One of my favourite books is Georges Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood (1975), which intertwines two stories: a fragmentary, dispassionately observed account of Perec’s childhood experience in the lead up to WWII; and a fictional account of a small island in which every aspect of social life is structured in terms of Olympic style sporting competition. Perec wrote an outline for the latter when he was in his early teens. The story has an oblique and yet legibly congruent relation to his own experiences, describing at once a utopia and a paranoid vision. Somehow, in placing these two accounts side by side, and in shaping a curious friction of fantasy and alienated autobiography, an alchemical response occurs. That which is not spoken of, and can never directly be spoken of, is potently summoned. The experience of the Holocaust emerges precisely as this gap between stories – and between modes of recounting and imagining.
In any case, leaving aside the specific theme, Perec’s book serves as a model for the relations of indirection and resonance that can emerge by interleaving two apparently unrelated things. It is within this context that at the same time as pursuing my ALMBWABPBIDCFERTIE project I will also pursue another project that documents my efforts to ascend a range of small bouldering problems in the bush just beyond our back fence. The two projects will be materially interleaved in this blog. The bouldering project will be called something simple like Bouldering Diary.
This blog will be included in the set of ALMBWABPBIDCFERTIE and Bouldering Diary posts, but will not be numerically counted.