Thursday, August 11, 2016

False starts, true beginnings

We said nothing concrete, I still have those letters [...]. We focused, let's say, on a book he had read, on an article of interest for our studies, on some reflection of his or mine, on unrest among certain university students, on the neo-avant-garde, which I didn't know anything about but which he was surprisingly well acquainted with, and which amused him to the point of inspiring him to write: "I would like to make a book out of crumpled-up pieces of paper: you start a sentence, it doesn't work, and throw the page away. I'm collecting a few, I would have the pages printed just as they are, crumpled, so the random pattern of the creases is interwoven with the tentative, broken-off sentences. Maybe this is, in fact, the only literature possible today."
— from The Story of a New Name, by Elena Ferrante.

I should collect the false starts of blog posts.

1 comment:

Stefanie said...

I just got this from the library yesterday and I am looking forward to starting it this weekend!