Tag: james joyce notes

The mark of an ideological mind is not that it is perspectival (all
minds are perspectival), but that it is enclosed within a
particular perspective for unacknowledged (to oneself as well as
to others) reasons of self-interest. In contrast, the unideological
mind is open to the claims of other perspectives. One may even
change one’s mind and adopt a perspective quite different from
th at previously held as a consequence of being susceptible to
experience, evidence, and logic, which would seem to “compel” a
change of perspective. Those who would assert the impossibility
of such a change of view, arguing instead that everyone is
locked into one’s own perspective, are engaged in a self-fulfilling
prophecy. It is the view of those who have made up their minds
to listen only to their own voices (Goodheart 185-186).

“On Found Poetry” by John Robert Colombo.  From Open Poetry, (ed. Gross & Quasha, 1973)

• Found art is the most conservation-minded of the arts, for it recycles the waste of the past and reuses it in a surprisingly different way, thereby giving the original a new lease on life. “Collage seems to me the one medium most suited to the age of conspicuous waste,” painter Harold Town wrote, “and it’s marvellous to think of the garbage of our age becoming the art of our time.”

• An especially valuable function of found art and found poetry in particular is its ability to make us respond aesthetically to the universe around us, not just to those separate parts of the world called works of art. It is possible to act as if the universe itself were an immense piece of art, a collage perhaps. But does this spell the doom of art? As the Czech poet Miroslav Holub wryly observed, “There is poetry in everything. That is the biggest argument against poetry.”

There is too much self in my writing…I do not want to be a windowless monad— my training and trainers opposed subjectivity strongly. I have struggled since the beginning to drive my thought out into the landscape of science and fact where other people converse logically and exchange judgements—but I go blind out there. So writing involves some dashing back and forth between that darkening landscape where facticity is strewn and a windowless room cleared of everything I do not know. It is the clearing that takes time. It is the clearing that is a mystery.

anne carson

from economy of the unlost, vii

Attention is a task we share, you and I. To keep attention strong means to keep it from settling. Partly for this reason I have chosen to talk about two men at once. They keep each other from settling. Moving, and not settling, they are side by side in a conversation and yet no conversation takes place. Face to face yet they do not know one another, did not live in the same era, never spoke the same language. With and against, aligned and adverse, each is placed like a surface on which the other may come into focus. Sometimes you can see a celestial object better by looking at something else, with it, in the sky.

Anne Carson from Economy of the Unlost, viii

Paul Meyer

Reading an Anne Carson translation can feel like reading the fragments of a lecture. By this I don’t mean the lecture form as it is traditionally practiced (i.e., as a closing off of teaching). Rather, Carson’s translations seek to open up that space between languages for a third thing to happen. In that space, she would like you to have your own thought of what she’s trying to get across as opposed to making you have her own. This desire (realized in the ‘translation moves’) is imminently pedagogical