Tag: Anne Carson

“Little Racket” — Anne Carson

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“Little Racket”

by

Anne Carson

Sunday evening, evening gray. All day the storm did not quite storm. Clouds closed in, sulked, spat. We put off swimming. Took in the chairs. Finally (about seven) a rumbling high up. A wind went round the trees tossing each once and releasing arbitrary rivulets of cool air downward, this wind which came apart, the parts swaying out, descending, bumping around the yard awhile not quite on the count then a single chord ran drenched across the roof, the porch and stopped. We all breathed. Maybe that’s it, maybe it’s over, the weatherman is often wrong these days, we can still go swimming (roll call? glimpse of sun?) when all at once the sluices opened, broke a knot and smashed the sky to bits, which fell and keep falling even now as dark comes on and fabled night is managing its manes and the birds, I can hear from their little racket, the birds are burning up and down like holy fools somewhere inside it—far in where they keep the victim, smeared, stinking, hence the pageantry, hence the pitchy cries, don’t keep saying you don’t hear it too.

“On Trout” — Anne Carson

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“On Ovid” — Anne Carson

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“On Major and Minor” — Anne Carson

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“On Rectification” — Anne Carson

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“Sumptuous Destitution” — Anne Carson

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“Sumptuous Destitution”

by

Anne Carson

“Sumptuous destitution”

Your opinion gives me a serious feeling. I would like to be what you deem me.

(Emily Dickinson letter 319 to Thomas Higginson)

is a phrase

You see my position is benighted.

(Emily Dickinson letter 268 to Thomas Higginson)

scholars use

She was too enigmatical a being for me to solve in an hours interview.

(Thomas Higginson letter 342a to Emily Dickinson)

of female

God made me [Sir] Master—I didn’t be—myself.

(Emily Dickinson letter 233 to Thomas Higginson)

silence.

Rushing among my small heart—and pushing aside the blood—

(Emily Dickinson letter 248 to Thomas Higginson)

Save what you can, Emily.

And when I try to organize—my little Force explodes—and leaves me bare and charred.

(Emily Dickinson letter 271 to Thomas Higginson)

Save every bit of thread.

Have you a little chest to put the Alive in?

(Emily Dickinson letter 233 to Thomas Higginson)

One of them may be

By Cock, said Ophelia.

(Emily Dickinson letter 268 to Thomas Higginson)

the way out of here

“On Walking Backwards” — Anne Carson

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Flann O’Brien & Anne Carson (Violating building codes leads to a web of obssession) | David Berman

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From The Minus Times #29, as republished in The Minus Times Collected. 

“Short Talk on Vicuñas” — Anne Carson

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“Short Talk on Vicuñas”

by

Anne Carson

A mythical animal, the vicuña fares well
in the volcanic regions of northern Peru.
Light thunders down on it, like Milton
at his daughters. Hear that?—they
are counting under their breath.
Think about style of life for a
moment. When you take up your
axe, listen. Hoofbeats. Wind.
It is they who make us at home
here, not the other way around.

More short talks by Anne Carson at BOMB.

Read Anne Carson’s short story “Flaubert Again”

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Objects would suddenly fall or fall apart, cars go off course, dogs drop to their knees. The Army was doing sound experiments at a nearby desert in those days. I was nervous all the rest of my life, she wrote. She was a novelist and enjoyed some success. But always she had the fantasy of a different kind of novel, and although gradually realizing that all novelists share this fantasy, she persisted in it, without knowing what the novel would be except true and obvious while it was happening. Now I’m writing, she would be able to say.

She broke off.

Where would you put a third arm? is a question asked in creativity-assessment tests, or so I have heard. Will this different kind of novel be like that, like a third arm? I hate creativity, she said. Certainly not like a third arm. It would be less and less and less, not more. Barthes died, he never got there. She named other attempts—Flaubert, etc. Other renunciators, none of them clear on what to renounce. This chair I’m sitting in, she thought. Its fantastic wovenness, a wicker chair, old, from the back porch, brought in for winter. Me sitting here, by a lamp, wrapped in a quilt, beside the giant black windows, this December blackness, this 4:30 a.m. kitchen as it reflects on the glass. The glass too cold to touch. The loudness of the silence of a kitchen at night. The small creak of my chair.

The first three paragraphs of “Flaubert Again,” a new short story by Anne Carson. You can read the whole story (all eight paragraphs of it) at The New Yorker.

“On Homo Sapiens” — Anne Carson

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“We’ve Only Just Begun,” more new fiction from Anne Carson

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They got into our car at a stoplight. It was cold. We never lock the doors in back. There were two of them. At the apartment they terrorized us. It took all day, most of the night. There was beating and thrashing and scorn and damage and fear. Sounds I didn’t know could come out of us. Above all it was boring. In the sense that it was all actions and all bad; there is no life of the mind available amid beating and thrashing and scorn and damage and fear, no space at the back of oneself to go to and think anything else. Long stretches of boredom that fill up with something like thinking but there is nothing to think except what it is, what it is to be in this, and what it is to be in this is simply and utterly nothing but what it is, no volume around it, no beach, no reverie. At one point Washington raised his arms to me and blood ran down both arms to the floor. I watched it hit the tiles, it would have been something to think about, cleaning blood off tiles. Sometimes it’s better to just replace them. Eventually in fact that’s what we would do, replace the white ones. We kept the black ones, which were sort of speckled anyway. But “eventually” is not a concept of mind that exists amid beating and thrashing and scorn and damage and fear. Even when they had Washington dance in the red-hot shoes, I wasn’t imagining analogies, Snow White, I was soaked into Washington’s dread, it had no edge. That is what boredom is, the moment with no edge.

