About the Infra-Ordinary
Observing the Unobserved
I’ve always been an observer and cataloger of details, a traveler, and a writer.
Everywhere I’ve gone — whether a new neighborhood in my home city, somewhere I’ve traveled for work, or a city abroad — I’ve always learned places by foot, capturing the minutiae and granular details and moving my awareness outward. I’ve mapped the “emotions” of a place, the vibe, and the overall psychology. Everywhere I go, I articulate it’s personality.
In 2016, I went back to school to finish a degree I’d been working on, on and off, for nearly 20 years. By chance, I took a class that was my favorite of all my 20 years of college classes, The City of the Future, a philosophical and psychological examination of everything related to cities — from security to social issues to public transport and everything between.
This class gave me the language, the terminology, and the concepts to describe what I do and my relationship to all my traveling: flâneur (flâneuse, in my case), dérive, psychogeography, the Situationists, etc.
That class, and those concepts, led me to Lauren Elkin and her book (an important part of my senior thesis), “Flâneuse.”
I am from the Northeast orginally (a fact everyone learns within the first 5 minutes of talking to me), but because of my husband’s work, spent 15 years on the West Coast (LA and Seattle). I desperately missed northeast cities and northeast transit, the ease of moving from place to place and the breadth of cities available to me any time I had a mere couple hours to spare. I also missed the ease of traveling to Europe. Still, I often went out wandering in Seattle, always finding something new, wearing down well-worn paths, in all the neighborhoods I frequented.
But then COVID happened, and I stopped wandering, stopped flâneuring. I also stopped writing, something I never thought could happen,
Last year, an opportunity arose to move back east, and we jumped on it. Settled in our new home city in the most northeast state you can get (Maine), I slowly began wandering again. Driving, walking, and then… I took a train several hours south. And again. I picked up and finished reading Elkins book, “No. 91/92: diary of a year on the bus,” a short book that consisted of nothing but small, daily observations during her bus commute in Paris.
Reading the notice, she decided to be vigilant when using her phone: she would carry out a public transport vigil, using it to take in the world around her and notice all the things she would miss if she continued using it the way she had been, the way everyone does--to surf the web, check social media, maintain her daily sense of self through digital interaction. Her goal became to observe the world through the screen of her phone, rather than using her phone to distract from the world.
I also finally picked up another book I’d started years ago, recommended by my City of the Future prof, All Over Coffee, a sort of comic strip of observations and conversations overheard in coffee shops by the author, Paul Madonna. I began plotting yet another train trip, this time knowing I wanted to begin a project based on the idea of observation and using these trips—tentatively titled “Notes from the Quiet Car.” But then from Elkins’ “No.91/92” I learned of another concept, the “infra-ordinary.” Coined by be Georges Perec, the “infra-ordinary” refers to all the things that go unnoticed. As Elkins said in her book, “But the reason I keep thinking of Perec is because of another essay he wrote the year before that, called ‘Approaches to What?’, in which he argues that as a culture, we are preoccupied by the ‘big event', the untoward, the extra-ordinary’; the daily newspapers are full of plane crashes and tragedies, and totally ignore the daily — the everyday, what Perec calls the ‘infra-ordinary’. The attempt to exhaust a place in Paris is an act of cataloguing that is destined to fail, yet what matters is not the importance of what is observed, but its triviality. The very futility of asking such questions, he writes, is ‘exactly what makes them just as essential, if not more so, as all the other questions by which we’ve tried in vain to lay hold on our truth.’”
And so this Substack was born. And while is starts with trains and train stations (and mostly observations of people), I realized I needed to go far beyond just trains.
This Substack Is for Fellow Observers, the “Observant-Curious,” and Those Who Notice the Unnoticed
I’m trying not to over-explain these things - if you are an observer, one who gets lost in the poetry of the every day, you understand what this is all about. If you’re not… the “whys” can’t really be explained, you’ll have to come see for yourself. I hope you’ll find this an enjoyable read, but most of all, I hope it inspires someone to look up, to look around, and to see all there is just waiting to be noticed around you.
How Often?
As a neurodivergent person, it’s folly to tell you I’ll stick to a schedule. I can promise there will be no less than once a month—but it’s likely much more. (My creativity comes in fits and spurts—there will be times I’ll post many within a week or two, and others only once or twice a month.)
I will also regularly post reading lists and resources.