, as Stendhal once declared, shed a truthful light upon the world, while also repudiating lazy prose. Compared to the uprightness of the Law, Literature might as well have 2 left feet; the latter is an affront to the former.
Primitive Hut
An African object from my father reminds me of him—but isn’t that the intent of all gifts, to animate matter by evoking their donors? It’s a small terra-cotta hut, white and brown, from the Bassari country (Mali). I like African art and if I had the means I’d fill my living room with masks and perhaps get a few good scares out of new visitors, but in the meantime I just go to the Musée du quai Branly to satisfy these longings. Further to that point, Douglas Huebler’s line comes to mind: “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” This fragile, primitive hut, leaning against my legal codes, is 1 of many physical counterparts to this text in which it is described. I wish it a long life, which I suppose isn’t really the most successful of performative utterances.
Take a Picture, It’ll Last Longer
As it’s practically inaccessible to anyone who might want to poke their nose into my library, I have to get down on my knees if I want to pull out my collection of postcards. Their vertical organization collapses together reproductions of artworks from various parts of the world (the only rule: they have to be of the 1s actually on display in the place that was visited) and near-forgotten full-color views of inane places, such as the Dourdan swimming pool or the Uruguay-France high school in Avon (département number: 77), where I wasted so much time. I’ve told some of my girlfriends about my love for these absurd scenes in which comedy clashes with pathos, where buildings have been immortalized without any clear reason, as if they were grandiose monuments, by a pathetic sort of proof of existence that’s forced upon them a continued reality for which they never asked. I do realize how this book is as much a trace or a replacement as these postcards are, but I could never simply dwell on the colors and wish-you-were-heres! that a Breton named Perec, deploying 243 such mementos in his book Species of Spaces, revealed to be dead ends; like Sol LeWitt before me, with the photo book he called Autobiography, I feel the need to set out and breathe life into all my belongings. Notwithstanding my predilection for ownership, I can’t really call myself a collector: I don’t have the perseverance that’s integral to the life and passion of true collecting. My pursuits tend to peter out quickly, either out of sheer indifference to the object in question, or out of my hostility toward having to expand my domain, or even out of a dilettantism that unwittingly belittles my own flights of fancy. I generally do nothing to increase my stock, but then I also won’t refrain from the occasional acquisition of whatever might bring a smile to my face. And so I’ve recently bought (without even the remotest thought of kitsch, which, by stripping things of their innocence, also deprives them of any interest they hold) 3 postcards already written on by various strangers.
Recent Acquisitions
An apartment blurs with all its comings and goings. As such, I’ve set down an untenable tenet for myself: while writing this book, I must neither acquire nor discard anything at all (even when this latter decision might actually have had a positive effect), and thus make sure that my apartment stays more or less the way it was when I began. 2.5 years of inertia at the cost of a few recent acquisitions.
Doodads
Several objects “decorate my bookshelves (a closing quotation mark would only increase my ambivalence about that particular verb, so I’ll use just an opening quotation mark here—it’s not every day that I get to invent a new form of punctuation). In effect, even though the few doodads I’ve set among my books do add variety to these otherwise uniform shelves, part of me still shies away from the idea of decoration, especially when I think of how it’s done in other people’s homes. Still, whether I like it or not, I do have to concede the appeal of having particular objects to underscore my belongings and particular belongings to highlight my objects.
Mangled Nativity
Here there’s a mini–crèche scene assembled with 3 plaster Bedouins, 1 of them standing up, the other 2 hunched over, bowing down as if praying. These painted figurines, remnants of a mangled Christmas nativity scene, grace with their soothing presence a world now so at odds with the Muslim sphere. A slightly less irenic interpretation would accuse me of not being able to bear the Arab world unless it’s contained within a Christian context, and such an accusation would underscore the fact that I’m already committing the horribly Occidental sin of Orientalism; in any case, I’ve isolated these Arabs from a context that I would never dream of reconstituting in full. It’s possible that these 3 figures are just my way of showing how much I prefer 2ndary characters, forgotten or scorned by History, like these old-world Palestinians completely erased by Catholic representations, an erasure for which we’ve paid such a horrifying price, as Jean Rolin so thoroughly outlined in his book bearing the frank title Christians in Palestine.
Double Museum
My bookshelves function as 2 museums in parallel, and this text is where I can share some pictures from (both) these institutions. In my eyes, the distinction between the worlds of literature and the fine arts is nonexistent, and nothing better emblematizes my double love than this William Wegman postcard that shows him seated and reading 2 books at the same time; he seems to have the same sort of strabismus that I myself experienced in childhood.
Napoleon Meets His Hullabaloo
My authoritarian tendencies are made visible (but also neutralized) by the presence of a small 6.5-cm-tall sculpture of Napoleon in lead, which was given to me by my maternal grandmother, and which depicts the man standing in a characteristically Napoleonic pose. To downplay its stance of triumphant virility, I’ve set this imperialistic figurine next to the works of André Gide. Since the very idea of Napoleon contains both the shaggy Bonaparte and the tyrant with his close-cropped coiffure, this little narrative device nicely fuses together the 2 extremes of masculinity. Such more or less accidental museum displays convey a nicely straightforward sense of existential desolation, I think, by transforming my home into a personal, multifaceted gallery space. If I had no philosophy of interior layout, I’m not sure what point there would be to having an interior in the 1st place.
