"there's Isaiah Berlin's account of
meeting Anna Akhmatova who began reciting incomprehensibly: it was
only afterwards Berlin learned that Akhmatova was reciting Byron in
what she thought was English!"
On which note: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RgL2MKfWTo
It was a great shock to me when I first heard an audiobook recording
of the Lord of the Rings to find that I'd been getting most of the
names wrong.
On Prynne: "inscribing new sets of sense-bearing differences upon the
schedule of old ones". "Schedule" is not, or not yet, rhythm; it
suggests a spatial metaphor for time, time plotted on a graph,
"frozen" or "arrested" time. Synchrony rather than diachrony. There is
diachrony only when some active intelligence inscribes the new.
Instead of past and present (time passed and time passing, "narrative"
time), the opposition is between the existing and the novel (time as a
succession of epochs, each new one breaking through the crust of its
precursor).
Dominic
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