Inspiring Stuff #9

Adorno on Hobbies





"I have no hobby. Not that I'm a workaholic who wouldn't know how to do anything else but get down to business and do what has to be done. But rather I take the activities with which I occupy myself beyond the bounds of my official profession, without exception, so seriously that I would be shocked by the idea that they had anything to do with hobbies -that is, activities I'm mindlessly infatuated with only in order to kill time- if my experiences had not toughened me against manifestations of barbarism that have become self-evident and acceptable. Making music, listening to music, reading with concentration constitute an integral element of my existence; the word hobby would make a mockery of them." -T.W. Adorno, from his essay "Free Time" (1969)

Inspiring Stuff #8

Anne Carson: "The form hasn't emerged yet of the thing I'm working on."

INTERVIEWER

I was wondering about your preference for things that are old and battered, flawed and tattered.

CARSON

In surfaces, perfection is less interesting. For instance, a page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains. Because the tea stains add a bit of history. It’s a historical attitude. After all, texts of ancient Greeks come to us in wreckage and I admire that, the combination of layers of time that you have when looking at a papyrus that was produced in the third century BC and then copied and then wrapped around a mummy for a couple hundred years and then discovered and put in a museum and pieced together by nine different gentlemen and put back in the museum and brought out again and photographed and put in a book. All those layers add up to more and more life. You can approximate that in your own life. Stains on clothing.

Text stolen from this interview in the Paris Review: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5420/the-art-of-poetry-no-88-anne-carson

Inspiring Stuff #7

Cannon Magazine: No. 2

I stumbled upon Cannon magazine yesterday afternoon in the LRB bookshop.

Edited by Phil Baber in Amsterdam, it is filled with poetry, letters, quotations, observations, and an editors note that runs throughout the magazine as a series of Bernardo Soares-esque diary entries.

It is printed on yellow paper. The front cover shows an abstract spillage of some sort. The back cover seems to be a photo of a man gluing grey office carpet tiles to a floor.

The spine carries a quotation from Wallace Stevens:

"It is possible, possible, possible. It must be possible."