In October 1974, Georges Perec sat for three days at cafés around Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris, determined to record everything in his notebook: passing buses and cars, the movements of pigeons across the sky, overheard conversations, changes in the light, people entering and leaving the local church, and so on. These observations became Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien, first published in the French journal Cause commune in 1975.1 It sounds tedious, but this is actually a beautiful read. Few pieces of writing capture better the existential texture of everyday minutiae — what Perec would term the infra-ordinary — than these notes. In just sixty-odd pages, Tentative… breathes with life and mortality; whether this is by accident or design, I can’t say. In any case, what Perec is doing here is demonstrating that it’s entirely possible to create a fully realised text out of scattered fragments, instead of clearly structured narratives.2
But if I mention the book today, it isn't for its literary merit. I’m more interested in how it gestures toward a practice that can help us write on those days when ideas aren’t forthcoming. Sketching, is its name.