Autobiography of Red
Anne Carson
1999, hardcover
16 cards
Autobiography of Red was recommended to me by someone who has pointed me in the direction of brilliantly fabulous books. Anne Carson is an amazing writer. She chooses words and combines them in ways that delight and surprise, and also more. Her fascination with and command of language proves what can be done with language. Other writers in comparison often only arrange letters.
Some excerpts/points of interest:
3- Gertrude Stein quote
-words bouncing
4 "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 worlds to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being."
22- Emily Dickinson, "Can human nature not survive without a listener?"
-"The only secret people keep is Immortality."
23- (stones) "To stop and imagine the life of each one!"
26- "A space for its meaning remained there but blank. The letters themselves could be found hung on branches of furniture in the area."
28- "Facts are bigger in the dark"
30-rhinestoning
36- He would remember when he was past forty the dusty almost medieval smell of the screen itself as it pressed its grid onto his face."
39- "They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics."
42- map
43-"'How does distance look?' is a simple direct question, It extends from a spaceless within to the edge
of what can be loved. It depends on light."
46- "Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary."
-photograph
48- "He could feel the house of sleepers around him like loaves on shelves."
49- toast and death
51- "Red Patience"
55- painting
56- "Nothing to say. Nothing."
58- "Why are you along in this huge blank garden like a piece of electricity?"
59- Barnum circus
61- Krakatoa
65- "...photography is a way of playing with perceptual relationships."
-stars, memories
66- "...nobody knows how to look at a photograph nowadays."
-Yeats
70- "Huge wads of silence stuffed the air."
72- yellowing index card
73- donuts
-Muhammad Ali, poems
75- slide projector
80- 15 names for clouds
-"What is time made of?"
-accordion
82- Heidegger, postcards
90- "It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion."
92- "White is black. Black is white. Perhaps I will get some new information about Red."
93- time, photographs
94- olives
-"Children make you see distances."
97- slippery foods
98- "Empty street below gave back nothing of itself. Cars nested along the curb on their shadows. Buildings leaned back out of the street."
-"sleeping pavement"
-moods
103- nothing
105- Philosophic problems, red
106- Walt Whitman
109- wings
120- water tank
125- "trying to think how to photograph Lima"
131- "Human Valentines"
139- "I am a beast"
-gamboling
141- time
145- Photographs #1748
-"The Only Secret People Keep"
148- blinking, blindness
