Reading: Anne Carson

I apologize in advance for the lateness of this post. I was most impressed by how Anne Carson controlled the audience and carried herself on stage. She had a subtle way of speaking, using a quieter voice that drew me in as the listener. Her humor worked well because of this mode of speech and gave the reading a light feeling. I felt that she was in control the entire time, which I do not think is easy for a writer. For the most part, the writer stereotype is that you are alone in a room with a notebook or computer creating a masterpiece in silence (although we know from Hemingway that cafes are also great writing spots). Reading appears to be an acquired skill, probably developed both outside of writing in other areas of study and from within writing as a mode of experience. I think it would be interesting, and helpful for me personally, to learn how she developed her reading style. Her style may just be a personal creation that she has always had, but I am curious about its development; this may be a good question to ask the writers who come into class.

On the point of craft, I really enjoyed both Carson’s Proost essay and her shorter pieces at the end of the reading. The essay reminded me of Alexander Pope because of its use of numbered sections as a formalized organization style and the informal and effective satire weaved into the piece. I never thought about using shorter sections in writing. I am concerned with chapters as a writer and how they function in a story. Short chapters seem to be effective in some stories that I have read; often times those short chapters have the most plot development or actions that change how the reader thinks about the story. That is all a bit wordy, but I think that short chapters pack the most punch and are usually deliberately short for this function when they drastically move away from the average page count in other chapters. Using Carson’s style on prose (arguably her essay certainly could have been prose, although the brevity of the sections made me think of poetry) would be entertaining but I think it would also force the writer to come up with significant points quicker than they might normally come to them in the writing. This could be both beneficial and costly to the writer. Lydia Millet argued in class that the longer novel often has an overabundance of useless sentences that do not get directly to the point. For this reason, using a shorter form would be helpful in order to push the writer to use their words carefully, rather than fling them about in long chunks of prose to no direct point or achievement. On the other hand, I think that the shorter form could also frustrate writers and discourage them from writing in the form if they are not used to coming up with quick jokes. With that being said, there is no harm in trying a shorter form (or a long form made up of shorter sections) because it might help the longer form writers to learn more about sentences.