Shadowing Practice: Anne Carson: Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind - Learn English Speaking with Video
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beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind this is a talk about hands
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and handwriting i think of handwriting as a way to organize
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thought into shapes i like shapes i like organizing them but
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because of recent neurological changes in my brain i find shapes
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fall apart on me my responsibility to forms cannot be properly fulfilled
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so i present this talk in its falling apart form in the hope that it's not unintelligible or depressing part one hands
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in order to right away avoid being depressing and
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because beginnings are important i'll begin with a poem of the
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roman poet catullus who lived in the first century bc and died at the age of 30.
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he was himself the beginning of the roman lyric poetry tradition
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and this is fragment 46 his poem invoking the beginning of spring In Latin,
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the first part of the poem is Now spring unlocks,
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now the equinox Stops its blue rages, quiet as pages I tell you,
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Catullus, leave Troy, leave the ground burning They did Look,
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we will change everything all the meanings all the clear cities of Asia you
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and me now the mind isn't she an avid previous hobo now the feet grow leaves
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so so glad to see whose green baits awaits oh sweet don't go back the same way go a new way
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catullus was perhaps the favorite poet of a painter named cy twombly about whom i'll say more in a minute
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twombly was a painter who used a lot of handwriting on his canvases
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critics were provoked by this and roland bart wrote an essay about it in his responsibility of forms
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how to draw a line that is not stupid is a question he asks at the beginning of this essay
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how to draw a line that is not stupid isn't this one of our big problems as humans
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whether i am me or whether i am hitler
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or whether i am william von humboldt it is a problem of human life so let's start with life your life
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There it is before you, possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map.
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Let's say you're 25.
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Then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor, a pirate.
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Years pass, maybe in a family, maybe not, maybe happy, maybe not.
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then one day you wake up
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and you're 70 looking ahead you see a black doorway you
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begin to notice the black doorway is always there at the edge whether you look at it
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or not most moments contain it most moments have a sort
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of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the glass
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you wonder
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if other people are seeing it too you ask them they
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say no you ask why no one can tell you a
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minute ago you were 25 then you went ahead getting the
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life you want one day you glanced over from 25 to now
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and there it is the doorway black and waiting
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when I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease a symptom particularly mortifying to me was that my handwriting disintegrated
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i had used to take pleasure in writing in notebooks shelves
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of them day after day year after year now the upright strokes bend or break or go in all directions
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vowels shrink to blobs slant loses its smooth smart angle it all looks just embarrassing Or Roland Barthes would say stupid.
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I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame.
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hard to describe
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or explain the shame of bad handwriting bad handwriting is ugly it looks sort of stupid
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and i was going to say it feels inauthentic
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but then realized the opposite is the case in its badness my chaotic handwriting seems to reveal something about me
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that i would rather not look at.
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It carries what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls the inscape out.
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Beware the man whose writing sways like a reed in the wind, said Confucius.
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Graphology, as I'm sure you know, is the study of handwriting as a clue to character analysis.
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Hard to believe it isn't a good clue.
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If my script slants to the right i am a person strongly influenced by my father
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if i am a procrastinator i dot my eyes to the left
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if i am hitler i have a very very very tiny script
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and dot my eyes with a slash mark
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and here is an interesting incidental fact about hands
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when a person who has been paralyzed from the neck down is given a tool
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that allows them to write with their mouth They reproduce the same handwriting style as they had before paralysis.
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Your handwriting is your brain, and your brain is you.
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But Parkinson's disease messes with all that.
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It turns off certain genes in the cells of the brain, no one knows why.
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This leads to decreased levels of a brain chemical called dopamine and to unusual electrical rhythms.
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many physical actions are inhibited or mangled like brushing one's teeth
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or writing with the hand
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but scriptural disintegration is just an image of the beginning of
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a cognitive breakdown whose gradual effects will include disorder discontinuity forgetting gaps and fissures slowdowns, and stops.
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Here is a medical explanation of what's happening.
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This is from a book called The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge.
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Each cell in our body contains all our genes, but not all those genes are turned on or expressed.
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When a gene is turned on, it makes a new protein that alters the structure and function of the cell.
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This is called the transcription function because when the gene is turned on,
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information about how to make these proteins is transcribed or read from the individual gene.
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What I take from this is that the brain has its own handwriting, which depends on a certain protein.
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I can imagine my poor brain throwing up its hands in dismay to find all the good handwriting protein gone
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or piled in the corner in a mess.