Mod
More discreetly, I’ve also put a modish badge on display here that I wore during the brief period of my existence (1981) when I was a card-carrying member of the mod subculture. Blazoned with the U.K.’s tricolor, this plastic emblem reading MADE IN U.K. reminds me, again, of my teenage love for rock music, and especially the band the Jam, as well as my old Anglophilia, which has more or less dissipated completely now because of that country’s selfish economic liberalism. I recently found in Susan Sontag’s journals another slang use of the word “jam”—not meaning “sperm,” which is the most obvious interpretation here in France, but a lesser-known application, referring, in fact, to the sexual preferences of the majority of the global population.
Nonanonymous
Among the pieces in my permanent collection that I rotate in and out of storage, there is currently on display an oval photograph of 1 middle-aged man, dressed in a 3-piece suit, sitting in an armchair with his legs crossed and posing with his right hand on his thigh. Turning over the card to identify the man in question, the mystery only grows—there’s no caption. For years I had no idea who this man could possibly be, much less where I might have found this image in the 1st place. I told myself that it had to be a stranger—after all, my attraction to anonymity in all its forms is hardly incompatible with my love for proper names—and so was always caught off guard when various liars, looking at this portrait, claimed to know who he was. Alas, the postcard’s mute strangeness dissipated completely when I finally discovered, unwillingly, the answer to my question. During a short stay in Brussels, at the gift shop located in Victor Horta’s house-turned-museum, I came across the image’s exact double, and realized that I’d even bought the card there: at that stele erected in honor of a most admirable architect of the interior.
Household Muse
The decorative proliferation to which I’ve devoted myself is my way of thwarting the overly metaphysical nature of Literature; clutter reminds me of my status as a man-object. I have the same feeling walking through my little cave as I do visiting the overfull Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, or the museum-house of August Strindberg in Stockholm. These are places where the Absolute of literature may be chipped away by the Relative—just as some torturers will dog-ear the pages of books. I won’t rule out, once this journey is complete, the possibility of opening my apartment up to public viewing, of adding it to the list of Parisian museums that welcome visitors for a handful of hours each week. Entry: €3.50. Please call ahead for school-group visits.
Temporary Exhibits
My apartment’s exhibits have to be rotated—the paucity of space here necessitates it. So that I don’t become habituated and forget that wonderful injunction to “look with all your eyes, look,” I regularly modify the iconographic displays on my shelves, which, at the moment, display the following: 2 black & white ’70s-era collectors’ photos of cars from that same period, 4 Diptyque perfume packages exuding the tranquil fragrance of their original contents, and 1 invitation to an exhibition, its words surrounding the image of a prestigious residence as seen through the fence of its conscientious owner. Thus do various small optical diversions glitter among my arrays of books, the better to please those who follow the instructions given by Verne and put on display as an epigraph for Perec.
Zoom Out
A young man bathed in an orange light with his left hand in the pocket of his white pants, which are neatly tucked into his boots. He’s wearing a black redingote and a black hat. He’s looking off to the side, his right knee bent and thrust forward. In front of him is a huge draft horse with a silky black coat rearing back in deference (its back left hoof is raised slightly). The beast is harnessed to a tiny, elegant Duc carriage with unevenly sized wheels. But, zooming out, the young man, the horse, and its harness seem to be perched on a long horizontal plank beneath which hangs a small ring in profile clasping a larger ring facing outward in turn containing the letter H. And this entire scene is set within an even larger disc, or medallion. And, as I step back farther still, I find, emblazoned across an even greater portion of this luxury shopping bag (found in a trash can), the word Hermès.
The Formerly Bare Wall
But I can’t back too far away from my book-lined wall, because only 2 or 3 full steps would make me collide, backward, with the other (freestanding) bookshelves along the facing wall. I turn 180°, pausing momentarily to look at the wall shared with my bedroom, which includes 1 door and ends at a window. This part of the wall stayed bare for a long time, its vast emptiness a contrast to the grandiloquence of the wall of shelves. I fought to keep it unsullied; I lost. An early symptom of the slow and deadly encroachment upon my person and personal space by books, books, and more books. I stagger back to my desk.
Blue Chair
My chair turns its back on me: its curved blond-wood frame suits the desk, the bookshelves, and the hardwood floor, even though its seat and backrest are upholstered in bright blue. As I pull the chair toward me, it glides noiselessly over the parquet thanks to pads affixed to its feet, and, greeted by its wholly blue face, I really don’t know what to think of this alliance between white ash and flashy moleskin that’s accompanied me since 1991—its austere modernist form adulterated by royal-blue padding. Oddly enough, I don’t have the same affection for it that I do for its more humdrum cousins (← infra, LIVING ROOM). It’s just a piece of equipment. I admit that it’s comfortable, but its blue quietude has no effect on me, just like a piece of furniture in a catalog or on display, with a history that has 0 connection to my own. Once we’ve been convinced they will serve us faithfully we don’t waste any energy fretting over our furnishings. Ownership makes us go soft.
