ESTEEMED WORDSCHMIDT GEORGES PEREC (1936-1982), GONE THESE LAST AND MOURNFUL TWENTY-ONE YEARS, LEAVES BEHIND A GASTRONOMICAL CATALOGUE BY WAY OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. IN OTHER NEWS, COULD YOUR CHILD�S SCHOOL LUNCH PROGRAM OPEN UP A GATEWAY TO HARD DRUG USE?

If newspaper headlines looked more like that, I�d be one happy man. Florid, flowery, purple and prolix, that�s how I want my paper, with headlines like �Crazed Restaurant Patron Shoots, Stabs Way to Fame� or �Deranged Beadle Burgles Dry Goods Concern, Marries Proprietor's Daughter�. Or something. On with today�s top story.

Georges Perec, the French writer best known for his stupefyingly thick hero sandwiches novel La Vie Mode d'Emploi -- Romans, which was translated into the unsatisfyingly titled Life A User's Manual -- Novels, also wrote the longest palindrome ever written, as well as an entire novel (La Disparition) that omits the lettter E. And he took the time to tabulate a list of everything he had ever eaten.

The list appeared in an issue of Granta several years ago, and I really wish I could recall the exact issue (although I have a feeling that the issue was about food). I don�t know whether he kept a daily journal from a young age, or whether he examined his eating habits one day and extrapolated backwards, but it certainly looks convincing enough. And when I say convincing, I don�t necessarily mean appetizing. Perec seemed to relish game fowl and inner organs, stinking soups and rich desserts, meals bookended by wines and liqueurs. French cuisine always seems to me slightly smelly and hung in a state of jellied decomposition, a handed-down brace from hunting aristocracy. It was a bit of a shock to read the list and see that a man could actually live off the stuff (or maybe not, considering his death at forty-six). If I recall correctly, he had organized the list into categories (viandes, tasses, etc) and recorded the number of times he had eaten each dish. My favourite entry is the final one: n coffees. Seldom has mathematical notation spoken to me so directly.

Perec�s menu is certainly the slyest, sparest and most peptic autobiography ever written. Perec, who belonged to the French literary-mathetical group OuLiPo, employed all sorts of constraints on his writing in order to press out the unprecedented. His formal autobiography, W or The Memory of Childhood, alternates between his isolated memories and a story of a dystopian island called W, in which a totalitarian government engages the entire populace in murderous sporting competitions. Eventually you find out that most of Perec�s mother* was killed in a concentration camp, and that the Island of W is a distorted description of camp life. Given such a history, it�s not too surprising that Perec engages in literary puzzles.

Anyway, I was thinking of Perec and his list because on Sunday yesterday I displayed eating habits that could best be called autistic, and if you see me eating cigarette butts or Ivory soap or drinking Windex you�ll understand that�s it�s not as much of a stretch as you previously imagined:

1 bowl spinach seafood soup
1 mixed greens with peanut sauce dressing
1 bag salted soy beans in pods
1 can fried mussels in spicy sauce
2 slices toast
n coffees

I tell you, by the end of the evening The Lotus wouldn�t come near me except to say �Gross� and keep on walking.

parode - exode