Anne Carson – Page 2 – Michigan Quarterly Review

Anne Carson

Dora García’s Instant Narrative

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* Mary Camille Beckman *

Before Dora García’s Instant Narrative was installed there, the apse of the local university art museum was the kind of space I’d cut through on my way somewhere else. The bathroom, the contemporary galleries upstairs, the auditorium in the basement. Nineteenth century American landscape paintings line the walls, visible between marble columns. The mood: quiet, cold. The mood: formal, save the rumpled students slouching through on their way, like me, elsewhere. Before Instant Narrative, I moved through the apse largely unnoticed and unnoticing.

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* Mary Camille Beckman *

Before Dora García’s Instant Narrative was installed there, the apse of the local university art museum was the kind of space I’d cut through on my way somewhere else. The bathroom, the contemporary galleries upstairs, the auditorium in the basement. Nineteenth century American landscape paintings line the walls, visible between marble columns. The mood: quiet, cold. The mood: formal, save the rumpled students slouching through on their way, like me, elsewhere. Before Instant Narrative, I moved through the apse largely unnoticed and unnoticing.

susan sontag bear suit

Willful Shapes

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* Gina Balibrera *

What I desired, and what I continue to desire, is the willful shape. I desire not those words that do the work of building, of containing, of safeguarding, but those which Ukrainian-Brazilian bad girl writer Clarice Lispector desires when she writes “I want to grab hold of the ‘is’ of the thing,” in Água Viva. I began to feel Lispector’s “perfect animal” of Near to the Wild Heart inside of me; I became a bad, bad girl.

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* Gina Balibrera *

What I desired, and what I continue to desire, is the willful shape. I desire not those words that do the work of building, of containing, of safeguarding, but those which Ukrainian-Brazilian bad girl writer Clarice Lispector desires when she writes “I want to grab hold of the ‘is’ of the thing,” in Água Viva. I began to feel Lispector’s “perfect animal” of Near to the Wild Heart inside of me; I became a bad, bad girl.

Thirteen Ways of Talking About a Volcano

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I recall standing on a platform before a television set, which was shrouded in funereal black cloth, and which played on loop a talk given by a grave white-haired scientist in a lab coat. The screen was grainy in a way I discerned to be fake: each trawling black worm was evenly sized, evenly spaced on the screen. The actor playing the scientist would cough when the screen broke up, due to an untimely earthquake disrupting the calm of his lab; the cough gave him away as an actor. My suspicion that the scientist was an actor made the film in which he appeared no less terrifying to me, a sensitive child, a nervous child.

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I recall standing on a platform before a television set, which was shrouded in funereal black cloth, and which played on loop a talk given by a grave white-haired scientist in a lab coat. The screen was grainy in a way I discerned to be fake: each trawling black worm was evenly sized, evenly spaced on the screen. The actor playing the scientist would cough when the screen broke up, due to an untimely earthquake disrupting the calm of his lab; the cough gave him away as an actor. My suspicion that the scientist was an actor made the film in which he appeared no less terrifying to me, a sensitive child, a nervous child.

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