Rearranging the Seating Chart
The blue chair, elevated above the other seats in my apartment by the place of honor it occupies, plays its leading role with pride. It’s superior to a Ron Arad chair, but less beautiful than a chair dreamed up by Donald Judd: it sits somewhere between being a chair for an artist to work at and a chair for a fence to offload. I bring it over to the center of the office, where it has no reason to be, simply to place it in a situation new to the both of us: by detaching it from my desk, I’ve liberated it, given it back to itself, restored its painful freedom. To force upon my apartment an asymmetric or even antisymmetric arrangement of furniture is a power I exercise with the stubborn obstinacy of a man determined to decorate and redecorate and re-redecorate his home ad infinitum.
Voluntary Discomfort
Instead of sinking into my chair, as I usually do, I deliberately only perch on its edge; I don’t sit squarely on the seat, pretending to be 1 of those men who only half-sit when they sit at all, ready to get up and move at the drop of a hat. I sample a taste of the discomfort of the provisional—a voluntary discomfort, in this case.
Jesus’ Place
This irritating position ushers me into a strange dream: Mussolini has been invited to dinner at Jesus’ place. He arrives at the street Jesus lives on, but can’t find the right house. Pacing authoritatively, he knocks on the doors at numbers 22, 24, and 26, calls out, but doesn’t get any answer. Then he realizes that Jesus doesn’t have a house, that he’s been tricked. Mussolini doesn’t want to lose face, so he turns on his heel and stomps down the street, all the while loudly imprecating the Lord as he repeats his famous curse: “Fascism is the enemy of domestic comfort!”
Incomplete Position
Awake again, I’m back in my office’s gaping center. Sitting suits me. Hunching over suits me too. Even slouching with my butt glued to the seat suits me; and yet, this isn’t the whole story—it glosses over some complications that I’ll reveal infra, once I’m standing again and walking.
Scores of Shelves
Obliquely to my right is the small section of bookshelf that forms an angle with the main shelves. It doesn’t take up its entire section of the wall with its 8 rows, the 2 on the bottom being blocked by the desk. In Paris, as you may know, building numbers are calculated vis-à-vis the Seine; in my office, I number my 8 shelves vis-à-vis the floor, the number 1 by the parquet, number 8 by the ceiling. Numbers 8 through 6 hold nothing but books, so they’re just more of the same, whereas numbers 5 to 0 are a little more equivocal.
Objective Crime
On the outer edge of the 5th shelf, 80 cm from my face and 40 from my outstretched arm, I’ve pinned up an illustration that breaks up the sober beige: I lean forward and decide to yank it cleanly off; the fact is that I tend to prefer to see a given material nude than gussy up its fundamental emptiness; the medium is sufficient unto itself. Between my living fingers the image protests, citing as evidence my teenage love for covering my bedroom walls with personal icons, household relics, stupid photos, newspaper clippings, and record covers. Jean Genet, whenever he moved into a new hotel, took possession of his room by pinning a photo of the murderer Weidmann to the wall. But Genet lived at no fixed address, and when it comes to decoration, I follow the school of Adolf Loos, which declares: ornament is a crime. Which must make me … a criminal?
Oranj Jaz
Part of the 5th shelf is taken up by a square Jaz clock (20 cm × 20 cm) with rounded corners. It affirms its ’70s style with its orange plastic and its embossed numbers protected by a glass pane. It brings to mind the start of a well-known novel: “Anton Vowl turns on a light. According to his Jaz it’s only 12.20…,” the mention of this particular brand—neither Kelton nor Patek Philippe nor Rolex—giving the reader a clue to the compositional process of the novel in question.
Down with Unity of Time!
Its ostensible provenance from a bygone age could be seen as a concession to my usual nostalgia; but the stylistic coherence-through-incoherence of my furnishings, resistant to all unities, repudiates this facile explanation. A genuinely antique clock, as superfluous as the idea of time it represents—like 1 of those grand old models found in aristocratic French homes—would drive me up the wall. I need a semirecent clock to defy time’s diktat. An hour produced by a clock from 1975 still seems to belong to the year it was made, steering me back toward the time when I was a happy, unpunctual child.
Temporal Lapses
As for this clock, which I’ve now nearly made my way all around (and I do insist it’s part of this project to make my way around each object around me—a quixotic aspiration that will no doubt wear me out completely), I’m the only 1 who knows there’s a crack in 1 of its sides, since I knocked it to the floor in circumstances I no longer remember, a sin that has engendered everlasting guilt. Pondering the integrity of the clock’s casing, forever lost, I draw my fingers along a seam of hardened glue.
Got the Time?
No matter where I am in my apartment, it’s always easy for me to see what time it is. Having the hour perpetually on display ought to make me panicky, but it actually calms me down. A truly fastidious devotee of time might have clocks in every room, but, making a careful count, it turns out there are only 4 ways to tell the time from my current position, at this precise second: the panoramic clock, my nomadic wristwatch and cell phone, and also, I guess, my computer screen, which displays the time in its upper right corner, and is actually the most reliable timepiece here, since it’s synchronized with “universal time,” a phrase that I’m admittedly skeptical about, as it feels like an affront to those many domains, Literature included, where I defy the universal.
4 Times, 5 Brands
In fact, the 4 slightly different readouts provided by each of the aforementioned chronometers don’t quite align with each other, and so give a clearer, more asynchronous image of time. And comparing these sources on the spot, I notice that Bulova gainsays Jaz, which corrects Nokia, which is itself disputed by Apple. The latter is corroborated only by the Braun (→ BEDROOM).
