TLA, p. 106-109: I'm shocked to hear that Jonathan Culler found Barthes's lectures dull! Although...I am curious what people thought about how they were to listen to. I'd love to hear more opinions from his students. I think I would have a hard time following them if I were listening to them (and understood French). I love taking my time reading them, but listening to them would be another matter. And, of course, when you don't know that someone's life is nearing it's end, you don't realize you should spend time with them no matter what.
Quickly sharing what I put on Twitter: Barthes: "That could be the definition of poetry: it would, in short, be the language of the Real in that it can't be divided up any further or has no interest in dividing itself up any further." My god does Barthes cover a lot in the Feb. 17th session. Theories of photography, photography vs. film, theories of poetry, essential characteristics of haiku, including the lovely "co-presence jolt."
How heartbreaking the section on Ferrante was -- the layers of translation and reading/writing/rewriting and the complicated, difficult relationship with the mother at the heart of it. Did the mother say the horrible thing or not? We don't know, but she might have. So sad!
TLA, p. 113-119: Reading Briggs and Barthes together on the pages of TLA speaking about reading and writing is such a pleasure! First, I don't have the lecture course on the Neutral, and want to get a copy and maybe read it after I've read the other two this year. I love the idea "I is a method" -- a way of answering questions or addressing large topics that are basically unanswerable by telling one's own experience in such a way as to keep from crushing the experiences of others. Yes! That's what reading first person narratives can feel like to me -- inviting and open rather than self-absorbed.
And the idea of writing as coming from wanting to add yourself to a text you love, feeling a text move you -- literally move you as you reach for a pen or bend the corner of a page or stand up or look up from the page and gaze off into the distance -- and then move you to write yourself into it. This #KateBriggs24 project comes out of a desire to make a text my own somehow, to add myself to it -- to add US to it. It makes me think about how when I've written reviews of books I love, I often forget to say that I think the book is good. I'm so busy thinking through it, analyzing it, that I forget I need to say explicitly, yes, this book is good and you should read it. I want to engage with it, not sum it up!
Oh I love this, Rebecca! I was very moved by the idea of "I is a method" as well, and by RB's desire (and KB's too!) toward inclusivity and gentleness in their use of the first person: this lovely quote from TLA p. 114: "to expand and vary what is possible to speak, and in what manner, in the hope of neither reducing nor crushing" by writing through and with and from the I. My favorite first-person texts are ones that open out in this way, by being deeply personal as an invitation to expansion and variation and communion. I hear you too about writing reviews—I haven't reviewed a poetry book for a while (I used to, and hope to again), but I know when I did I was often frustrated by my own inability to be as personal as I wanted to be, to transmit my own love for the book to a possible reader of the review.
I'm thinking about how Barthes and Briggs both develop their arguments very slowly, with digressions along the way. As we get into the "Would-Be Writer" section in Briggs, I'm not sure how it all fits together -- why is she giving us the Barthes material, why her reading history, why the dance class story? I can guess, but I love how many threads she's working with and how she takes her time. Barthes's lectures are doing something similar. We will get to the novel (I guess?) but will spend time with haiku first. He has his reasons!
Also, the material on types of readers and how reading leads to writing (sometimes, and sometimes does not) is really beautiful. Plus I love that Briggs is reviewing the Barthes material for us!
Love all this too, and it reminds me of Briggs on the Fitzcarraldo podcast (which I know I've referenced multiple times! but it's so good!) speaking about her desire to make what she calls a rather simple idea (the fact that a translated text is one that has been written twice) into something we, as readers, can truly feel in a new way. An idea that's alive, rather than one that's just received, and not really experienced because we've heard it before. So I imagine that's part of all these threads in "Would-Be Writer"—making what she is writing new for us. Though I also sometimes wonder how it all fits together! And: I trust her, I trust where she's going (and b/c I trust her I trust Barthes, knowing how much she loves this lecture course, even though I feel even more lost at times trying to figure out how we're going to get from haiku to the novel). He does have his reasons! And yes, for me too, KB's reviewing of the material in the lecture course is helping me tons.
Your description of this is wonderful, Kasey, how Briggs creates the experience for us, helps us live through it. To create an idea that's alive rather than just received -- the best kind of writing! To have an experience of an idea while reading a book -- my favorite thing. I love experiencing a story while reading, but my favorite kind of reading may be experiencing the development of an idea. I'm also so happy to be experiencing Barthes for himself and also for the way he illuminates Briggs's mind -- oh, so THIS is what she loves so much! I get it!