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How to draw a line that is not stupid.
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When critics talk about the late style of Beethoven or Baudelaire, I wonder do they mean marks on paper as well as,
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or as a clue to, hauntings in the brain.
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Here we enter the shatter zone, hands within hands.
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Metabolic and metaphorical vectors overlap.
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Is this confusing?
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Yes, it is confusing.
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In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes, said Theodore Adorno famously in his essays on music.
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as i am not keen on considering myself a catastrophe let's
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turn from late style to early style the world's earliest writing systems developed independently in three places
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the near east china and mexico all three began as systems of counting or accounting
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a way to keep track of goods or money later that is thousands of years later
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A concern for the afterlife paved the way to literature by using writing for funerary inscriptions.
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Death and property, you could say, two of our most basic anxieties,
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seemed able to be managed or at least placated by putting marks on a surface,
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and so inspired the first systematic mark -making, the first writing.
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The psychology of one particular moment in this evolution interests me, the moment of transition from the realm of material things,
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goods or money, to that of words and ideas, poems about death.
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Let's take ourselves back to 3500 BC and to the kingdom of the Sumerians, present -day Iraq.
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here people kept track of debts by counting out clay tokens and placing them in a clay envelope
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to simplify matters some accountants began marking the outside of the
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clay envelope to signify the number of tokens inside presumably the
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number of tokens inside the envelope would be exactly the same as the number of marks on the outside
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but what if it wasn't might there be room here for mistakenness
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or even duplicity at any rate
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when the outside does not match the inside things may be going
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or have gone awry that boundary is not so simple it's possible i am overthinking this imaginary moment of early scripture
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But it fascinates me how introducing a dialectic of inside
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and outside polarizes the attributes of each and may so easily slide sideways into judgments of right and wrong, good or bad.
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So let's be a little more subtle about the problem of bad handwriting.
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It would seem to have two possible solutions one perfect its craft
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so that the handwriting is not bad two disown the craft so
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that the badness doesn't matter examples john keats in his manuscripts
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would be an example of the first way the way of perfection
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when publishing a volume of poems keats copied out the text in a hand
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so regular flowing and confident it's hard to believe the writer ever had a moment of doubt or despair
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at any point in the composition of the lines keats was a romantic as an artist much concerned with self
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and selfhood the sheer beauty of his fair copies seems a revelation
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if not a celebration of what he considers his own best self At the other end of the spectrum,
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consider the 20th century artist Cy Twombly, whose modernist conception of self and selfhood was quite different than Keith's.
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Born in Lexington, Virginia, 1928, Cy Twombly was once declared by Artforum magazine to be the
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greatest American painter of the 20th century he loved books his
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inspiration was often literary his paintings feature handwritten words inscribed in
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such a way as to avoid offering any clues to himself
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or his character or his inside state scribbled scrawled gauche idle unlovely the hand is no one's
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or everyone's or mythic or just a stain left behind by something written before.
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You cannot get away from yourself in your own hand, I used to think, but then Cy Twombly does.
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In his essay on Twombly, Roland Barthes describes his handwriting as drifting between desire and politeness,
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or, quoting the Tao Te Ching, the hand of a man acting without expectation.
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how to draw a line that is not stupid like certain other artists of the modern era
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twombly seems to have been intent on leaving the self behind evading the ego and its marks
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positing emptiness as more interesting than presence
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twombly was best friends with john cage the well -known composer of 433 and other ego emptying artworks.
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As Cage put it, something has to be done to rid us of our memories and choices.
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What John Cage did was to introduce chance operations into his work.
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What Cy Twombly did was to find his way to a handwriting that has no person in it.
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Critics sometimes referred to Twombly's line as graffiti -like.
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I don't think Twombly enjoyed hearing this.
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Graffiti is often ugly and usually, at some level, activist.
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Its character is that of the egotistical sublime, as Keats said of Wordsworth.
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I once asked artist Tacita Dean about Twombly's attitude to all this.
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She was a friend of his.
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She came to know him very well while making a film about him and she said,
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For Sai, I always believed it was about the encounter and a bit like a medium with a Ouija board.
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When he's in the moment, he cannot be interrupted, even by himself, or the connection is broken.
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When he's in the moment, the encounter becomes the painting and nothing else matters.