References
Shelf number 4 displays my reference books. I’ve reserved a place of honor for the 2 Roberts. Their symmetrical format (Vol. 1: Langue française / Vol. 2: Noms propres) is a deliberate artifice meant to give credence to the naïvely ironic idea of a harmony between words and things. Next to them stands a Bible, inscribed by my parents, who gave it to me for my 1st communion in 1977, the year of punk. Here, the most famous book in the world sits next to the Roberts, but, to me, the dictionary is the definitive book, the holy book that contains all others (I have a project in mind that would involve rewriting the dictionary…), while there’s a phenomenal number of words and things missing from the Bible—“Kafka,” for example, or “cogwheel.” The false totality of religious books is due to their inviolable character, written as they are during 1 era for all eras; only the totality of the dictionary is true and beautiful, rewritten, as it is, for every era.
High Books
Meant to hold oversize volumes, the 3rd shelf has more height than the others, but wasn’t well thought out, as I don’t actually own any books 40 cm tall; even art books aren’t that tall, and although there may be some publishers out there who do produce books in such a gimmicky format, I’m not what you’d call their ideal market. The idea of “books as objects” is disagreeable to me, the sole exception being those false, hollow books, holding a flask of rum or a Colt 45 or a tapered deck of cards, as are so often found in the homes of self-described pranksters or other such cultural provincials.
In any event, there’s a 13-cm-tall empty space floating high above the tallest literary peaks of my collection, the record for height being held by Hitchcock/Truffaut, which is 30 cm tall, head and shoulders above my thesis (which isn’t a book at all, just a bound sheaf of A4 pages) and other tomes of lesser importance. In this array, from the left, are the 1st 5 volumes of the Grand dictionnaire encyclopédique Larousse in 10 volumes (1963 edition), recognizable for its black hide stamped with gilded letters. Volumes 1 through 9 were a familiar part of my childhood; I was so fascinated by that array of massive dark cakes that I can still remember and recite the letters on their spines, like so many other incantations I find myself mumbling, now and again, like some Cro-Magnon: “DESF–FILAO! FILAR–HYDRA! ORM–RALS!”
Hard to Reach
The most noticeable detail about this shelf is that it intersects perpendicularly with my stereo system, which, projecting forward beyond the shelf, makes for a partial obstruction. As a result of which, in order to reach the books obscured in this fashion, I 1st have to pull out the 1s hemming them in on the left—the fat dictionaries that are hardest to shift around. This unintended niche very nicely conceals those works I might prefer to keep away from prying eyes: a casual glance isn’t enough to tell what’s back there, though, since I can make out only the top edges of the tallest volumes … So I get up to make sure that what I’m keeping there really deserves to be hidden away—I have to pull out Hitchcock/Truffaut to relieve the suspense and see just how disparate the contents stowed here really are: next to the (dated) Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse is the Petite fabrique de littéerature, which I absolutely fell in love with when I 1st discovered the Oulipo, then the Dictionnaire des excentriques du cinéma français, which unfortunately contains no entry for myself, and then an issue of the magazine Actes sur la recherche en sciences sociales dedicated to sexuality, against which 2 pornographic magazines bought in Antwerp are leaning.
Porn Data
Will I reshelve these volumes before going on with my narrative, or will I flesh out my remarks while I’m holding and paging through these? You’ll never know. In any case, the fact that a sociological investigation into sexuality should find itself neighbor to hard-core porn serves to confirm for me that every obsessive is thoroughly obsessed—a banal and practically tautological remark whose accuracy is nevertheless demonstrated by this hideaway secreting its theoretical and practical assemblage. As I quickly flick through these periodicals of Dutch flesh, I notice that they no longer have any effect on me: Internet pornography has thoroughly destroyed this subgenre, and it’s only out of documentary interest that I keep these magazines … though, saying that, I can’t help but smile, since this is exactly the kind of argument that hypocrites like to spout to justify their pleasures.
Very Hard to Reach
The 2nd shelf, almost completely hemmed in by the desk, positioned down low, welcomes the rest of my encyclopedic dictionary, volumes 6 to 10, augmented by 2 supplements published to keep this edition—very popular in French households of the time—up-to-date. These supplements were a failure, by contrast, as the desire to stay up-to-date beyond 1960—with inventions that seemed to be at the cutting edge of progress quickly becoming anodyne, political leaders losing status, actors coming and going, countries shifting their borders, writers’ fame rising and falling—soon foundered, as if bewitched, under the steadily encroaching curse of obsolete knowledge.
STRIA–ZYTH
My childhood collection was missing STRIA–ZYTH, the last of the 10 volumes. This absence actually saved me: I had a space to fill; I had to make myself number 10 (in soccer, growing up, that was what we called the position now known, quite respectably, as the playmaker).
And what would I have become if we had owned only 1 single volume? A decorator? An interior designer?
