Thursday, January 12, 2017


A small room inside a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.

In "The Bed" (1974), George Perec writes:

The bed (or, if you prefer, the page) is a rectangular space, longer than it is wide,  in which, or on which, we normally lie longways.

It is on the bed that I read about my dream as I am having it, as writing, the laptop open, powered down, asleep like me.

Hours pass.

And the laptop awakes to Sky's now-more-than-ever article on Mapplethorpe, his 1982 picture of Louise Bourgeois. Such nice writing! It opens like this:

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts can’t send me Robert Mapplethorpe’s most explicit and notorious photographs, despite exhibiting them. It doesn’t have the copyright to do so. Instead, I’m granted access to a slim, gauzy collection of centered, covered nudes, suggestive stamens, and celebrity portraits. I’m grateful for Louise Bourgeois’s picture, in this mix, which pierces the sun-bleached parasol of its press package with her conspiratorial grin, her fur-shirt vaunting while she crooks an arm over a penile sculpture, a forefinger positioned at the head of its tumescent head. Two large balls swell behind her. 

Perec again:

The bed is thus the individual space par excellence, the elementary space of the body (the bed-monad), the one which even the man completely crippled by debts has the right to keep: the bailiffs don't have power to seize your bed.

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