and now, because real-live human event happenings are saying these things in my real, live human life … contexts in which the word “curate” should never be used:
- conversation (“how can we curate a conversation that addresses that dialectic in practice?”)
- publications (“journal / magazine / quarterly curated by…” no, no, wait! there’s a word for it. it starts with an “e”. edible? edict? huh.)
- social media (q: “aren’t we kind of curating an identity through facebook?”) (a: no.)
- any extension of your person (“i’d like to, but i need to curate my fingernails.”)
- …or clothing (in fact, any aspect of your personal appearance is off limits. sorry.)
- other stuff (just … if you’re not sure, use another word. preeze?)
i have a bunch of photos to put up, but clearly i’d rather be complaining about weird, faux-intellectual bastardizations of english. no, but really, i’ll put them up soon.
i’ve been reading graham greene’s the quiet american for the past few days. it’s a strange match to the crying of lot 49, which is what i was reading before. i tried very sincerely to wade through pynchon’s dense, schizophrenic prose, but dried up around page eighty. (how some people have proposed that pynchon and salinger are one and the same is completely beyond me.) in contrast, reading greene feels like meeting an old friend again. it continually blows my mind the things graham greene could write without sounding preachy or fake. he makes it look so effortless.
” ‘quatre cent vingt-et-un?‘ he asked.
‘why not?’
we began to throw and it seemed impossible to me that i could ever have a life again, away from the rue gambetta and the rue catinat, the flat taste of vermouth cassis, the homely click of dice, and the gunfire traveling like a clock hand around the horizon.
i said, ‘i’m going back.’
‘home?’ pietri asked, throwing a four-to-one.
‘no. england.’
well, it’s christmas eve. i feel terrible. i started a project called liminal. you should check it out. i’ll be adding to it as i damn well please. (that is, desperately often, in a brazen attempt to defer beginning the third draft of metabolism. ) really lousy.
well, after around two months of shuffling my feet, i’ve finished anna karenina. personally, my interest dropped off dramatically after about 200,000 words (or, you know, halfway) and i found it hard to come to terms with a resolution that i felt bore little or no relation to the substantive action of the book. but then again, i’m really not in a position to criticize leo tolstoy.
anyway, speaking of shuffling your feet, if you’re planning to do that, you should do it to the song “ripe” by givers, which is the only song i can bring to mind which begins with something resembling “chopsticks” and winds up in a kind of orgiastic explosion. (truthfully, though, how many can there be?)
i’m sorry to say i don’t have a raft of pictures soaked deep in the spanish sun to share with you (i’m waiting until i get access to a computer that has a screen larger than a postage stamp), but i’ll share a few just to be sociable. hope you’re all grand!