Hidey-Hole
The end of this shelf plunges so far down behind the desk that, as opposed to my merely inaccessible books, it’s practically impossible to reach anything that might be back there—it’s such a perfect hidey-hole, in fact, that I have no idea what it’s hiding. I hesitate to rummage around what might be buried here—out of sheer laziness, really, not out of any particular desire for secrecy. However, since I’ve set out on this journey, I’ve had to remove obstacles at every step that would otherwise have compromised my forward progress, and so even as I talk the talk, I go ahead and—in contrast to the viscount Xavier de Maistre, who could depend on his good servant Joanetti to do the heavy lifting—walk the walk. Moving objects alongside words: if this is an archaeological dig, it’s being run by a topographer in tandem with an archivist. So I get up, I push the heavy desk to the side, speaking the magic words “Oh, my back!” in order to open up a passage into the forbidden zone just mentioned, whereupon I have to kneel down—taking care not to knock over the green lamp—cough a few times in all the dust I’ve stirred up, untangle the inextricable tangle of cords, making sure not to accidentally pull any of them out of their sockets, and press onward between my desk and my speakers—under constant threat of muscle strain—taking care not to hit my back or my head against anything, crawling on all 4s in a ridiculous, humiliating, painful position. Only then am I finally able to get close to the shelf/hidey-hole, out of which I carefully pull the remaining Larousse volumes 1 by 1, and take all the other tenants too, only to verify that there’s not much back here, as I had feared, aside from a few more catalogs of contemporary art—or, rather, not-very-contemporary art, since I haven’t thought about them for ages. The only notable exception gleams in the shadows, Russian Folktales, a book I’ve never bothered to read because of the instant boredom induced by its title but which will reveal its riches upon being rescued from this oubliette, its cover—coated with a thick layer of dust—illustrated in the mannered style of formerly Soviet republics.
Photo of Musset
And, indeed, stuck between the 3rd and 4th pages of the Folktales, I find 2 documents that, not content to merely substantiate my prediction, give this otherwise insignificant book its true evocative power: 1 vignette of Paris’s public schools, crowned by the national motto of the French Republic, and, down below, the note Distribution des prix, which shows that I received 3rd place in 1975. Underneath it I find a rectangular black-and-white photograph, 17 cm by 10 cm, showing the CM2 B class in the courtyard of the school on the rue de Musset (Paris, 16th arrondissement). Beneath the courtyard horse chestnut tree, 1 row of 11 students is standing behind 1 row of 11 others squatting down in a perfect symmetry that neatly denotes the strict order with which my school was run. As I was part of the shorter row, I’m on the far right of the photo, the last of those squatting down. I’m wearing a pair of bell-bottoms, a dark pullover with a long-point narrow-spread shirt collar sticking out over it, and some Kickers. I’m smiling. My hair is long and blond. As I look at this photo, I run through all the names of my buddies, which come to me practically without any effort even 35 years later. And so this photograph at last makes its way to the light of day out of the dark pages in which it had been imprisoned.
Unreachable
Finally, the last shelf, which doesn’t even deserve to be called a shelf, because it’s just a kind of storage space delimited by the floor: a nearly unreachable gap. My bookshelves’ invisible subproletariat—the books I almost never touch. Just like those supermarkets that stock their lowest shelves with the least attractive or least useful or least pricey products, or particular bookstores that cynically shelve poetry or art criticism in the spots that require the greatest lumbar effort, I’ve chosen this spot for the books whose claims on my sympathies have waned the most over time—comics. To identify them takes a bit of light, or anyway a bit of memory jogging: Tintin, Lucky Luke, Astérix, some of which formerly belonged to my older brothers, their covers worn down by multiple generations, their corners folded or sometimes even torn, and occasionally reaffixed with shiny Scotch tape over the red, blue, and green spines. These primary colors are vivid even in this darkness.
High Culture, Low Culture
The position of my comic books at the lowest depths of the abyss isn’t a complete accident. A sociological analysis of my 1-man culture could easily demonstrate that I’ve reserved my lowest shelves for those cultural products I consider the weakest aesthetically. And there’s enough truth to that assessment that I don’t see any point in protesting—even though, that said, I do like comics, and the mere fact of their being on my shelves (I count 65 of them here) proves it. Still, comics are, historically, a minor, newfangled art when compared to the other literary forms. I can’t accord them a status comparable to the other works I keep, even if I do consider a few graphic novelists to be true masters and hold them in greater esteem than some authors included under the rubric of “official” literature. My tastes on that front are classical—I would give up all the works of John Perse for a single volume of Hergé, and all Heidegger’s flights of fancy for a single Blueberry collection.
3 Connected Actions
I stand up straight, I push the desk back against my shelves, my left buttock brushes against the radiator.
Radiator 2
This radiator, the 2nd of its kind, is positioned between the window and the door to the bedroom, and is a perfect storm of shortcomings: it barely works and wasn’t cheap. Even so, I want to set aside its functional shortcomings for now and breathe some life into this ugly little object, which is smaller than its homologue in the living room, but is made out of the same cold, grayish metal. The apparatus’s body, emblazoned with a red WELCOME stamp, is topped by a horizontal board containing 6 gill-like openings to let out its heat. Visually, its best aspect is this series of alveoli that look exactly like 9 small basement windows.
On the Bone
Carving up the radiator like a Christmas-dinner capon, I find a charm in it that the machine’s totality can’t provide. My gaze is like a carving knife—it’s better, even, since it can’t actually stab anyone or slice them up. Once it’s anatomized, the object almost becomes poignant; vivisected, it radiates.