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this moment is one
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that Roland Barthes locates inside Twombly's handwriting Barthes remarks on the
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lightness of Twombly's line his impulse to quote link in a single state what appears
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and what disappears not to separate the exaltation of life from the fear of death but to produce a single affect,
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neither eros nor thanatos, but life -death in a single thought,
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a single gesture." And here is an interesting incidental fact about exaltation.
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When a Twombly painting called Farewell Catullus to the Shores of
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Asia Minor was exhibited in Houston a few years ago a
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guard found a french woman standing in front of the canvas totally unclothed
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that painting makes me want to run naked she wrote in the guest book
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twombly was delighted no one can top that he said to the new york times
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well let's perk ourselves up here with a random homonym and another brief poetic interlude
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once i lived sorry once i lived in los angeles for a
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while and i had a friend from mexico a composer
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whose ambition in life was to compose an entire symphony out of the sound of people sighing His name was Guillermo.
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Guillermo's Sigh Symphony. Do you hear sighing?
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Do you wake amid a sigh?
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Radio sighs AM, FM.
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Short wave sighs crackle in from the Atlantic.
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Hot sighs steam in the dawn.
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people kissing stop to sigh then kiss again doctors sigh into wounds
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and the bloodstream is changed forever flowers sigh and two noon bees float backwards is it doubt is it disappointment
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the world didn't owe me anything leaves come sighing in the door bits of girls sigh like men Forgery sigh twice
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Balthus sighs and lies about it Claiming it was Byron's sigh A sigh may come too late Is it better than screaming?
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Give me all your sighs for four or five dollars
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A sigh is weightless Yet it may interrupt the broadcast Can you abstain?
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What is that hush that carries itself up each sigh?
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we hunt together the sigh
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and I sport of kings to want to stop is beyond
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us the more sighs shine the more I'm in trouble some
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kind of silvery stuff you thought it was the sea part
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two tremor tremor what is it uncontrollable shaking of a limb identified by the english surgeon
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and apothecary james parkinson in 1817 as one of the first
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symptoms noticeable in people suffering what he called the shaking palsy before
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that we find mention of a shaking disease in an ayurvedic treatise from 10th century bc india
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and galen the ancient Greek doctor, noticed an affliction he called skelaturbe,
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which might be charmingly translated as revelry of limbs.
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But it was not until the 20th century
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that neurologists came to think this revelry could be quieted by physical and mental action.
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That is, by physical exercise focused with deliberate and intense mental attention.
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If the brain is plastic, as we now believe it is, it can be changed.
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Certain activities can rewire it, by generating new neurons to replace lost ones,
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or by exciting neurons that have gone idle or slow.
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Boxing is recommended.
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Its combination of difficult cardiovascular effort
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and deliberate focusing of the mind has proven to reduce the symptoms and slow the progress of the disease.
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Body and brain work together.
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Do you ever wonder what it's like inside the brain?
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Is it a noisy workroom or a silent laboratory?
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what does a sound sound like in there
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myself I imagine it as a big boardroom with CEOs sitting around staring at their phones
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and sending one another texts
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and the spookiest part of this would be presumably they're all
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there sitting in the total dark it would be dark inside the brain wouldn't it where would light come from
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and who would see it anyway going back to trimmer i brush my teeth with my right arm
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and right hand where i have a trimmer the toothbrush therefore goes whamming up
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and down at a savage pace colliding with lips
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and gums this revelry of toothbrush is produced by electricity flowing along a nerve path path.
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But a nerve path has a plane of action.
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If I concentrate and change the plane by moving my arm up or down at an eccentric angle, I can interrupt the flow and still the tremor.
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Or if I grip the toothbrush handle really tight, I can master the shaking by intensity of focus.
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Concentration is key.
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I have to think into the motion.
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In my own brutal understanding of it, thinking makes neurons, or makes neurons move.
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A man named John D.
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Pepper has made a similar discovery in managing his problems walking
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this gentleman born london 1938 now living in cape town is a bit of a hero
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or at least a significant innovator in the parkinson's community he
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addresses his problems with walking by walking 15 miles a week
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in three sessions of five miles each at a pace of
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four miles per hour four miles per hour is a faster
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pace than i naturally want to walk it is a struggle i have to pay attention to the motion
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so whereas you would perform a complex action like walking
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or toothbrushing automatically because the ceos sitting around the boardroom in your brain are sending memos to one another,
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making clear what each is supposed to do and when they're supposed to do it,
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I have to stop and think and apply conscious control.
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It is the opposite of the exalted state of Cy Twombly seated at his painting.
