Georges Perec en la puerta insular de Nueva York kaosenlared.net - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from kaosenlared.net Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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