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, the victim of an insidious mix of reels, memes, algorithms, the buzz of text messages and WhatsApp missives, and the constant nagging thought that whatever is on our phone screens is more interesting than what is right there in front of us in what we used to romantically call architectural space, or just real life.

One of Perec’s most curious books—which is really saying something—is “An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris.” It turns fifty this year. The “Place,” or public square, in question is Saint-Sulpice, first laid out as a public garden and now a hardscaped urban plaza, about two acres in size. It is watched over from its eastern edge by an imposing cathedral of the same name, built beginning in the middle 17^th century by a rotating cast of architects and now the city’s second-largest church after Notre Dame, as well as the spot where Baudelaire and the Marquis de Sade were baptized and Victor Hugo, in 1822, was married to Adèle Fouché.

Perec, born in 1936 in Paris to working-class immigrant Jewish parents, was on the morning of October 18, 1974, when he made his first observational visit to Saint-Sulpice, a writer and filmmaker with a modest following and a member of the experimental-writing collective OuLiPo. That group (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, or Potential Literature Workshop) had been co-founded by Raymond Queneau, probably the single biggest influence on Perec’s work, in 1960.

Perec sat down at a table outside a cigarette shop along one edge of the plaza and began what he called “an inventory” of “strictly visible things.” (I’m relying here on the translation by Marc Lowenthal.) His goal, as the book’s title suggests, was as quixotic as it was straightforward: to exhaust the plaza in front of him, to empty it out, by naming everything in it, fixed and mobile, architectural and human, in a series of entries that reads variously like an experimental poem, a shopping list, and a string of text messages, with humble and steadfast city buses (the 86, the 70) becoming the unexpected stars of the show.

This was a quest that owed something to the Situationists and to the completist ambitions of Queneau’s work. It was in certain ways a French version of what Holly Whyte was doing, around the same time, in New York. In sensibility—curious, approachable, and discerning—it was a sibling of Charles Moore’s underrated writing on architecture and cities.

Yet from its first lines “An Attempt” is stamped by Perec’s singular style, at once straightforward and lyrical:

Most people are using at least one hand: they’re holding a bag, a briefcase, a shopping bag, a cane, a leash with a dog at the end, a child’s hand

 A truck delivers beer in metal casks (Kanterbraii, beer of Maitre Kanter)

The 86 goes to Saint-Germain-des-Près 

A double-decker "Cityrama" bus

A blue Mercedes truck

A brown Printemps Brummell truck

The 84 goes to Porte de Champerret

The 87 goes to Champ-de-Mars

He goes away for a bit and comes back in the early afternoon:

Three taxis at the taxi stand. A 96. A 63. A bike courier.

Deliverymen delivering beverages. An 86. A little girl with a schoolbag on her shoulders.

Wholesale potatoes. A lady taking three children to school (two of them have long red hats with pom-poms)

There is an undertaker's van in front of the church.

A 96 goes by.

People are gathering in front of the church (for a funeral procession?)

An 87. A 70. A 63.

Rue Bonaparte, a cement mixer, orange.

A basset hound. A man with a bow tie. An 86.

The wind is making the leaves on the trees move.

A 70.

He returns for several visits over the following two days. He ends the book essentially as he began, but with a touch of melancholy creeping in that, as a reader, you can never be sure is Perec’s or your own:

A dark blue Volkswagen crosses the church square (I've seen it before)

Rarity of complete lulls: there is always a passerby in the distance, or a car passing by

The 96

Tourists are photographing each other in front of the church 

The church square is empty. A tourist bus (Peters Reisin), empty, crosses it 

The 63 

It is five to two

The pigeons are on the plaza. They all fly off at the same time.

Four children. A dog. A little ray of sun. The 96. It is two o’clock

One of the things I love about that last line is the way it trails off without punctuation, leaving Perec’s stay in the plaza, theoretically, open-ended (and, of course, anticipating the way most us now text). 

