The Translation of a Text Already Within Us
April 16, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Anna Kamienska, “In that Great River: A Notebook,” Poetry Foundation
I like Simone Weil’s idea that writing is actually the translation of a text we already carry within us.
[See Dylan Nice (via Gary Lutz)'s idea of "a text beyond the writer to which the writer submits".]
The Book Next to It
April 15, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Roberto Calasso, “The Art of Fiction 217,” The Paris Review 202, Fall 2012
When looking for a book, you may discover that you were in fact looking for the book next to it.
The Book You Get
April 15, 2013 § Leave a Comment
James Baldwin, “The Art of Fiction No 78,” The Paris Review 91 Spring 1984
You never get the book you wanted, you settle for the book you get.
A Clean and Unmarked Sheet of Whatman Paper
April 5, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Georges Perec, Life A User’s Manual
As each puzzle was finished, the seascape would be “retexturised” so that it could be removed from its backing, returned to the place where it had been painted — twenty years before — and dipped in a detergent solution whence would emerge a clean and unmarked sheet of Whatman paper. Thus, no trace would remain of an operation which would have been, throughout a period of fifty years, the sole motivation and unique activity of its author.
To Remember That We Miss It
April 5, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Yves Bonnefoy, “The Art of Poetry No 69,” interview by Shusha Guppy, The Paris Review 131 Summer 1994
[T]here is nothing before language, for there is no consciousness, and therefore no world, without a system of signs. In fact, it is the speaking-being that has created this universe, even if language excludes him from it. This means that we are deprived through words of an authentic intimacy with what we are, or with what the Other is. We need poetry, not to regain this intimacy, which is impossible, but to remember that we miss it and to prove to ourselves the value of those moments when we are able to encounter other people, or trees, or anything, beyond words, in silence. [via]
Records of Disappearances
April 2, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Chris Rose, “Marie Levallois,” The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure 27 March 2013
All writing has loss at its heart; all books are records of disappearances.
Like the Word on the Tip of Your Tongue
April 2, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Stephen Sparks, “An Imagined Book,” Invisible Stories 31 March 2013
An imagined book cannot be possessed. Any attempt to bring it into mental focus, to remember or conjure it up — which is it? have you held it or has it held you? — leaves you bereft, as if, like the word on the tip of your tongue, the book rests in your hand, nearly. It is a vague shape around which it is impossible to stake words.
When those readers fortunate enough to feel this sense of loss speak of the book, they do so in whispers, not with secrecy, although perhaps a little, but out of reverence and fear that doing so will damn them to forgetfulness. In speaking of the book they diminish it, syllable by syllable, without ever grasping it, a handful of water.
Not to Create Any Art
March 26, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Evan Lavender-Smith, From Old Notebooks
I would be very envious to meet a great artist who had the strength of will not to create any art.
The Project
March 13, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Daniel Levin Becker, Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature
The centerpiece of Roubaud’s oeuvre is a lifelong endeavor called le Projet (the Project), which began with a dream he had in 1961 about deciding to write a novel called The Great Fire of London. He started to act on his decision in waking life but eventually abandoned the project, and has now spent way more time writing about that abandonment than he did working on the novel. There are seven books that collectively constitute the Projet, in that they elaborate, in a pseudo-autobiographical style filled with digressions and interpolations and bifurcations, Roubaud’s failure to stick to the initial Projet. (Very Roubaldian distincrion: the imagined work, which he abandoned in 1978 for reasons he explains in a book called ‘the great fire if London’ (lowercase and in single quotes, to differentiate it from the unrealized dream-novel), is the “bigger project”; the actual published work is the “minimal project.”) “Everything I speak about is, in a way, linked to the old abandoned project,” he told an interviewer in 2008. “And if they’re not true, at least the events are told truthfully, as I remember them.”
Trivialities of Text
March 8, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Kenneth Grahame, “Marginalia,” Pagan Papers, 1898
Without actually suggesting this course to any of our living bards, when, I may ask — when shall that true poet arise who, disdaining the trivialities of text, shall give the world a book of verse consisting entirely of margin? How we shall shove and jostle for large paper copies!
