Can a 50-year-old book on Paris help repair your attention span?

I don’t journal. To be honest, I don’t think using the word “journal” as a verb should be acceptable in polite society.

But there I was on a sunny afternoon last month, settling into my spot on a green park bench, beneath a row of London plane trees whose leaves were just beginning to yellow, in the corner of a mid-sized square in the sixth arrondissement of Paris. I proceeded to place my iPhone face down next to me, pull out a small notebook and a red pen, and earnestly make notes for the next hour about everything that came into my field of vision. 

My goal was two-fold: to honor the work of the experimental French writer Georges Perec, whose writing on domesticity and the city has established a small but expanding beachhead on my Yale syllabi over the last couple of years, and maybe at the same time do something to shore up my attention span, which like yours has been decaying at an alarming rate.