These Voices are Birds, It's Like a Sound of Wings

Pigeon Purse by Debra Gavant

I've been thinking that those books we're reading, re-reading, wanting to read, say as much about us as anything else. One of the books on my to-read (to buy) list, is Karen Solie's Pigeon. (I was reminded of this when I came across the above purse...). Others:

Want to read: The Marram Grass: Poetry & Otherness by Anne Simpson, Fountain Pens: History and Design by Giorgio Dragoni

Reading: The Winter Vault, by Anne Michaels

Re-Reading: White Ink, by Helene Cixous, Woman to Woman(interviews), by Marguerite Duras and Xaviere Gauthier, Script & Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting, by Kitty Burns Florey

It's interesting to me how the books we're reading or want to read, sometimes prompt the re-reading of books on our shelves. What was it that has made me want to pick up the Duras interviews again? I know part of what attracts me to them is their rough and real quality. I am attracted to the square brackets. A telephone rings, a dog barks incessantly, the tape runs out, there are malfunctions, accidental erasures, a long silence is recorded, wine is sipped. There are digressions and sentences that trail off. Gauthier talks about the decision to leave them "exactly as they were said." In the afterword, there is a discussion of how Duras' comments on 'voice film' is intriguingly parallel to what goes on in the interviews. She says, "So they spoke in all directions...like birds, these voices are birds, it's like a sound of wings. They speak in all directions. I also had to...choose, from all that they were saying." This reading of several books at once, this listening to voices, from all directions, those moments that exist in square brackets, too. These voices that one absorbs, flutters and flaps and hops steadily toward. Yes, they are birds. I do hear the sound of wings....