I think it's my favorite kind of reading, too—the development of an idea, and writing that somehow shows the idea didn't just arrive fully-formed in the writer's head and then fall out onto the page!—it grew and circled and looped back on itself and moved and changed. I love how that working-out of an idea—when Briggs does it, when other writers I love do—happens for me, also, when I'm reading. And YES, I'm also loving the way Barthes and Briggs are speaking to and illuminating each other; the more I read KB the more I feel what she loves in RB's work.
This is why I've always loved essays -- because they are so often about charting a process of thinking -- and why I'm in love with the genre of the book-length essay, so much so that I generally go for the long-form essay rather than the shorter ones. I don't know that book-length essays were as much of a thing when I first became aware of the essay as a genre (back in the 90s). But now I love them because I can stay with someone's mind for a longer period of time.
I am also interested in the response Briggs's translation of The Preparation received. This Little Art got some significant push-back, but I'm not sure about the translations. But, yes, WHAT a task. Not just the translation, but also the research, the notes, the documentation.
Your point about people probably not composing haiku while strolling through gardens cracked me up.
I had a look for reviews and all I could see was reviews of Barthes, not the translation itself. Then again, if that’s the first time the text has appeared in English, who is in a position to judge?
Briggs, pp98-101: Why does Barthes want to write a novel? Because it’s long. (98) But why does he choose writing rather than, say, taking a break from writing? Briggs suggests that it’s because “I write because I have read.” (99) I really like how Barthes’ desire to write seems to emerge from his reading.
I love that too, and I also loved Briggs's speculations -- or paraphrasing? -- of Barthes here as she/he/they are thinking about not knowing why he made the decision to switch writing forms: "How could I or anyone know? How could I, or anyone, plunge down deep enough into the secret sources of our desires to figure it out?"
"And yet, all it wants to say is: I read with my body, I read and move to translate with my body, and my body is not the same as yours...": this beautiful and moving passage from TLA (p. 107), in which KB goes on to specify what "it" is, for her, and what it is not: not War and Peace, not the quotation from Chateaubriand Barthes loves. It IS Barthes, particularly his late work, particularly his lectures, particularly these final lectures we're reading together. I love how her list of loves, of is/is not, gets more and more focused, more whittled down, smaller and smaller and more absolutely specific. As with so much in TLA (and in Barthes, too) this feels totally permission-giving to me: to love what one loves and to claim that in all its particularity. Again, I feel so invited in to her thought process. (Plus I love this translation of Barthes from p. 106: "all that it [his written list of likes and dislikes] wants to say is..."—as if the writing itself has agency and desire—which I totally believe it does).
Also: Dorothy Bussy and Andre Gide! The passages about their relationship and their letters were some of my most favorite parts of my first read of TLA, and that's true again this time around. As if KB is connecting Bussy's love for Gide with the love a translator can feel for a companion text: not that they are exactly the same type of love, but they are related loves, kin.
Permission-giving -- not self-absorbed and solipsistic, as sometimes people think personal writing is, but idiosyncratic and allowing us to be idiosyncratic along with her. That's great. I also am fascinated by the way the favorite writers of my favorite writers are often not MY favorite writers, if that makes sense. I think about how Kate Zambreno loves Robert Walser and also Herve Guibert, and I read both and thought ... ??? Maybe I'll understand one day, especially with Walser, but for now, I think they're ... fine? I don't quite get it. So strange and interesting.
I've had similar experiences! With Walser and Guibert (I have tried to read both, and I will probably try again, but really struggled to engage with them). Also coming to mind: Alice Notley—Rachel Zucker loves her work and I haven't been able to get into it. I do want to read The Descent of Alette—might need to try this with a group!
Kasey! Are we the same person??? I had the same experience with Notley, through Zucker, although in my case, it was The Descent of Alette specifically that I didn't get on with. I haven't read much else. Have we talked about Notley before and I forgot about it? That's possible. But I'm amazed at how similar our reading responses are. I could appreciate some things about Descent, but I did not fall in love with it and it didn't feel especially meaningful to me. In other circumstances -- with a group, with the right teacher, in a different mindset, perhaps by traveling back in time to another era -- it might be different.