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By engaging the conscious movement technique john d pepper has been able to tame his tremor
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and other symptoms he got parkinson's when he was in his 30s
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and is now in his 90s still walking still walking four miles per hour
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peppers may not be an entirely new discovery james parkinson records in his case notes of 1817,
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that the patient called case 6 was able to interrupt his interminable shaking for a few minutes by a brief,
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sudden, deliberate movement.
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Philosophically, there is something worthy of notice here, having to do with attention.
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When we bring an action out of habit
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and into consciousness we stir up a new perception of it inside and outside change places time shifts
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Parkinson's disease is always now or maybe we could say the disease reminds us
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that life is now and at this point my reasoning bumps into Gertrude Stein's famous sentence from 1913
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Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
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rose it's a rose it's a rose it's a rose about
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which she herself made the following comment now you all have seen hundreds of poems about roses
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and you know in your bones that the rose is not there I think in
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that line the rose is read for the first time in English poetry in a hundred years part three boxing.
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I go to boxing class three times a week.
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Everyone in the class has Parkinson's, various degrees of damage.
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At a certain point in each class, after we've done warm -up and strength training and footwork drills,
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the coach yells out, gloves on, and we rush to the lockers to get out our boxing gloves.
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Then station ourselves, each of us, at a heavy bag and go ahead punching.
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As you may know, there are six basic kinds of boxing punches.
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Each has a number.
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One, jab.
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Two, cross.
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Three, hook with left hand.
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Four, hook with right hand.
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Five, uppercut with left hand.
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Six, uppercut with right hand.
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You can see what a great boxer I am, you know, demonstration.
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It's better with the gloves on.
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The central portion of a boxing class involves punching the heavy
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bag according to a combination of numbers called out by the coach.
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We each reproduce the punches that match the numbers it all goes quite fast i find
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that when i am trying to perform a complicated boxing combination i can feel the neurons in my brain struggling
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and striving i know this sounds crazy but as we saw earlier that boundary between inside and outside is not so simple
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the more i know about parkinson's disease the more i see it as holding oneself upright against a current
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that never ceases to pull the books all tell me to
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pay conscious continual attention to actions like walking writing brushing my teeth
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if i want to inhibit or delay the failure of neurons in the brain.
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It is hard to live within constant striving.
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It is hard to live within the word degenerative, which means that however I strive, I do not win.
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Of course, everyone is striving all their life, and none of us will win against mortality.
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But there is a difference, or so it seems between striving to say learn ancient greek or get up off the couch and do the vacuuming
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and striving to pay microscopic attention to every instant of a physical act
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studying his own way of walking john d pepper analyzed it into nine segments of action
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and six targets of attention for each step that he takes the man is intense
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but before we leave the topic of striving one more observation about boxing class
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at the midpoint of every class the coach yells gloves on
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and we head for our lockers to get out the boxing
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gloves now putting on your first boxing glove is easy
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because you still have another hand putting on the second glove not
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so easy meanwhile the coach is yelling don't use your teeth
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so conventional practice is to look around
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for someone at large in the gym and ask him
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or her to put on your glove for you as I'm a classics person it struck me
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that this whole situation whereby one human being stands before another
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asking for help has the same structure as the ancient Greek ritual called supplication
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as when Priam comes to the tent of Achilles at the end of the Iliad
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and supplicates for the body of his son.
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And in my boxing class I observe that it is all but,
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all but, impossible,
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when someone else is putting a glove on your hand to conjure up or worry about the black doorway.
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writing this essay in a notebook with a pencil has been
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a chastening exercise the handwriting is partly legible I do not
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achieve any John Cage -like liberation from the shackles of myself
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with this scrawl the hand seems in fact to be all
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too much me speaking of authenticity though here is one final interesting incidental fact.
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During the Second World War, Cy Twombly was in the army and assigned to the cryptography division,
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where he spent a couple of years deciphering other people's stupid lines on paper.
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We should be careful how we read the marks on that clay envelope.
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But really, what difference does handwriting make.
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Almost everyone to whom I mentioned my worries about bad handwriting said something like, oh, I've always had awful writing.
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No one in my family can read it, and it gets worse over time.
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Nowadays, I do everything on computer.
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Often when people say this, they sound a bit sheepish.
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I wanted to get another angle on this sheepishness,
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so I decided to question composers about the difference between making a musical score by hand and using a computer program.
