Flaubert's Trois Contes, Lefebvre's Production de l'espace

I read Henri Lefebvre's Production de l'espace because an article in New Scientist mentioned it as a classic. I didn't think much of it, at least in part because I don't think I understood it. I may have read it without concentrating, but on the other hand I did teach myself rudimentary quantum physics and I did read Sartre's dissertation Being and Nothingness (in the original French) when I was sixteen...so I am fairly confident about my intellectual capacity. I was on page thirty when I noticed we hadn't gotten out of the great philosophers yet. There isn't a footnote or an index in the damn book -- wish my own editors were that indulgent. Also I disagree that gender relations and relations of production produce space: I think at most they allocate or divide it. So there. Well, I give myself A for effort.

I was primarily interested in Flaubert's short stories because they were written in the period where he became neurotically fixated on creating perfection: apparently he wrote and rewrote the most minute detail in order to achieve harmony in his words. I admire that, although it does lead to a career like Harper Lee's, or a workday like James Joyce. I admire balance between melos and opsis, between the ear and the eye, and even the greatest authors only achieve it some of the time: Francois Mauriac and Therese Desqueyroux, Pearl Buck and The Good Earth. But I'm even less convinced that this is the province of anyone else but the poet, or that it can be achieved by effort. I think it is like being in the zone: it just happens, and it's wonderful and ephemeral and rare.