Comment by knitandpurl, 2 months ago

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:48:17 +0000

"Now in the little lounge what is left is what remains when there's nothing left: flies, for instance, or advertising bumph slipped under the door by students, proclaiming the benefits of a new toothpaste or offering twenty-five centimes' reduction to every buyer of three packets of washing powder, or old issues of Le Jouet Français, the review he took all his life and to which his subscription didn't run out until a few months after his death, or those things without meaning that lie around on floors and in cupboard corners, you never know how they got there nor why they stayed: three faded flowers of the field; bendy sticks with probably calcinated threads etiolating at each end, an empty Coke bottle, a cake box, opened, still keeping its false raffia string and its legend "Aux Délices de Louis XV, Pastrycooks and Candymakers since 1742" forming a fine oval shape surrounded by a garland and flanked by four puffy-cheeked putti, or behind the door to the landing a kind of cast-iron coatstand, with a mirror cracked roughly Y-shaped into three unequal surface portions, and in the edge of which there is still stuck a postcard showing an incontrovertibly Japanese woman athlete holding a flaming torch at arm's length."
-- Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos, p 27

Wordie: Bumph: Comments

Comment by knitandpurl, 2 months ago