“According to Stephen Greenblatt, the choices artists and writers make about how to fashion their self-representations reveal what he calls “the point of encounter between an authority and an alien.” By authority, he means the shared, referential meaning associated with an object or an item of clothing. By alien he means the figure in the painting, which becomes an alien twin to the artist, frozen in a constructed world. Greenblatt would say that self-fashioning in self-portraiture forces the artist to select a costume. But unlike an actress the painted figure cannot take the costume off when the drama is over. The alien image in the self-portrait separates from the real self, living a different life than its maker whenever it is viewed, often surviving the artist’s corporeal existence, forever captured in relation to certain unchanging objects.”

–from “Self-Fashioning in Sarah Goodridge’s Self-Portraits,” by Chris Packard, on “Common-Place” website: http://www.common-place.org/vol-04/no-01/lessons/

“As [Anne] Carson said in her interview with Kevin McNielly:

Using words so that you create a surface that leaves an impression in the mind no matter what the words mean. It’s not about the meaning of each individual word adding up to a proposition; it’s about the way they interact with each other as daubs of meaning, you know as impressionist colors interact, daubs of paint, and you stand back and see a story emerge from the way that the things are placed next to each other. You can also do that with language. (“Gifts and Questions” 20)”

excerpted from: “This Breaking Where Red Things Wade”: Textual Hybridity in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red and Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, by Madeline Oatman

This is an excerpt from Anne Carson’s poem “The Glass Essay” from Glass, Irony and God, which gives a moving and unusual look at Emily Bronte:

WHACHER

Whacher,
Emily’s habitual spelling of this word,
has caused confusion…

 But whacher is what she wrote.

Whacher is what she was.

 She whached God and humans and moor wind and open night.
She whached eyes, stars, inside, outside, actual weather.

She whached the bars of time, which broke.
She whached the poor core of the world,
wide open.

“Emily is in the parlour brushing the carpet,”
records Charlotte in 1828.
Unsociable even at home

and unable to meet the eyes of strangers when she ventured out,
Emily made her awkward way
across days and years whose bareness appalls her biographers.

This sad stunted life, says one.
Uninteresting, unremarkable, wracked by disappointment
and despair, says another.

She could have been a great navigator if she’d been male,
suggests a third. Meanwhile
Emily continued to brush into the carpet the question,

Why cast the world away.
For someone hooked up to Thou,
the world may have seemed a kind of half-finished sentence.

But in between the neighbour who recalls her
coming in from a walk on the moors
with her face “lit up by a divine light”

and the sister who tells us
Emily never made a friend in her life,
is a space where the little raw soul

slips through.
It goes skimming the deep keel like a storm petrel,
out of sight.

The little raw soul was caught by no one.
She didn’t have friends, children, sex, religion, marriage, success, a salary
or a fear of death. She worked

in total six months of her life (at a school in Halifax)
and died on the sofa at home at 2 P.M. on a winter afternoon
in her thirty-first year. She spent

most of the hours of her life brushing the carpet,
walking the moor
or whaching. She says

it gave her peace.

This excerpt is from Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson:

“What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else…These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

Of course, there are several different ways to be. In the world of the Homeric epic, for example being is stable and particularity is set fast in tradition. When Homer mentions blood, blood is black. When women appear, women are neat-ankled…the sea is unwearying. Death is bad…Homer’s epithets 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. There is a passion in it but what kind of passion? “Consumption is not a passion for substances but a passion for the code,” says Baudrillard.

So into the still surface of this code Stesichoros was born. And Stesichoros was studying the surface restlessly. It leaned away from him. He went closer. It stopped. “Passion for substances” seems a good description of that moment. For no reason that anyone can name, Stesichoros began to undo the latches.

Stesichoros released being. All the substances in the world went floating up. Suddenly there was nothing to interfere with horses being hollow hooved.  Or a river being root silver. Or a child bruiseless….or a planet middle night stuck. Or an insomniac outside the joy. Some substances proved more complex. To Helen of Troy, for example, was attached an adjectival tradition of whoredom already old by the time Homer used it. When Stesichoros unlatched her epithet from Helen there flowed out such a light as may have blinded him…”

For further information:   “Seeing Red”, the New York Times 1998 review of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red:   http://bit.ly/7MXqd

Geryon, the protagonist of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, as illustrated by Gustave Dore for The Divine Comedy.

Below follows an interesting excerpt from the Seed  magazine interview with Alison Gopnik, author of the new book  The Philosophical Baby. The interview takes a look at children and imagination, and the meaning it has for the adult world.

 Seed: You describe children as being “useless on purpose.” What do you mean by that?

AG: It’s related to one of the basic things that came out of our research: Why do children exist at all? It doesn’t make tremendous evolutionary sense to have these creatures that can’t even keep themselves alive and require an enormous investment of time on the part of adults. That period of dependence is longer for us than it is for any other species, and historically that period has become longer and longer.

The evolutionary answer seems to be that there is a tradeoff between the ability to learn and imagine — which is our great evolutionary advantage as a species — and our ability to apply what we’ve learned and put it to use. So one of the ideas in the book is that children are like the R&D department of the human species. They’re the ones who are always learning about the world. But if you’re always learning, imagining, and finding out, you need a kind of freedom that you don’t have if you’re actually making things happen in the world. And when you’re making things happen, it helps if those actions are based on all of the things you have learned and imagined. The way that evolution seems to have solved this problem is by giving us this period of childhood where we don’t have to do anything, where we are completely useless. We’re free to explore the physical world, as well as possible worlds through imaginative play. And when we’re adults, we can use that information to actually change the world.

Seed: You think Freud’s and Piaget’s conceptions of young children’s theory of mind are wrong. What do we know that they didn’t?

AG: Both Piaget and Freud thought that the reason children produced so much fantastic, unreal play was that they couldn’t tell the difference between imagination and reality. But a lot of the more recent work in children’s theory of mind has shown quite the contrary. Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It’s just they are equally interested in exploring both. The picture we used to have of children was that they spent all of this time doing pretend play because they had these very limited minds, but in fact what we’ve now discovered is that children have more powerful learning abilities than we do as adults. A lot of their characteristic traits, like their pretend play, are signs of how powerful their imaginative abilities are.