Existential Gradation
Beneath the flat board topping this appliance, sloping almost imperceptibly, is its temperature dial, made out of serrated plastic, going from 0 to MAX. I rarely use the full range of temperatures: if I’m trying to warm the entire room, I set it to 5, 6, or even 7, but never MAX. Am I scared of overdoing it? Or of breaking this thing? I’m always suspicious about pushing an object or machine or tool to its maximum, as if it were dangerous to use anything completely: my oven never has all its burners turned on, I don’t open my faucets all the way, I never turn my stereo up to a scream. When I was a child sitting in the family car, I watched the speedometer on the dashboard and noticed that it could go all the way to 240 even though we only ever hit 120, and even then had the feeling that life was best lived well short of the full range of possibilities.
Cold at Home
1 of the meager benefits of living in a small space is that it heats up more quickly. Sometimes, though, I’m determined to do without basic comforts, and so I test my ability to survive the cold all by myself, preferring to put on an extra sweater rather than deal with all those switches on the fuse box (← ENTRYWAY). This little game doesn’t really work in the opposite direction—nobody is stupid enough to intentionally heat their apartment in the summer—so I would deduce that wintertime just makes people Nietzschean. Saunas are so oppressively sweltering that I can’t bring myself to replicate 1 here, not even for the irony of wearing a T-shirt during the winter. But that at least would let me have a laugh or 2, whereas being wrapped in sweaters and pullovers in an icy apartment is merely depressing. Between the rigor of 1 kind of asceticism and the debauchery of 1 kind of luxury, I don’t want to have to choose—or get stuck in between.
Prop Art
The bulging backside of this heater is firmly anchored to the wall and (in the summer) doubles as a display stand for records. The beauty of record covers has contributed to the foundation of an authentic form of pop art, their 21 × 33 format allowing for a broad visual component that rounds out the acoustic essence of a given LP (and makes a fool of CDs). And I could never get tired of Kraftwerk’s gorgeous Autobahn record cover, which I’ve co-opted to make into a piece of art on display here, supported by the radiator. Every week I tell myself I should swap it out with something else, to make this area into yet another rotating exhibit.
Door-Bridge
I step right in front of the door to my bedroom, which connects the 2 rooms. I’ll open it only when we’re there, farther down (→ BEDROOM), to bridge the gap.
Window on the Street
As we prepare for that great and emotional moment, we find ourselves in front of the window overlooking the rue du Faubourg-Martin, right by numbers 37 and 39. I’ve filled this huge illuminated gap in my wall (and its twin sister in my bedroom) with a double-paned window in plastic moldings, which replaced the previous antiquated wood moldings that betoken the lodgings of the poor on the façades of their humble abodes …
Site Comments
“But aren’t you ashamed to have used PVC?”
“You’re 1 to talk!”
“But it’s so ugly!”
“And expensive too—€300 for the pair…”
“Has it done the trick, at least?”
“Go see for yourself, in the bedroom.”
Double Exposure
Looking out onto the street is crucial for me. I like my domiciles to retain some degree of sovereignty, bounded though they must be by the outside world, allowing me to enjoy the spectacle of life on the street while still having the freedom to step back and sample the calm of a courtyard. From this point of view, the apartment I currently occupy suits me perfectly, as it overlooks both street and courtyard, and I wonder, now that I’ve reached maturity, whether this principle of “both at once” isn’t precisely the principle, if not of happiness, then at least of general balance. The desire to unite opposites, which I would have considered vulgar in my youth, and sneered at as though it were a moral shortcoming, seems to me, now that some of my passions have subsided, eminently advisable; and, as my mind’s eye peers through a window from my past at some landscape I remember hating, I have to admit that wanting things that are incompatible is, on the contrary, the hallmark of someone happily drunk on life.
No Exit
As inwardly focused as I tend to be, as keen as I am for the “courtyard side,” I need the infinite theater of the street to distract myself and feed my daydreams with dense, rich reality. I’ve even positioned my desk in such a way that when I raise my head, I’m face-to-face with 2 contradictory continents: the bookshelf wall and the ever-bustling outdoors. Plenty of deskologists would differ on this point of interior design, since the spectacle of the street could well distract me from my screen. I do understand that argument, but the prospect of working while facing a wall seems far too ascetic for me. Which is why, by turning my desk to be perpendicular to the window or even facing the window, I’ve landed, I think, on a solution that serves as a good compromise, allowing me to concentrate while still being conscious of the pulsating street. My 2 screens fight to occupy my field of vision—and as I type I synthesize them.
Flip and Tuck
It’s very rare that I change apartments, because I tend to defend my way of life as if it were a kingdom: so, in order to get a small taste of moving, I sometimes rearrange my furniture—pushing my desk against the window or turning it around to face the opposite direction (as if this were a real office in which I had to receive visitors), orienting the couch differently to clear space by the back wall, etc. The room immediately feels rejuvenated.
Rail
Beyond the window it bars horizontally, a wrought-iron rail asserts its thoroughly Parisian arabesques. 4 circles adorned with leaves and plumes hark back to an age when Art was put in everything to renew life. These ornate decorations appear in 1,000 variations—such as, on the windows of the building facing mine, those elongated crosses curving to make an oval medallion. Embellishing the inside as much as the outside, they reestablish the equivalency between 2 wrongfully separated worlds. Who knows whether these patterns have some occult significance? Maybe they speak to each other in a code that became indecipherable when the group of conspirators who imposed this fate upon every building cast this spell upon our society? The kind of poetry they exude is both esoteric and bourgeois, industrial and mannered (and filthy).