To survive you need an edge.

Read the rest of “We’ve Only Just Begun” at Harper’s.

“1 = 1,” new fiction from Anne Carson

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She visits others. Before they’re up, dawn, she walks to the lake, listening to Bach, the first clavichord exercise, which she plans to have played at her funeral someday, has had this plan since she first heard the music and, thinking of it, she weeps lightly. The lake is whipped by wind and tides (big lake) doing what tides do, she never knows in or out. There is a man standing on shore and a big dog swimming back to him with stick in mouth. This repeats. The dog does not tire. She peels a swim cap onto her head, goggles, enters the water, which is cold but not shocking. Swims. High waves in one direction. The dog is gone. Now she is alone. There is a pressure to swim well and to use this water correctly. People think swimming is carefree and effortless. A bath! In fact, it is full of anxieties. Every water has its own rules and offering. Misuse is hard to explain. Perhaps involved is that commonplace struggle to know beauty, to know beauty exactly, to put oneself right in its path, to be in the perfect place to hear the nightingale sing, see the groom kiss the bride, clock the comet. Every water has a right place to be, but that place is in motion. You have to keep finding it, keep having it find you. Your movement sinks into and out of it with each stroke. You can fail it with each stroke. What does that mean, fail it.

Read the rest of Anne Carson’s short story “1 = 1” at The New Yorker.

Three Books (or, My three favorite reading experiences in 2015)

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These were my three favorite (?!) reading experiences in 2015:

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Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. 1973 first edition trade paperback by Viking. Cover design and illustration by Marc Getter.img_1218

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson. First Vintage Contemporaries edition, trade paperback, 1998. Cover design by Carol Devine Carson.

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Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed. 1978 mass market paperback by Bard Books, a division of Avon Books. No designer or illustrator credited.

Riff on recent reading

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I can’t seem to muster language lately, to make the words do what I want them to do.

I’ve read a number of excellent (or really good) books in the past few months and haven’t been able to write more than the first few sentences of an ostensible “review” before giving up…mostly because those first few sentences usually resemble the kind of boring moaning dithering whining I’m doing now.

There were the two red books by Anne Carson: Autobiography of Red and Red Doc>.  BLCKDGRD sent them to me back in September and I wolfed them down. Autobiography is the superior volume (which is saying something because Red Doc> is grand stuff too). What is it? What is Autobiography of Red? A novel? A poem? A history? An essay? Shall I get bogged down in description? No? Instead, let me be clear:

What I want to think/feel when I read is, How is this possible? How is this allowed?

–which is what I thought/felt reading Autobiography of Red.

From Autobiography of Red:


What else, what else?

Okay, so after the Carson I did manage a review Kazuo Ishiguro’s fantasy novel The Buried Giant—why did a review come out so much easier than anything on Carson, or, say, The Free-Lance Pall Bearers by Ishmael Reed (which I read after the Ishiguro)? Ishiguro’s book was familiar territory, fairly easy to describe—the Carson novel-poems and Reed’s picaresque performance are wholly different animals than the conventional novel.

The Free-Lance Pall Bearers by Ishmael Reed is, I hate to say, dazzling. I know what a lazy term that is, but the novella is just that—it dazzles. It zips. It zings and zounds and skips and scatters, and just when you think you have a handle on its allegorical outlines, it sticks out its tongue and jeers at you. The Free-Lance Pall Bearers is a mirthful and merciless satire on the USA written in a howling vernacular and set in an outhouse. It’s abject, picaresque, volatile, hysterical (in several of the senses of that word). I will relieve myself from summarizing the plot and instead offer this image of its perfect epigraphs:


Okay and so then I read Joanna Walsh’s collection Vertigo. The stories here hum together, evoking consciousness—consciousness’s anxieties, desires, its imaginative consolations. It deserves a full proper review (or just take my word and buy it from The Dorothy Project), but in the meantime, a wonderful passage from “Half the World Over”:


I also read two more by Le Guin: Rocannon’s World (I hope to have an exchange on it with the novelist Adam Novy posted some time in the not-too-distant future), The Dispossessed, which I’ve read three times.

Also: Paul Kirchner’s The Bus 2, which, again, full review in the not-so-far-off-future. But until then, a sample:

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Thinking about Proust (Anne Carson)

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image

From Red Doc>.

Two by Anne Carson (Books acquired, 9.14.2015)

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Still recovering from Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. Haven’t felt so zapped by a book in a long time. Amazing. Try to write something about it on here soon. Million thanks again to BLCKDGRD for sending it my way.