Maybe we were separated at birth! (Aside: we might seem like the same person partly because I read so many of the books you recommend! One of my most favorite reads of last year, Julietta Singh's The Breaks, I read b/c you wrote about loving it. There are more examples but this one comes to mind first...)
And groups can make, do make, such a difference. I also might take to Notley better (and Guibert and Walser!) as part of a group. This makes me wonder if I'd be enjoying the Barthes so much if I were reading it solo. I don't think so. There are many parts I love... and it is also difficult for me, and there's a lot I struggle to get my mind around. And of course this is OK, and perfectly normal—and still, I don't know if I would be sticking with it, through the challenging bits, without this group and everyone's smart comments and questions and engagement.
Oh! Bernadette Mayer is another person who falls into this category for me (of "a writer I love loves this author but I just don't"). And in the winter I read a book of hers as part of the reading group Rachel Zucker is doing. I didn't care for the book much but I was SO glad I read it because the conversation around it was fascinating, and because reading it and talking about it raised a ton of questions I do care about, questions about making and community and what poetry is. I keep thinking about those questions even though the experience didn't turn me into a Bernadette Mayer fan.
I think we might have been! :) I did pretty well with Mayer's Midwinter Day -- I didn't understand all of it, for sure, but it's one I'd enjoy reading again, I think. I haven't read much else of her writing. I definitely enjoy reading books that I might not particularly love with groups that make them interesting and meaningful. It's so cool that did or are doing Rachel's reading group! That sounds amazing. I love the different ways collaborative reading can be meaningful -- it can introduce you to new books, make you fall in love with books you might not otherwise, and offer a good discussion even if the book isn't really your thing.
I would like to read Midwinter Day, despite my not having loved the book we did read, which was Milkweed Smithereens. And I do love Rachel's group! I did a couple sessions last year and have signed up for a few more this spring. The conversation each time was so warm and smart and inspiring... it left me thinking for a long time afterwards about the things that came up. Yay for collaborative reading, and yay for our group! I'm so grateful to you and Kim for making it possible.
TLA, p. 106-109: I'm shocked to hear that Jonathan Culler found Barthes's lectures dull! Although...I am curious what people thought about how they were to listen to. I'd love to hear more opinions from his students. I think I would have a hard time following them if I were listening to them (and understood French). I love taking my time reading them, but listening to them would be another matter. And, of course, when you don't know that someone's life is nearing it's end, you don't realize you should spend time with them no matter what.
Quickly sharing what I put on Twitter: Barthes: "That could be the definition of poetry: it would, in short, be the language of the Real in that it can't be divided up any further or has no interest in dividing itself up any further." My god does Barthes cover a lot in the Feb. 17th session. Theories of photography, photography vs. film, theories of poetry, essential characteristics of haiku, including the lovely "co-presence jolt."
How heartbreaking the section on Ferrante was -- the layers of translation and reading/writing/rewriting and the complicated, difficult relationship with the mother at the heart of it. Did the mother say the horrible thing or not? We don't know, but she might have. So sad!
TLA, p. 113-119: Reading Briggs and Barthes together on the pages of TLA speaking about reading and writing is such a pleasure! First, I don't have the lecture course on the Neutral, and want to get a copy and maybe read it after I've read the other two this year. I love the idea "I is a method" -- a way of answering questions or addressing large topics that are basically unanswerable by telling one's own experience in such a way as to keep from crushing the experiences of others. Yes! That's what reading first person narratives can feel like to me -- inviting and open rather than self-absorbed.
And the idea of writing as coming from wanting to add yourself to a text you love, feeling a text move you -- literally move you as you reach for a pen or bend the corner of a page or stand up or look up from the page and gaze off into the distance -- and then move you to write yourself into it. This #KateBriggs24 project comes out of a desire to make a text my own somehow, to add myself to it -- to add US to it. It makes me think about how when I've written reviews of books I love, I often forget to say that I think the book is good. I'm so busy thinking through it, analyzing it, that I forget I need to say explicitly, yes, this book is good and you should read it. I want to engage with it, not sum it up!