A Worldly Man Never Looks out the Window
Will the view I have of the street free me from myself? “The spectacle of the world” gives me, itself, a joy far greater than anything I might see within it. Some person steps out of my field of vision, someone else walks into sight, a 3rd goes out, and so on without end: a wholesaler opens the door to the textile store; the garbage man collects green bags of trash and throws them into the back of his truck; the 47 bus goes by; traffic comes to a halt; the crazy woman with 6 dogs walks her greyhounds; a man comes out of the building at number 39; the sailmakers’ store sign is replaced with 1 that says BABY TOWN; I notice my neighbor in her bra and try to imagine just how happy she might or might not be; I wonder what the shutters on the 4th floor that have been closed for 10 years are hiding; I notice the slaves at the Chinese textile store stirring behind their wire fence; I look up toward the grayness of the gray sky; at number 39 the neighbors on the 7th floor make me smile as they eat their lunch on their little balcony; at number 37 the children on the 3rd floor throw water balloons at passersby and I can’t decide whether to laugh or yell at them; I see 1 woman take 100 steps while on her cell phone; a shop owner smokes a cigarette on his doorstep; and maybe someday I’ll be lucky enough to directly experience some of the Chinese New Year’s festivities whose fireworks I’ve heard, or else the festival of Janmashtami, or else a Kurdish protest to free Öcalan, the leader of the PKK; someone I know passes by below my window; some Tamils try to enter my building to leave behind flyers for SOS Plumbers, and 1 of them sticks a blade into the door; I’m thinking of something, of nothing, of some nothings; I tell myself that I should wash this window the better to see my neighbor washing her clothes; I’m spouting my umpteenth rant against the anarchic filth of window frames mucking up the uniformity of my neighborhood’s façades; I start thinking that maybe I’m made of PVC too; a line by Robert Creeley comes to mind and collides with the hope that I might somehow come into some money; and then I snap out of camera mode, which is so relaxing it makes me delighted to be alive. We tell children not to waste their time staring out windows, as if children didn’t have nothing but time to waste; we advise young women not to expose themselves the way flies perched on a windowsill do; we tease the men of the world for standing sentry by their windows when there’s nothing to keep an eye out for.
Trajectory
After writing a book on walking every single street of the 10th arrondissement, I’ve come back home.
Unproductive Assets
As it’s fairly difficult to reach, because of my desk’s obstructive presence, I rarely actually open this window. If I decide to crack it open, and shift the desk to the right, I find myself in a narrow strait, utterly hemmed in, and have to slide along the door, squeeze past the radiator, even get around the near left corner of the desk so I can wriggle into the 28 cm valley that separates it from the window. It seems like such an enormous, unexploited space—only ever visited by my vacuum—and yet, attempting to cross it, I still somehow wind up jammed against the window, where, as they say in Marseille, I’m “asquished.”
Filthy Panes
The grime on these filthy panes stands out like a reproach; in the sun, the dust keeps breeding and breeding. He grabs a newspaper and some Ajax window cleaner, mixing the black of the window’s muck with that of the paper’s ink. Soon enough, the newspaper, having become 1 damp black ball, has found its vocation as a dishrag. Then he wipes a soft cloth over both sides of the glass and new rays of light grace the room in thanks. To do so, he had to get up on the rail outside, overcoming his vertigo to experience the particular pleasure in being between 2 spaces, half inside, half outside, standing on the façade, equal parts human and bird.
Another Technique
There’s another, less poetic technique of window cleaning, which consists of doing just 1 pane each day. The 1 thoroughly clean window stands out in sharp contrast to the 7 filthy others. In this way, reality shifts from the cloudiness of nearsightedness to a farsighted clarity. The world is remade in 8 days.
The Heavy Blue Denim Protecting Me
Feeling the urge to cut myself off from the world, I yank shut the heavy blue denim that protects me. The curtains that seal off the street have to be thick; ideally, opaque window coverings would also be present to shore up the curtains, as in those respectable houses where rivals are assassinated in the total secrecy afforded by opaque drapes. The piece of denim I use is a single bolt—the better to keep out the daylight. In general, I only draw the curtain when night falls, but sometimes too when my office is bathed in sunlight so bright that I’m blinded. At night, to make sure that nobody can see me from outside, I perform 1 simple test: I turn on the lights, I poke my head between the curtain and the window, and I watch as I wave my hand at myself from inside, staging a little shadow-puppet performance, even having a bit of fun making obscene gestures. If my hand stays invisible, my mind lights up.
Verso
At nightfall, he catches his reflection in the window of the facing building; a hologram on the glass, beyond which seems to be a bedroom, he sees himself pouring himself a glass.
Diplomatic Curtness
I always pull the curtain from left to right, from where my friend the light barely shines to where it pours in. The too-thin rod and the too-heavy weight dragging it down keep the curtain from being easily drawn all the way open or closed; 1 strong yank usually gets the job done, but this overemphatic gesture of mine sometimes pulls the little curtain-rod screws out of the wall. Every time I set the scene, then, I have to be diplomatic: using enough strength to move the fabric, but not so much that it’ll bring everything crashing down.
