"Her book jackets rarely feature an author photo.... She has rarely discussed her private life in interviews, although in an August 2024 essay in The London Review of Books she said that she had Parkinson’s disease and that her handwriting had 'disintegrated' as a result. 'I used to take pleasure in writing in notebooks, shelves of them, day after day, year after year,' Carson wrote: 'Now the upright strokes bend or break or go in all directions, vowels shrink to blobs, slant loses its smooth smart angle, it all looks embarrassing. I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame.'"
Informed that she had won the Nobel Prize, "All the poet would say was she was 'in Iceland,' where she was 'listening to the wind.'"
AND: There are some nice photos of her in this 2021 Interview magazine piece. From the interview (with the British artist Tacita Dean):
DEAN: The last time we talked, you said you were drawing. Did you work on this project when you went to Iceland?
CARSON: We rented a place and there was a spare room, which became mine. When you have a room of your own, you can work. So that’s what happened. I thought, “What can I do in this room?” And then there it was. Virginia Woolf was right about that. Just a room where you close the door and something will happen.
DEAN: And you’ve continued to draw since, right?
CARSON: Yeah, even more so because writing seems kind of pointless in the contemporary world. I like drawing. I don’t know if you find drawing more frightening than writing, but I do. It’s more revealing.
DEAN: I agree. I don’t think I’m capable of just sitting down and letting myself draw. I’m too self-conscious these days, which is a tragedy. It’s a fear of failure to actually sit down and make a mark. I used to be able to do it. It’s something I lost with age. Or lost with a level of professionalism.
CARSON: It’s true. There’s a lightness to it that you lose as you become an artist with a capital A.
DEAN: Yeah, whereas writing for me is the opposite. I feel less self-conscious if I write something. I thought you’d feel the opposite.
CARSON: I think writing after many years becomes a place you can hide. Because you acquire a certain amount of craft, it allows you to do something while not revealing yourself. Whereas with drawing, every mark you make reveals yourself. You can’t cloak that in technical brilliance....
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20 comments:
Good choice. She's shown up in comments a lot in fact.
The early version of Red Meat that I prefered appeared in Raritan which might be in a university library today, though the journal is now defunct
Ann Carson ``Red Meat: What Difference Did Stesichoros Make?'' _Raritan XIV:4 Spring 1995, p.37
Here's something from the NYT "All this flickers through Carson's ''Autobiography of Red,'' a hybrid work of poetry and prose that includes witty critical reflections on Stesichorus and an imaginary interview with him. (Like other famous authors questioned about the ''concealment drama'' in their work, he produces inconsequential remarks that read like a cry for help.) But the core of her book is a reinterpretation of another lost Stesichorus poem, ''Tale of Geryon.''
Sounds interesting.
Its too bad the nobel prize for literature has turned into such a leftwing trash fire. My first reaction was "i suppose she's mediocre leftist who writes about climate change or being Trans". Or she just knew the right peole like Veronica Gluck or whatever the fuck her name was.
But it turns out she's into Greek classics. So that's shocking.
“Yeah, even more so because writing seems kind of pointless in the contemporary world”
…yeah…
“Yeah, even more so because writing seems kind of pointless in the contemporary world”
…yeah…
…the propaganda doesn’t work anymore, so why bother?
Hard to say writing is pointless. Take this example I believe from her Glass Irony and God
What is an idol?
An idol is a useless sacrifice, said Isaiah.
But how do you know which ones are useless? asked the nation in its genius.
Isaiah pondered the various ways he could answer this.
Immense chunks of natural reality fell out of a blue sky and showers of light upon his mind.
Isaiah chose the way of metaphor.
Our life is a camera obscura, said Isaiah, do you know what that is?
Never heard of it, said the nation.
Imagine yourself in a darkened room, Isaiah instructed.
Okay, said the nation.
The doors are closed, there is a pinhole in the back wall.
A pinhole, the nation repeated.
Light shoots through the pinhole and strikes the opposite wall.
The nation was watching Isaiah, bored and fascinated at once.
You can hold up anything you like in front of that pinhole, said Isaiah,
and worship it on the opposite wall.
Why worship an image? asked the nation.
Exactly, said Isaiah.
“In recent years, the Swedish Academy has tried to expand the diversity of laureates after criticism that too many past recipients have been men. Since 2018, the academy has alternated between male and female laureates.”
Hee…I wonder if they’ll try that in a category that actually matters (Physics, Chemistry, Medicine).
Lots of comments over there whining that Margaret “Handmaids Tale” Atwood was passed over again. Oh well, maybe next year—er, no, guess she’ll have to wait another two years….
Well deserved.
"CARSON: Yes, endlessness involving a lot of disinfectant. Speaking of COVID journals, a *cheesy thing* I started doing during the pandemic was making a gratitude list. You know, that psycho-therapeutic mechanism whereby at the end of the day you try to think of all the things in the day that you’re grateful for, to counteract despair and depression. As *cheesy* as it is, it’s really effective. I liked doing that."
I wonder what she means by "Cheesy". You'd think a poet would be more clear in their language.
Anyway, its a good interview.
All the poet would say was she was 'in Iceland,' where she was 'listening to the wind.'
That’s the kind of thing a poet should do.
So they're alternating men and women. They'd seem to have doing that for a long time. From 1991-2017 the ratio of men to women was about 2-1.
Making it 1-1 will just reinforce the idea that the Prize is worthless, except as a political marker. Of course just because you got a Nobel Prize doesn't mean you're mediocre, but it doesn't mean you're good either.
Thin gruel.
BTW, here are the Anglo-American aka wrote their stuff mostly in English winners for the last 50 years:
Bellow, Golding, Brodsky, Gordimer, Walcott, Morrison, Heany, Coatzee, Pinter, Naipul, Lessing, Munro, Dylan, Gluck, Carson.
15 authors - 6 women. 6 Jews. 2 blacks. 3 Canadians. 3 South Africans. 1 Indian. 1 Irishman.
The thought in the poem is interesting, but "immense chunks of natural reality" spoiled it for me.
Sometimes, who gets the award is more a slap in the face at the writer who didn't get it. Carson is the second Canadian (and second Canadian woman to get the prize), and neither was Margaret Atwood. It was similar with Fosse and Knausgard, the two Norwegian writers, a little while back.
And if we breakdown the whites we get:
Male white Non-Jewish - 3
Male white Jewish - 4
Female white Jewish - 2
Female white non-Jew - 3
Seems like the prize needs to get "Browner" not more female.
If the nobel prize of the last 50 years has any worth, its in identifying non-English authors that are worth reading in translation. Chinese, japanese, European, etc.
My handwriting started out as cursive, how I was taught back in DR. It then transitioned to mold after I started working as a draftsman (the time before CAD). Now that I hardly ever have to write anything down (I still make todo lists by hand) my writing now looks like a hybrid between mold (mostly mold) and cursive. The moldcurse.
I wonder if this is because of the merits of her writing or to stick a thumb in President Trump's eye? Kind of like Carney is being talked up for a Nobel Peach prize on the strength of Trump being mean to him.
As if he might be bothered because Canada got a nobel.
OTOH, she does not seem very Canadian living mostly in Ann Arbor MI for the past 25 years or so.
And part time in Iceland. Enough that she is an Icelandic citizen.
John Henry
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