Oh I love this, Rebecca! I was very moved by the idea of "I is a method" as well, and by RB's desire (and KB's too!) toward inclusivity and gentleness in their use of the first person: this lovely quote from TLA p. 114: "to expand and vary what is possible to speak, and in what manner, in the hope of neither reducing nor crushing" by writing through and with and from the I. My favorite first-person texts are ones that open out in this way, by being deeply personal as an invitation to expansion and variation and communion. I hear you too about writing reviews—I haven't reviewed a poetry book for a while (I used to, and hope to again), but I know when I did I was often frustrated by my own inability to be as personal as I wanted to be, to transmit my own love for the book to a possible reader of the review.
I'm thinking about how Barthes and Briggs both develop their arguments very slowly, with digressions along the way. As we get into the "Would-Be Writer" section in Briggs, I'm not sure how it all fits together -- why is she giving us the Barthes material, why her reading history, why the dance class story? I can guess, but I love how many threads she's working with and how she takes her time. Barthes's lectures are doing something similar. We will get to the novel (I guess?) but will spend time with haiku first. He has his reasons!
Also, the material on types of readers and how reading leads to writing (sometimes, and sometimes does not) is really beautiful. Plus I love that Briggs is reviewing the Barthes material for us!
Love all this too, and it reminds me of Briggs on the Fitzcarraldo podcast (which I know I've referenced multiple times! but it's so good!) speaking about her desire to make what she calls a rather simple idea (the fact that a translated text is one that has been written twice) into something we, as readers, can truly feel in a new way. An idea that's alive, rather than one that's just received, and not really experienced because we've heard it before. So I imagine that's part of all these threads in "Would-Be Writer"—making what she is writing new for us. Though I also sometimes wonder how it all fits together! And: I trust her, I trust where she's going (and b/c I trust her I trust Barthes, knowing how much she loves this lecture course, even though I feel even more lost at times trying to figure out how we're going to get from haiku to the novel). He does have his reasons! And yes, for me too, KB's reviewing of the material in the lecture course is helping me tons.
Your description of this is wonderful, Kasey, how Briggs creates the experience for us, helps us live through it. To create an idea that's alive rather than just received -- the best kind of writing! To have an experience of an idea while reading a book -- my favorite thing. I love experiencing a story while reading, but my favorite kind of reading may be experiencing the development of an idea. I'm also so happy to be experiencing Barthes for himself and also for the way he illuminates Briggs's mind -- oh, so THIS is what she loves so much! I get it!
I think it's my favorite kind of reading, too—the development of an idea, and writing that somehow shows the idea didn't just arrive fully-formed in the writer's head and then fall out onto the page!—it grew and circled and looped back on itself and moved and changed. I love how that working-out of an idea—when Briggs does it, when other writers I love do—happens for me, also, when I'm reading. And YES, I'm also loving the way Barthes and Briggs are speaking to and illuminating each other; the more I read KB the more I feel what she loves in RB's work.
This is why I've always loved essays -- because they are so often about charting a process of thinking -- and why I'm in love with the genre of the book-length essay, so much so that I generally go for the long-form essay rather than the shorter ones. I don't know that book-length essays were as much of a thing when I first became aware of the essay as a genre (back in the 90s). But now I love them because I can stay with someone's mind for a longer period of time.
Still catching up, my response to week 4 - https://open.substack.com/pub/keeperofthecats/p/katebriggs2024?r=19i5wa&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
I am also interested in the response Briggs's translation of The Preparation received. This Little Art got some significant push-back, but I'm not sure about the translations. But, yes, WHAT a task. Not just the translation, but also the research, the notes, the documentation.
Your point about people probably not composing haiku while strolling through gardens cracked me up.
I had a look for reviews and all I could see was reviews of Barthes, not the translation itself. Then again, if that’s the first time the text has appeared in English, who is in a position to judge?
Briggs, pp98-101: Why does Barthes want to write a novel? Because it’s long. (98) But why does he choose writing rather than, say, taking a break from writing? Briggs suggests that it’s because “I write because I have read.” (99) I really like how Barthes’ desire to write seems to emerge from his reading.
I love that too, and I also loved Briggs's speculations -- or paraphrasing? -- of Barthes here as she/he/they are thinking about not knowing why he made the decision to switch writing forms: "How could I or anyone know? How could I, or anyone, plunge down deep enough into the secret sources of our desires to figure it out?"
For the next couple of weeks, I’m away and won’t be able to post. Please take care of the place without me!
I'll do my best, Nicholas!