Wanted Dead or Alive
He’s had 0 contact with the office’s outdoor shutters. They’re always open, there on the façade, and he’s never had any reason to touch them. Suddenly, though, he imagines these 2 shutters shut—indicating either a place FOR SALE, or an occupant dead. He shuts all the windows—a new experience—then goes outside and looks up from the street. 3rd floor windows all shuttered—but he’s still alive.
3rd-Floor Program
This building has 5 floors. You’ve been put on the 3rd floor. You’ll live there happily, not too low down or too high up. Time will go by. You won’t need an elevator. You’ll pity the 1st-floor residents, but you’ll be jealous of those on the 4th. You’ll get used to it.
Bibliotheca Alexandrina
Now I’ve come to the other bookshelf, which, as I deal with an overflow of books, has become an add-on that doubles my personal Library of Alexandria. Bought for €800 at a flea market, in the trente glorieuses style, standing on 8 rectangular black iron feet and leaving 1 empty 22 cm space above the floor, it boasts 3 vertical boards holding 6 shelves each, to which I might add the shelves’ little roof terrace.
Continuity
This freestanding addition extends the alphabetical continuum of my library. The last book there was How I Wrote Certain of My Books by Raymond Roussel, and the 1st book here is Henry Rousso’s The Vichy Syndrome. Rousseau is the best-represented author in R, the only 18th-century author I actually like, notwithstanding Sade, whose stately black S adorns the spine of my Pauvert editions. Sachs anticipates Sade, and Sartre their mutual enemy follows them at a distance. The letter T begins with Tarkos, a poet who died tragically at age 39, the climacteric age at which I, in publishing my book on Maurice Sachs, could say I was born as an author, and runs on to the biography of Truffaut, my real-life hero, and the poems of Tsvetaeva. U is a hapax legomenon (the sole instance of a word in a text) in the person of Ungaretti, whose distichs I often repeat to myself (M’illumino / d’immenso). Valéry/Voltaire could not be more French, and Walser/Woolf could not be more wonderful. X is absent, as is Y (I’m not counting that copy of the Yi Jing my mother gave me), and Z, which starts with Zabrana, is as usual filled with many volumes of Zola, the only 1 of which I’ve enjoyed being The Kill, that novel of flesh and gold that nicely sums up all the human aspirations of these last few centuries of the future.
Quo Vadis?
Despite my steady progress down these literary train tracks, there reigns over this rugged terrain a certain entropic tendency. And so, breaking with my principle of alphabetical classification, this bibliostructure also holds the totality of 1 specific category, the diaries and journals of writers (with internal alphabetical classification, from Barbellion to Woolf), a genre for which I nurse a well-known partiality. The passage of days is also incarnated here by my Quo Vadis day planners, on shelf number 2, which sit in orderly succession from 1997 to the present day in formats distinct from the preceding years’ planners as seen in the dentist’s cabinet (← LIVING ROOM). This black forest (black, that is, except for the year 1998, which had its leatherette cover thrown into the trash) contains the objective side of my life.
Roof Terrace
Controversial as an urban planner, Le Corbusier, in inventing the roof terrace, was also criticized as an architect; but, from the point of view of interior design, this great pioneer deserves all our esteem. Who hasn’t turned the upper surfaces of their furniture into roof terraces? The freestanding bookcase, much as I feared, has had its top colonized by a motley row of books. On the left are my bilingual dictionaries—Bailly for ancient Greek, Gaffiot for Latin, Robert & Collins for English—preceding, contrary to my principles, 6 vertical piles lying flat. Merely looking at this overcrowding is almost as exhausting as my constant pacing; I want nothing more than to get far away from my overfull shelves as quickly as I can, into a thoroughly new and empty space—though not silent, for that would mean my grave.
Spatiogen
Only 2 nonbook items are on this roof. The 1st is a black vase that, like its 2 brothers in the living room and the bedroom, holds 0 flowers. I might joke that I’ve deflowered it, though nobody ever offered me up their, ahem, flower to begin with. I’ve hidden this vase behind several volumes to silence any utilitarian objection and so avoid throwing it out, since my aesthetic side would rather hold on to it a while longer. The 2nd is my beautiful squirrel, reclining like a Roman on a couch of catalogs: a stuffed creature that I picked up on the street, probably stolen and then abandoned there as part of the revenge of some opponent of taxidermy, which art makes me think less of dying than of merely keeping up appearances. Its dark-brown fur gleaming, its eyes black marbles, this animal frozen on a branch is grabbing a huge pinecone with its clawed fingers. I didn’t pay for the remains of this transfigured rat: I feel as though my rescuing it turned it into a totem.
The only companion animal I appreciate is the cat. I spent 17 years sharing a space with that species, which asks only for gratifying inattention. A cat ratifies an apartment, but I don’t know whether a new 1 would get along with this “old mole,” as Hamlet called his father’s ghost (and a nickname I’ve happily taken on ever since reading that play).
Anti-Bartleby
Turning around 1 more time in my office where I scriven, I realize that I prefer it, even admire it, less for its harmony—which moving a single piece of furniture would completely undo, and which I’d have to re-create, somehow, if I ever settled into a new place—than for its simple existence: because I’ve “had” kitchens before, I’ve had entryways, and I’ve had bedrooms, but this is the 1st time I’ve ever had an office of my own.
Brrring!
Another ring of the doorbell makes me jump. I turn toward the living room—not to go back to the entryway, though, but rather to enter the bedroom.