In Conversation | Hatty Nestor & Nathalie Olah granta.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from granta.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Mónica De La Torre.
Join us live on Instagram from your cell phone, or watch on YouTube after, for a series of remote visits to artists studios to bring Americas Society s Visual Arts public programs to your home. Every other Wednesday, contemporary artists will dialogue with our Visual Arts department about their work and practice. Check out the series playlist.
About the writer:Â
Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat). Other books include
The Happy End/All Welcomeâa riff on a riff on Kafka s
Amerikaâand
Public Domain. With Alex Balgiu, she co-edited the anthology
Women in Concrete Poetry 1959â79 (Primary Information) and teaches at Brooklyn College and Bardâs MFA program.
Reading Georges Perec’s prose poem“Ellis Island” (reissued this month in a slim, Statue-of-Liberty green edition courtesy of New Directions), I felt inspired to coin a word. A wee bit precious of me, I’ll admit but then, as I may have mentioned already, I was reading a book by Georges Perec. This is the writer who spent the better part of his life tinkering with the alphabet like a child assembling Legos. Surely, I could be permitted one assemblage of my own.
“Chusing” was the word I coined. Defining it would be very un-Perecian of me, but I’m prepared to live with that: chusing (long u) is the act of musing about things in a loose, whimsical, chirpily performative way. It is often buoyant but capable of moments of deep melancholy. Its touch is light, better suited for implying than defining. It doesn’t point; it waves. It delights in trivia, and in its own delight. It is, at heart, a first-person way of looking at things, and as such it often risks lapsing into an