Wrong Norma

Anne Carson — 2024

Anne Carson’s first original work since Float (Knopf, 2016) Published here in a stunning edition with images created by Carson, several of the twenty-five startling poetic prose pieces have appeared in magazines and journals like The New Yorker and The Paris Review. As Carson writes: “Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget's Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night. The pieces are not linked. That's why I've called them ‘wrong.’"

Highlights

dagonet@dagonet

Warfare has grown increasingly faceless throughout its history. Surely Hector and Achilles looked into each other's eyes on the battlefield, but in 1092 Pope Urban II found it necessary to outlaw the crossbow as being in glorious due to its distance from death, and by the 21st century a soldier in Nevada can push a button and have five people in Pakistan burst into flame. Without the face, no ethics: this is an old idea. But also, without the face, no function for me, nothing to write about. No one can make sentences using only verbs. No one can tell a story without believing in the reality of others.

dagonet@dagonet

Herakles was a thing of ordinary substance, a thing with specific life and limits in space and time. In other words he had to die.

dagonet@dagonet

... Thinking of other people's suffering. Who has a right to it. The masters don't ask. Just lift the knife and cut. Virginia Woolf, for example ...

dagonet@dagonet

Rationales have to do with composite things [...] the plural - but existence and self belong to singularity. Sentences are strategic. They let you off.

dagonet@dagonet

The difference is like the difference between glimpsing a beautiful thing and staring at it.