My own experiment à la Perec began in Place Saint-Sulpice at 12:14 p.m. on the sunny and slightly overcast afternoon of Oct. 14. I found myself distracted for a minute or two, but soon enough I managed to get down to Perecian business:

looking down to make notes, I see that my sweater has a tiny hole, the size of a pencil tip

suddenly got quieter in our corner. Nobody on my bench now

I hear “Maneater” by Hall and Oates from a passing car

I wouldn’t, if I were you
I know what she can do
She’s deadly, man, she could really rip your world apart
Mind over matter

…

Fiat has new headlight design

I hear a cane dragging 

baby stroller-->across street; I can see feet and tiny fingers

“Reuse Recycle” on a bag

I am looking almost directly into sun

Old Rolls? I resist the urge to Google Lens it

I resist the urge to check time

yellow orangina can—tall

man sits down heavily next to me

96 Gare Montparnasse

…

Van with KONE on the side

“Dedicated to People Flow”

58 Vanves

dog barking in distance

when it’s quiet you can hear bike gears

cobblestones in front of church now reflecting sun; easier to see their pattern

a man with a kid on his shoulders says, “Saint-Sulpice”

a pause

“c’est place la” 

I did feel, as I stood up to leave the square and walk back to my Airbnb, a significantly sharpened sense of perception, not to mention a pleasing sort of mental calm. And though both faded after just a few minutes, I was left wondering if I shouldn’t make exercises like this one part of a regular routine: not so much an attempt to clear my mind, as is the point of many meditation practices, as to fill it with non-digital information by mentally clearing the world around us of objects. This might be a first step toward building back up our atrophied powers of attention and observation.

J.G. Ballard imagines a similar scenario, though with a darker cast, in his 1967 short story “The Overloaded Man.” That one’s on my syllabus too, as is Perec’s great and strange Species of Spaces, published in 1974.

News & Notes

On the subject of attention spans and their possible rehabilitation, I recommend this essay Jael Goldfine wrote last year for New York Review of Architecture. Perec makes an appearance.

Dezeen should be embarrassed by this deeply credulous profile of President Trump’s chief design officer, Joe Gebbia, which doesn’t mention the words “East Wing,” “ballroom,” or “gilded appliqué,” even in passing, nor the ways in which Gebbia, on X, loves to repost far-right Islamophobic nonsense by Christoper Rufo and other MAGA favorites. “Design is in the White House”? Really?

I love what Justin Beal had to say on IG about the sad fate of Marcel Breuer’s Whitney, the subject of last week’s Punch List: “Everything I feel compelled to say about Sotheby’s takeover of the Breuer might neatly be summarized by the fact that they took one of the most elegant, comfortable benches on the island of Manhattan and turned it into a vitrine to sell more, more, more. This gesture, like so many others, belies any claim to care about the building or the public’s access to it. An art fair would have shown more restraint. An Apple store, more tact.”

The Louvre may be forced to rethink its ambitious renovation plan in the aftermath of last month’s break-in.

Finally, it seems my item last week on Architectural Record’s milquetoast Q&A with David Adjaye, helping usher him in from the #MeToo cold, really touched a nerve. Josephine Minutillo, who conducted the interview in question and is Record’s Editor in Chief, fired off a rather muddled and unhinged email to me last night defending her approach. She also appeared (again: muddled) to accuse me, without evidence, of having broken an embargo to review Adjaye’s Princeton Art Museum, since she couldn’t seem to fathom how I could have beaten her magazine and the New York Times to the punch otherwise.

In a plot twist, a subsequent email from her this morning has left me wondering if she actually knows how an embargo works, at least outside the clubby world of the trade journal, where access is routinely traded for specific tiers of coverage. I now think it’s possible that she thinks that an embargo can be imposed unilaterally by an institution to cover any journalist who might want to write about a given project, in order to safeguard an exclusive given to Record, the Times, or some other outlet.

In fact an embargo doesn’t exist until both parties explicitly agree to its terms. (I sent a note to Minutillo asking her to clarify her understanding of these issues; she declined to do so.) So let me stress for the record that my July visit to see the Princeton museum was not covered by any embargo; I was invited to tour the building without conditions. The same is true of my visit to Peter Zumthor’s LACMA. In fact in three decades of writing about architecture, including on several occasions for Record, I’ve never broken an embargo. (I also arranged embargoes from the other side of the fence while working in the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office, so I have a pretty well-rounded, battle-tested sense of how they work.) I beat Record on Princeton the old-fashioned way: by doing journalism.

That seemed to leave Minutillo big mad. “Good luck with your blog,” she wrote at the end of her second email, in a note dripping, like the first one, with derision.

I think I speak for many readers of Record during her editorship when I say: We’d be grateful if you brought some of that same spirit and fight to, you know, covering architecture. The interview with Adjaye might have been a good place to start.

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