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First, I asked the American composer David Lang, who said that he began writing scores on computer in the early 90s,
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but always wondered what this might have changed in his composing, as he often uses a lot of math and graphs and charting of proportions,
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which are much easier to do on computer
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so in 2003 he decided to see what it would be
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like to return to the old ways he wrote a piece
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called this was written by hand completely made with just a pencil on paper i'll quote what he said about
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that experience i tried to make it as complicated and structured as the other music I was writing at the time,
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but I discovered that I no longer had the patience, so the piece ended up being a lot simpler.
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Then I had the idea that the music should only be published in a facsimile of my paper score,
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but when I tried to copy the music over neatly enough to publish it by hand, I kept making mistakes, and it became illegible,
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so I ended up copying it on my computer and publishing that version.
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After David Lang, I went to the Icelandic composer Maria Holdmark and Sigfrustdottir, who had a very different view.
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She said, Well, it's a bit hard to describe, but I feel more in touch with the music,
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almost as if writing by hand has the same quality as playing.
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She's a violinist.
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or that the music is more real not as generic as it sometimes seems when writing on the computer
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i feel like each of the notes has an individual personality
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when handwritten and this can be exaggerated with different emphasis on size shape
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or space of each note after she had shown me some
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of her handwritten scores maria added a third angle to the whole situation by telling me
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that before she puts any notes on paper she makes a drawing
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that has neither notes nor words just shapes
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and colors indicating the ideas for the work she seemed diffident about mentioning these sketches.
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Perhaps we are all a little uneasy with our own pre -verbal selves.
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However that may be, none of them seem to construe the situation as a crisis of self or a test of character, as I did.
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For this conviction, I had to fall back on Confucius, beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind,
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not to mention Roland Barthes' inexhaustible question, how to draw a line that is not stupid.
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At this point, I felt I had exhausted aesthetics and turned to science,
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where there is a substantial body of evidence demonstrating that handwriting...
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stimulates different and more complex brain connections than typing on a keyboard,
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connections essential to encoding new information and forming memories.
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The precisely controlled movements of handwriting lead to patterns in the brain that promote learning.
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The brain opens, deepens, and enriches itself.
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There is in it, speaking subjectively, an exhilaration and a feeling of homecoming.
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Homecoming brings us near to the end of the lecture.
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To sum up, Actually, I'm terrible at summing up, so let's end with another text of Catullus.
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This, astonishingly, is a recently discovered papyrus, in which John D.
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Pepper interviews Catullus on various topics.
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um i'll impersonate john d pepper catullus will speak from the deep antiquity of the audience
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and john d pepper speaks first death death made me grow up love love made me endure Malady.
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Malady does not rest.
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Passion.
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Passion bewildered me.
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Parsnips.
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Parsnips taste like violets.
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Violets.
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Violets smell like parsnips.
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Gods.
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Gods cause me to be silent.
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Bureaucrats.
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Bureaucrats make me melancholy.
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Tears.
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Tears are my sisters.
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Laughter I wish I had a splendid laugh Warfare Ah,
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warfare Humankind Humankind is glass Roses I hate roses The line The line is just a lure
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Why not take the shorter way home?
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There was no shorter way home There was no shorter way home So, the end.
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Thank you.
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Thank you Anne.
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I think we're going to have some house lights come up.
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We have a few minutes for questions.
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Please raise your hand if you want to ask one.
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Wait for the roving mic and speak directly into the roving mic
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because the online audience were complaining that people weren't doing that last time.
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There's also some online questions that I'll turn
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but we'll start with one from the room i can see a hand in the middle aisle
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if one of the roving mics could um head up
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that way yeah okay um thanks very much alan sorry um you you said right at the beginning
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that when you saw how your handwriting had changed you you used the word embarrassing it was embarrassing
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and then you said later on it was chastening
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and i i just wondered if you could say a little bit more about embarrassment specifically
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and um i don't want to phrase it as the uses of embarrassment
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but your embarrassment has given us such an amazing lecture
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so i just wondered about um if you could speak a bit more about embarrassment thank you Yeah, embarrassment.
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It's a funny thing.
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I always try to, when I'm asked about a thing in me,
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I always try to think what it would be like for an ancient Greek to think that, to ask that or think that.
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And they don't have a word for embarrassment in ancient Greek, which is puzzling.
