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.’
a few things. in no particular order:
- lest we forget, the vicky mendoza diagonal.
- new photos coming to liminal (flatiron district and fort greene).
- this is good, i’ve been listening to this. or a better-known, old (august) flame.
- in re the never-ending, agonizing, and at times hilarious / frightening republican primary: NPR and everyone else, in the course of considering this “divisive” primary’s effects on the eventual GOP candidate’s performance in the general election, please refrain at all times from comparing this race to the democratic primary of 2008. that was competitive because two segments of the liberal electorate were excited by two different (but strong) candidates. this one is competitive because no one can get excited at all by the only candidate granted the benediction of sufficient malleability by the united corporations of america.
requiescat in pace, chica. you were good and you will be missed.
