‘I wonder sometimes if the teacher is not the real student and beneficiary’ (George Steiner)
… all study is worthwhile, observing things and trying to understand their hidden patterns.
The interesting thing about this quote from C. J. Sansom’s Revelation is that it is said about the study of medicine, including the opening up of bodies, during the Tudor period when such procedures were highly controversial.
Anne Carson is brilliant. I have only admiration for her creativity and use of language.
In ‘Red Meat: What Difference Did Stesichoros Make?’ (published in Autobiography of Red), she discusses Stesichoros’s literary contribution, which, in her estimate, consists in breaking the constraints of Homeric epic. ‘Homer’s epithets’, Carson says, ‘are a fixed diction with which Homer fastens every substance in the world to its aptest attribute and holds them in place for epic consumption.’
How does Homer do that? By using a stock repertoire of adjectives, ‘the latches of being’. If nouns name the world and verbs activate those names, then, says Carson, adjectives ‘are the latches of being’. Wow! What an ingenious way of describing the function of adjectives!
So how does Stesichoros come into this? By leaving Homer’s stock repertoire behind and coming up with novel descriptions. Or, in Carson’s words, by ‘undoing the latches’.
Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
Anne Carson, ‘Red Meat: What Difference Did Stesichoros Make?’ in Autobiography of Red
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War is the admission of defeat in the face of conflicting interests …
Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch
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ypography, another fascination of mine. Although it is one that I have been paying far too little attention to in recent years. I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps I have been too preoccupied with work. Beauty is important though because it lifts the spirit. It really ought not to be neglected. Having begun to realise that I have been quite wrong to do so, I am all the more determined to make time for the contemplation and pursuit of beauty.
One thing that I truly delight in is beautiful lettering and typography, and so I was very excited when I discovered Jessica Hische’s beautiful site Daily Drop Cap, which features a plethora of illustrative initial caps that can be reproduced free of charge on non-commercial sites. I shall make good use of them on ‘Brief thoughts & quotes’ from now on.
By the way, I came across Jessica’s site on Nonsuch Book, a bibliophile blog that also alerted me to the fact that Jessica has been involved in the design of Penguin’s beautiful Drop Caps series, an example of which is shown below.
What can I say? The heart sings when it sees a book like this!
Sometimes you come to an edge that just breaks off.
Anne Carson, ‘The Anthropology of Water’, in Plainwater: Essays and Poetry
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Karl Möller 