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They have a word for shame, which is related to embarrassment, but much less trivial or something but I think what
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what happened with the handwriting was
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that um looking at it i realized i could never be different than i am
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which is supposed to perhaps the thing you're supposed to recognize around age 17
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and somehow i missed that stop still trying to get there on the train but um
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It's a feeling of displacement for me from the self that I had been imagining I was, and then see, no, you're this.
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And I guess that's good and bad, both.
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I mean, it's always good to lose your preconceptions about anything, but especially the self.
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But it gives a different place to stand to look at whatever situation you're in.
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And I think that's the effect it had on me was just to make me stop and think,
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you know, what does it mean to be this person?
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What does it mean to be mortal, basically?
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You know, because when you're given a disease thing, you have to look at death and think, well, how will that be?
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What could I do to make that, like, more enjoyable for myself?
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Maybe not being embarrassed about it would be one aspect of that enjoyment, I don't know.
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But yeah, well good question.
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And there was an article in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago that was saying that
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handwriting might fall out of the culture completely within a couple of generations.
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Yeah.
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As people do what the friends in your lecture do, do you have a sense of what that does to
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society at large yeah i think it would be tragic really
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i don't i notice well there are lots of other examples of this
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but it does show up in people i teach they used
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uh i'm a professor sometimes i it shows up in in
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a different attitude to time it's all about the attitude to time that
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what's what makes people impatient about handwriting about writing things by hand is the time
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that it takes partly and so nowadays that's removed
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and with the removal of the time it takes to do
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a thing is removed the the state of mind they call reverie in
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which you think on your way to thinking you're not thinking yet exactly what you're going to think
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but you're getting there and
408
that procedure is is i think where we grow up you
409
know as mental as people who have mentality you learn to move around in your own brain in
410
that space of reverie
411
and handwriting among other things is one of the places where you get to practice that But if it's gone,
412
I mean, think how fast texting goes now.
413
Everything about texting is getting the thing done in four seconds.
414
Why?
415
I mean, what's the rush?
416
And then you end up with a message that's always misspelled and usually ungrammatical and kind of stupid.
417
It's just, you know, what do you want from Starbucks?
418
I'm going there on the way home.
419
Who really cares? but anyway so i think it would be really a tragedy
420
if we lost handwriting um a question from sarah on the
421
live stream uh are there any changes in your handwriting
422
that you welcome have they changed the way you compose in
423
a way that's interesting i suppose that's what the lecture is about
424
but also you can answer it more directly i wouldn't say i mean it's made me envious of Cy Twombly
425
because he manages to write in a messy silly way
426
that somehow also incredibly forceful I think
427
when I see my messy handwriting it just looks well as I said stupid that's what Roland Barthes
428
that word he locates which is the right word it looks stupid
429
so no I don't think it has improved anything for me
430
actually have any more questions from the room I can see
431
a hand on the third row here down the middle aisle
432
oh thank you i wondered um how do you feel
433
when you box
434
and what's your favorite punch uh how do i feel uh
435
it's exhilarating some people a number of people in the class mentioned anger being angry
436
and using the anger on the on the punching, I never have got to that yet.
437
i'm not an angry person maybe
438
but instead of anger i have a the kind of exhilaration
439
that goes with anger the kind of heightening of senses
440
and perception um favorite punch uh it's hard to say the
441
combination the one through six combination is is um just extremely pleasurable the way it locks together
442
and you know each one comes out of the one before
443
and it's just a lovely little sequence like a metrical shape in a poem
444
so i think i really like all six of them together um anybody have a preference for one punch over another
445
that one's volunteering um rose on the live stream asks have you written any poems about boxing
446
um yeah years ago i did write a poem about in
447
tv men there's a poem about boxing a box a shadow
448
boxer i forget why it was oh yeah it's okay poem at the time
449
not great but oddly enough i remembered the other day out of the blue that
450
when i was 10 years old i think i was in
451
grade six we did have to do a project about about a way of life
452
and i did the history of boxing it was like a
453
big um tabletop cardboard collage with stand -up figures of the marquis of queensbury
454
and so on it was really terrific i wish i wish i still had it but
455
mother threw it out another question from the room i can see uh okay
456
so we'll go to the gentleman back first
457
so just about three rows down thank you very much thank
458
you very much I was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 2017
459
and I'm just getting used now to the the concepts of switching off
460
and switching on I wondered whether they've given you any pause for thought no explain
461
that can you they're switching off is the sensation as you
462
as you come to the end of the efficacy of the of the dose of the medication
463
that you're taking so it's it's an obviousness of slowing down and a paralysis of a kind and a stiffness,
464
but which you can almost anticipate because it's the end of the drug cycle.
