"Do hawks and falcons look so fantastic rising and falling because they have the sky as background or would they look equally good flying through mud or a piece of corduroy."

Writes Anne Carson — who just won the Nobel Prize for Literature — in "Lecture on the History of Skywriting" (a chapter of the collection called "Wrong Norma" (commission earned)).

A Paris Review interviewer asked her, "Tell me about the 'wrongness' in the title of Wrong Norma." She answered: 

When people ask me, “How are Canadians different from Americans?” I say, “Canadians have one characteristic: they’re polite, but wrong.” All the time, polite but wrong. “Wrong” I put in the title because, well, because of the Canadian thing. And also, something you always feel in academic life is that you’re wrong or on the verge of being wrong and you have to worry about that, because everything is so judgmental and hierarchical. Getting tenure depends on XYZ being “not wrong” every time you speak. So it’s kind of a mentality I was interested in disabling. It’s something Simone Weil says in an essay she has about contradiction, because people find contradiction in philosophical texts so perplexing, and she specializes in contradiction. She says it’s a useful mental event, because it loosens the mind. And once you can loosen, you can go on to think other things or wider things or the things underneath where you were. It’s just suddenly a different landscape. And that loosening, I think, is what wrongness allows in. I could talk about wrongness tomorrow and say an entirely other thing. A person is a prism, you know, and concepts just flash from this to that from day to day.

Ha ha. I remember once, long ago, saying to a colleague that I thought the risk of being wrong was essential figuring out anything new. I thought that was an exciting idea. He gave me quite the stinkface. The stinkface isn't interesting. It isn't even an argument. It doesn't even take the risk of saying, "You're wrong."