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Massimo Campigli Amiche, Le Consolatrici , 1946 Oil on canvas

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Repetition does not add anything, it only accentuates what is irreducible to human existence. Repetition in Kierkegaard is ‘the will to live again and the refusal to survive’. Only by repeating can we become authentic subjects. In Kierkegaard’s ‘beautiful moment’, Bespaloff found what she called ‘the instant’: an experience of absolute, eternal silence. The absence of a path, she wrote on Kierkegaard, is the only path his philosophy wants to follow. This Zen-like image also perfectly captures the meandering trajectories of her own thought, which Laura Sanò has called ‘nomadic’. A wandering cosmopolitan, Bespaloff was forced to traverse the boundaries of various countries, languages and cultures. Her philosophy mirrored that nomadism, with subtle attention to the embodied experience of movement, melody and metamorphosis.

- Isabel Jacobs, "Dancing and time"

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INTERVIEWER: In the writing world, particularly in and around M.F.A. programs, there’s a lot of discussion around things like “character” and “perspective,” the mechanics of narrative. Do you think about “craft” in these terms?

CARSON: Never. I don’t think about it. I think people should just quit that stuff. Just think about something and follow it down to where it gets true.

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I slip [the apron] over my head and make us good things to eat. There are coconut-heady dhals; focaccia pooled with grassy olive oil and sea salt; green tea rice and salmon; peach tart. We eat together each night and no pasta sauce ever gets on my clothes. Between sewing, writing, and cooking, my life is full of making. In every act, I savour.

Maddie Ballard, Bound: A Memoir of Making and Remaking

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I spent the most formative years of my life learning that you can interpret books/poems/any group of words you want in five hundred thousand different ways, because there are five hundred thousand different schools of literary theory. For example, here are a few I remember:

There’s close reading, which is basically what we were taught in high school, although of course all I can remember from high school is every detail of every interaction I ever had with the hot dude who was captain of our football team. Close reading is the thing where you view a text as closed off from outside information and just really dig into ~~the words~~. It was invented by the New Critics, which consisted of Robert Penn Warren and a bunch of other white dudes from the South. So while I love close reading, I am VERY SUSPICIOUS OF IT and fully expect to have to someday disown it following troubling allegations about its behavior toward women.

There’s biographical reading, in which you consider the author’s life, but this is considered BAD. There’s considering the author’s intentions, which is apparently WORSE, because WHO CARES and AUTHORS ARE MORONS. I don’t know what these techniques are actually called because I stuck mostly to the How-Does-This-Relate-to-Twilight reading, which I am thrilled to say once got me an A-minus on a paper about Wuthering Heights and absolutely no other A’s. There’s semiotics? Which I have heard of. But I have no idea what it is. There’s psychoanalytic literary criticism, a field which is now, I believe, practiced only by people who specifically are trying to be annoying and entirely miss the point. There’s deconstruction, which I cannot remember anything about other than the fact that it made me extremely nauseous and confused. My opinion on all schools of literary thought is now: Oh, hundreds of years of white men thought about this subject? Let me throw all of that out the window and do whatever I feel like!

- Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

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Goffman’s dramaturgical metaphor is sometimes misunderstood. He did not claim that we are all frauds constantly misrepresenting ourselves. Rather, his point was that being a member of society required constant work – a constant process of impression management, of making oneself intelligible to others through subtle cues and gestures. Just as a character in a play is the result of an actor’s hard graft, so too is a person’s identity the product of an ongoing creative project, performed to and with an audience.

This work remains pertinent today, when social media influencers have turned identity construction and curation into an art form. Goffman’s theatrical metaphor also finds echoes in the contemporary idea of gender as performance, developed by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990) and elsewhere. Goffman was ahead of his time in noticing that identity is constructed not just through talk, but through the body. We express our identities not only in words but also in how we move and how we dress – or what Goffman calls our ‘body idiom’.

- Lucy McDonald, "The Magic of the Mundane"

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 Quand ils partent à la recherche de l’origine du langage, les rêveurs se demandent toujours à quel moment le premier phonème s’est enfin arraché au bruit, introduisant d’un coup et une fois pour toutes, au‑delà des choses et des gestes, l’ordre pur du symbolique.

- Michel Foucault, "Sept Propos sur le Septième Ange"

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In fact, not only the content of fiction – what we’re able or willing to call ‘fiction’ – but also the nature of fiction – what fiction is – depends on how we think about the real world. A comparative study of the way ‘fiction’ as a concept develops across cultures shows that, whenever a group of people think of reality differently, the nature and function of fiction is understood differently as well.

- Hannah H Kim, "The truth about fiction"

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Louise-Bourgeois New York apartment / studio. Photo - François-Halard

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In the morning I sometimes forget about death, but by the afternoon the memory returns and tells me that however fast I run or high I climb, my body is pregnant with death...

- Ma Jian, Red Dust

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It’s always been interesting for me, the state of mind that the translator arrives at, where they have two languages simultaneously on their brain-screen. And they’re saying something not quite equivalent and they both keep on floating there. Some writers—Emily Dickinson would be the outstanding example—make use of that ditch within their own language. So she’s not translating from another language. She’s translating herself. She writes certain lines and words and then crosses them out and puts another word in, or writes the third word on the side, or turns the paper over and makes another version of the whole thing. And it all exists together as the poem. It’s just a really weird state of mind, to have all that floating, and have it be, have it constitute the poem in its entirety—in its untidy, unresolved entirety.

In translation, this arises in a different way, because you have a text, and it has perhaps certain obvious errors in it. And then you have variant readings at the bottom of the page, which are ideas that different scholars have had over the years to make a better reading where it seems wrong. So you get, again, these possibilities floating in your mind, for the same thing, but different. And they’re all kind of there together constituting the poem. I’ve never known what to do with that. It’s a beautiful event to have the poem in Greek with various readings in English underneath it, and to have all that floating as possibilities for what the guy really said.

- Anne Carson

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Unknown Torso of Female Figurine mid 6th M. BC 7,000 - 2700 B.C from Otzaki Magoula clay Neolithic Greece

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[…] The body has been for women in capitalist society what the factory has been for male waged workers: the primary ground of their exploitation and resistance, as the female body has been appropriated by the state and men and forced to function as a means for the reproduction and accumulation of labor. Thus, the importance which the body in all its aspects — maternity, childbirth, sexuality — has acquired in feminist theory and women’s history has not been misplaced. Caliban and the Witch also confirms the feminist insight which refuses to identify the body with the sphere of the private and, in this vein, speaks of "body politics." Further, it explains how the body can be for women both a source of identity and at the same time a prison, and why it is so important for feminists and, at the same time, so problematic to valorize it.

- Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (introduction)