465
It tells you that you need to take the next medicine, really.
466
But it's an idea that I struggle with and think about a lot, you know, this sense of myself switching off at some point and, you know, whether I like it or not,
467
unless I take a upland yeah i don't at the present have
468
that sensation other people in the boxing class have mentioned
469
that a number of them a number of times but i don't myself experience it but it must be
470
yeah distressing you have to expect it up and down the medication so far doesn't
471
affect me that much that i would notice a pattern
472
there's another question slightly further up in the middle there yeah thank you
473
thank you very much for your lecture i just want i just wondered uh do you ever think about ai
474
in how in what and how um I'm so worried about it,
475
what it might do to our minds, the fact that it's around us so much and it's hyped so much.
476
And you want me to solve that for you?
477
The gloves are the only way.
478
I can AI box I wonder yeah well that's an avenue of thought I had not explored
479
so thanks I'll do that perhaps over dinner is the Ann Carson bot AI driven
480
or is there a person behind it we just don't know do we no the fact
481
that it stopped suggests there's a person did it stop I wasn't really following the bar
482
but if it stopped i'm glad um kyle on the live stream asks it said
483
that vibrato tremor of the voice deliberately masks imperfections in pitch
484
do you have thoughts about tremors of sound as well as movement hmm no i don't have a single thought about that
485
I guess I'm not a singer or anything, so I really wouldn't know how it would affect, I mean, in giving a talk at the...
486
You have to control your voice to some extent, but I have no idea what it sounds like.
487
In my head, it just sounds, as I say, stupid.
488
So there is no, I don't have any sort of two sides to that knowledge.
489
So no, I just say no. The Twombly pictures, it struck me that your last book,
490
Wrong Norma, has lots of images with quite a sort of twombly -ish energy about them, some of them.
491
I wondered how this
492
has affected your drawing and the role drawing serves in your creative practice
493
and whether there's a kind of parallel story that's slightly different.
494
I don't find that tremor kicks in when I'm drawing
495
so that's provocative isn't it someone should study that PhDs will be written
496
sure they will uh more questions from the room we've got one in the this side of the middle aisle
497
um so
498
if you just come down about halfway um it's right on
499
the other side of the road from where you are
500
so keep keep coming down
501
but we'll have to pass the mic across this is very
502
like my brain trying to find a neuron to do the thing it needs.
503
Sai Twomley is my favourite, my first ever favourite artist and I can really
504
remember the first time I encountered his work and what that experience was like as a teenager.
505
And I wondered if you could share a bit about what that was like for you encountering his work.
506
I think I first encountered it
507
because Currie took me to the Philadelphia Art Museum where they
508
have the the sequence about the um the Iliad I think it's I don't know what it's called
509
but anyway it's a number of a whole room full of paintings about Achilles and Agamemnon and so on
510
and I was in school well teaching school at the time in classics
511
and it was just fabulous to have somebody actually using all this material
512
that i thought of as too esoteric to be cared about by anybody my own age
513
and and then also to have half of it misspelled
514
because you know he misspells ilia he deliberately did it wrong
515
and then waited for people to complain and no one did
516
and he was incensed that no one no one cared
517
that he spelled the Iliam wrong but anyway
518
so yeah it was completely exhilarating to me to see
519
that room it you should all go to Philadelphia and see that room
520
he said yeah I think we've got time for about two more questions
521
so um I can see another just another hand a bit
522
closer actually maybe yeah no come down about three more rows
523
and then again sorry it's the other end of of the row no no keep coming
524
and then the end of that row thank you
525
hi is this working um i thought
526
that the handwriting in your text nox always resembled site homily the way you write michael at the beginning
527
and i was wondering what you were thinking about the self present in the printed handwriting of
528
that text and your handwriting now That's complicated.
529
The writing of the Michael, the name.
530
One thing, though, is it's off again.
531
I wrote his name in cursive.
532
Twombly never uses cursive.
533
It's always printing, as far as I remember.
534
well no there are some there are some that are scrawled
535
that way so I didn't think about Twombly at
536
that time I can't remember when I did that
537
but it was long before I think I think long before I knew about Twombly's work
538
or had studied it looked at it carefully so I yeah I don't know I like the way the book looks,
539
I like the way that name works on that page, but I don't know that I thought of it as Twombly -like at the time.
540
But thank you, it's nice to remember that page.