"And yet, all it wants to say is: I read with my body, I read and move to translate with my body, and my body is not the same as yours...": this beautiful and moving passage from TLA (p. 107), in which KB goes on to specify what "it" is, for her, and what it is not: not War and Peace, not the quotation from Chateaubriand Barthes loves. It IS Barthes, particularly his late work, particularly his lectures, particularly these final lectures we're reading together. I love how her list of loves, of is/is not, gets more and more focused, more whittled down, smaller and smaller and more absolutely specific. As with so much in TLA (and in Barthes, too) this feels totally permission-giving to me: to love what one loves and to claim that in all its particularity. Again, I feel so invited in to her thought process. (Plus I love this translation of Barthes from p. 106: "all that it [his written list of likes and dislikes] wants to say is..."—as if the writing itself has agency and desire—which I totally believe it does).
Also: Dorothy Bussy and Andre Gide! The passages about their relationship and their letters were some of my most favorite parts of my first read of TLA, and that's true again this time around. As if KB is connecting Bussy's love for Gide with the love a translator can feel for a companion text: not that they are exactly the same type of love, but they are related loves, kin.
Permission-giving -- not self-absorbed and solipsistic, as sometimes people think personal writing is, but idiosyncratic and allowing us to be idiosyncratic along with her. That's great. I also am fascinated by the way the favorite writers of my favorite writers are often not MY favorite writers, if that makes sense. I think about how Kate Zambreno loves Robert Walser and also Herve Guibert, and I read both and thought ... ??? Maybe I'll understand one day, especially with Walser, but for now, I think they're ... fine? I don't quite get it. So strange and interesting.
I've had similar experiences! With Walser and Guibert (I have tried to read both, and I will probably try again, but really struggled to engage with them). Also coming to mind: Alice Notley—Rachel Zucker loves her work and I haven't been able to get into it. I do want to read The Descent of Alette—might need to try this with a group!
Kasey! Are we the same person??? I had the same experience with Notley, through Zucker, although in my case, it was The Descent of Alette specifically that I didn't get on with. I haven't read much else. Have we talked about Notley before and I forgot about it? That's possible. But I'm amazed at how similar our reading responses are. I could appreciate some things about Descent, but I did not fall in love with it and it didn't feel especially meaningful to me. In other circumstances -- with a group, with the right teacher, in a different mindset, perhaps by traveling back in time to another era -- it might be different.
Maybe we were separated at birth! (Aside: we might seem like the same person partly because I read so many of the books you recommend! One of my most favorite reads of last year, Julietta Singh's The Breaks, I read b/c you wrote about loving it. There are more examples but this one comes to mind first...)
And groups can make, do make, such a difference. I also might take to Notley better (and Guibert and Walser!) as part of a group. This makes me wonder if I'd be enjoying the Barthes so much if I were reading it solo. I don't think so. There are many parts I love... and it is also difficult for me, and there's a lot I struggle to get my mind around. And of course this is OK, and perfectly normal—and still, I don't know if I would be sticking with it, through the challenging bits, without this group and everyone's smart comments and questions and engagement.
Oh! Bernadette Mayer is another person who falls into this category for me (of "a writer I love loves this author but I just don't"). And in the winter I read a book of hers as part of the reading group Rachel Zucker is doing. I didn't care for the book much but I was SO glad I read it because the conversation around it was fascinating, and because reading it and talking about it raised a ton of questions I do care about, questions about making and community and what poetry is. I keep thinking about those questions even though the experience didn't turn me into a Bernadette Mayer fan.
I think we might have been! :) I did pretty well with Mayer's Midwinter Day -- I didn't understand all of it, for sure, but it's one I'd enjoy reading again, I think. I haven't read much else of her writing. I definitely enjoy reading books that I might not particularly love with groups that make them interesting and meaningful. It's so cool that did or are doing Rachel's reading group! That sounds amazing. I love the different ways collaborative reading can be meaningful -- it can introduce you to new books, make you fall in love with books you might not otherwise, and offer a good discussion even if the book isn't really your thing.
I would like to read Midwinter Day, despite my not having loved the book we did read, which was Milkweed Smithereens. And I do love Rachel's group! I did a couple sessions last year and have signed up for a few more this spring. The conversation each time was so warm and smart and inspiring... it left me thinking for a long time afterwards about the things that came up. Yay for collaborative reading, and yay for our group! I'm so grateful to you and Kim for making it possible.