“The distance between two points increases over time. Disconnecting and fragmenting their connections. This is a painful experience, full of bitterness and resentment that ebbs and flows over memories and nostalgics. But there is a gorgeousness that exists in this like pale watercolours over solid black lines. It will always linger, but it becomes a part of you, for better or worse, keeping you who you are and marking you with scars like brands you can never escape or change but must always grow with. I believe in so many things, but that doesn’t make them passions. So why don’t you tell me who you are?”
–Anne Carson, from “Short Talk On Travelling.“ Short Talks (Brick Books, 1992)
“Languages are not algorithms of one another, you cannot match them item for item,” she says, adding “what if [there is] a word that does not intend to be translatable.” She calls this “a word that stops itself,” and writes: “in the presence of a word that stops itself, in that silence, one has the feeling that something has passed us and kept going, that some possibility has got free.” There it is again, that indescribable nearness, the sense of proximity to something words can’t identify.
how is a Greek chorus like a lawyer / they’re both in the business of searching for a precedent / finding an analogy / locating a prior example / so as to be able to say / this terrible thing we’re witnessing now is / not unique you know it happened before / or something much like it / we’re not a loss how to think about this / we’re not without guidance / there is a pattern / we can find an historically parallel case / and file it away under / ANTIGONE BURIED ALIVE FRIDAY AFTERNOON / COMPARE CASE HISTORIES 7, 17 AND 49
“if you are intolerable, let me be the one to tolerate you,” i said, and then i kissed her and tasted the lemon juice on her lips.
and what does it mean that we have not spoken in a decade but i still hear your voice in my head every day?
now the only person i think about is you.
let’s get married right here and now. me and you. in this bed. you don’t even have to put on a white nightgown.
"so please don’t say you’re proud of me when i’ve lost my way” “then can i say: i couldn’t get my mind off you all day”
you are a call to motion. there, all of you, a verb in perfect view.
slap my face, or hold me till winter.
let’s be scared together. let’s pretend that nothing is awful. there’s nothing to fear, just stay right here.
“do you regret?” “i’d do it again. i’d like to believe that i’d do it again and again and again… and what more can i say?”
as she sees him, her heart skips, just once. like it used to. he hears it.
“you dreamt of me?” “no, i thought of you”
now you hang from my lips like the gardens of babylon, with your boots beneath my bed, forever is the sweetest con.
i don’t know where this road will end but i’ll walk it with you hand in hand. do you let me walk with you?
i was thinking that i would like to never have to leave this room. what do you think about that? …let’s just stay here.
sometimes… i still wish we never left that room.
yes, now i know that home is where you are.
in the low lamp light i was free, heaven and hell were words to me. when my time comes around, lay me gently in the cold dark earth. no grave can hold my body down, i’ll crawl home to her.
“i’ll take care of you.” “it’s rotten work.” “not to me. not if its you.”
the seven husbands of evelyn hugo [book] / in the heights [musical]/ movement [song] / falsettos [musical] / elektra (1996) #12 [comic] / portrait of a lady on fire [film] / cowboy like me [song] / hadestown [musical] / daredevil vol. 2 #37 [comic] / catch me if you can [musical] / work song [song] / grief lessons: four plays by euripides [play]
A painful and unsettling poetry cycle, The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson, was the next book cover I designed. Although my first idea for this cover struck me as more intriguing and obtuse than this one, I have not yet found the best way to iterate that idea. This approach conveys much of the emotional ambiguity of Carson’s narrative.
I’ll be posting more cover designs over the next few weeks on this blog, but you can check them out on my website, too.
[image description: a black and white comic featuring anthy himemiya and nanami kiryuu from revolutionary girl utena. nanami speaks down a wired phone, smiling and twirling her hair in her finger as she says “we begin in the dark, and birth is the death of us.” anthy replies “who said that,” also speaking down a wired phone and smiling. nanami says “hegel,” with a smug look on her face, and anthy, also looking smug, replies “sounds more like becket.” finally, a smaller and more confused nanami says “he was paraphrasing hegel.”]
“You write what you want to write in the way that it has to be.“ In honor of Anne Carson’s birthday, we’ve collected some of her best thoughts on writing.
“1.1 History and elegy are akin. The word “history” comes from an ancient Greek verb ίστωρειν meaning “to ask.” One who asks about things – about their dimensions, weight, location, moods, names, holiness, smell – is an historian. But the asking is not idle. It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself. … The phoenix mourns by shaping, weighing, testing, hollowing, plugging and carrying towards the light. He seems to take a clear view of necessity. And in the shadows that flash over him as he makes his way from Arabia to Egypt maybe he comes to see the immensity of the mechanism in which he is caught, the immense fragility of his own flying – composed as it is of these ceaselessly passing shadows carried backward by the very motion that devours them, his motion, his asking.”
“Even to receive this letter was to be transgressed by an iridescence of him which I could not keep out of me like a fine plaster dust it came in at every pore.”
It is February. Ice is general. One notices different degrees of ice. Its colors–blue white brown greyblack silver–vary. Some ice has core bits of gravel or shadow inside. Some is smooth as a flank, you cannot stand on it. Standing on it the wind goes thin, to shreds. All we wished for, shreds. The little ones cannot stand on it. Not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, can stand. Blindingly–what came through the world there–burns. It is February. Ice is general. One notices different degrees of ice.
Franz Kafka was Jewish. He had a sister, Ottla, Jewish. Ottla married a jurist, Josef David, not Jewish. When the Nuremberg Laws were introduced to Bohemia-Moravia in 1942, quiet Ottla suggested to Josef David that they divorce. He at first refused. She spoke about night shapes and property and their two daughters and a rational approach. She did not mention, because she did not yet know the word, Auschwitz, where she would die in October 1943. After putting the apartment in order she packed a rucksack and was given a good shoeshine by Josef David. He applied a coat of grease. Now they are waterproof, he said.