541
Rather than a final question, we're actually going to hand over to Curry for a final moment, So if we could get that mic there,
542
to the front here, before I hand over to Currie, it'd be great if we could just say thank you to Anne one more time.
543
Hello, hello, hello, oh there we are, you know when Ann and I do performances together we always end it in a particular way
544
and um even though suzanne's lecture we decided we still have to end it in
545
that particular way
546
so you know there's an artist who is one of the
547
great artists of the last 75 years yoko ono who in 1961 i think wrote a piece called the scream symphony
548
and ann and i for a number of years have ended our performances with the scream symphony
549
so what What we're going to ask you to do is for 10 seconds, scream at the top of your lungs,
550
remembering Yoko and thinking about joy.
551
So on three, Ann will count it off, everybody's going to scream for 10 seconds.
552
You ready?
553
One, two, three.
554
Thank you, thank you.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Anne Carson: Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind”. This video has 554 sentences and 7008 words to shadow. The speech runs for 56:17. The speaker talks at a steady 125 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. Only 78% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| handwriting noun | /ˈhændɹaɪtɪŋ/ | The act or process of writing done with the hand, rather than typed or word-processed. |
| sigh verb | /saɪ/ | To inhale a larger quantity of air than usual, and immediately expel it; to make a deep single audible respiration, especially as the result or involuntary… |
| poem noun | /ˈpoʊ.əm/ | A literary piece written in verse. |
| glove noun | /ɡlʌv/ | An item of clothing, covering all or part of the hand and fingers, but usually allowing independent movement of the fingers. |
| punch noun | /pʌnt͡ʃ/ | A hit or strike with one's fist. |
| embarrassment noun | /ɪmˈbæɹ.əs.mənt/ | A state of discomfort arising from bashfulness or consciousness of having violated a social rule; humiliation. |
| gene noun | /d͡ʒiːn/ | A theoretical unit of heredity of living organisms which may take several values and (in principle) predetermines a precise trait of an organism's form… |
| lecture noun | /ˈlɛk.t͡ʃə/ | A spoken lesson or exposition, usually delivered to a group. |
| pepper noun | /ˈpɛp.ə/ | A plant of the family Piperaceae. |
| strive verb | /ˈstɹaɪv/ | To try to achieve a result; to make strenuous effort; to try earnestly and persistently. |
| shake verb | /ˈʃeɪk/ | To cause (something) to move rapidly in opposite directions alternatingly. |
| doorway noun | /ˈdɔɹweɪ/ | The passage of a door; a door-shaped entrance into a house or a room. |
| anger noun | /ˈæŋɡə/ | A strong and unpleasant feeling of displeasure, hostility, or antagonism, usually combined with an urge to yell, curse, damage or destroy things, or harm… |
| angle noun | /ˈæŋ.ɡəl/ | A figure formed by two rays which start from a common point (a plane angle) or by three planes that intersect (a solid angle). |
| clay noun | /kleɪ/ | A mineral substance made up of small crystals of silica and alumina, that is ductile when moist; the material of pre-fired ceramics. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. |
| get out verb | To leave or escape. |
| grow up verb | To mature and become an adult. |
| sit around verb | To spend time sitting idly, not doing anything important. |
| sum up verb | To produce a total by adding. |
| switch off verb | To stop or disable a device by turning a switch or a lever. |
| call out verb | To specify, especially in detail. |
| come down verb | To descend, fall down, collapse. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Do you hear sighing?
- Do you wake amid a sigh?
- Do you ever wonder what it's like inside the brain?
- What could I do to make that, like, more enjoyable for myself?
- I mean, what's the rush?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has been paralyzed · have gone · has proven |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | were provoked · was diagnosed · has been paralyzed |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | person who has · degenerative, which means · Greek, which is |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 76 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, I'm, you're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: smooth /smuːð/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, toothbrush /ˈtuːθ.bɹʌʃ/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: shake /ˈʃeɪk/, conscious /ˈkɑn.ʃəs/, rush /ɹʌʃ/, passion /ˈpæʃən/, brush /bɹʌʃ/
- Long words — get the stress right: embarrassment /ɪmˈbæɹ.əs.mənt/, complicated /ˈkɑm.plɪˌkeɪ.tɪd/, deliberate /dɪˈlɪb.(ə.)ɹət/, medication /mɛdɪˈkeɪʃən/, presumably /pɹɪˈzuːməbli/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like handwriting, sigh, poem.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.