随便说说

找了很久一则关于这本accordion binding形式的日记，却无论如何都找不到了。意外呼应了对muteness的沉思。 贴一些别的笔记：Today I’m reading and pondering Anne Carson’s Nox. I’m thinking about how she juxtaposes two approaches to writing: one that is academic, factual, and explanatory (most evident in the scraps of a Greek dictionary—though I doubt whether she wrote the definitions herself), and another that is personal, euphemistic, and ambiguous.

It begins almost like a standard argument, like a beautiful analogy, examining the kinship between history and elegy. Yet after moving toward the big, the philosophical, it always returns to the small: a personal anecdote, or a feeling the author herself cannot quite grasp.

I’m musing on section 1.2, the part about autopsy. “Autopsy is… ‘eye witnessing’ of data or events by the historian himself, a mode of authorial power.” Needless to say, witnessing is a form of authority—that’s why “seeing is believing.” Yet the next line reads: “To withhold this authorization is also powerful.” That’s why Herodotos uses “it is said” to introduce the myth of the phoenix, which he never saw.

I also have questions about the images in the book. I read Nox because I’m working on an accordion bookbinding project, and I want to see how other artists deal with images inserted into text—how image and text might re-contextualize each other by sharing the same page.