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 easy self-centeredness. Its great strength is that it can take on serious subjects without getting bogged down in seriousness. A quick list of exemplars would include Agnès Varda’s documentaries, Sheila Heti’s “How Should A Person Be?,” Roland Barthes’s “Mythologies,” some of David Byrne, most of Geoff Dyer, that Noam Chomsky cartoon Michel Gondry made a few years back, and the scaffolding episode of “How To with John Wilson.”