Loving a new interview with Julie Carr of Counterpath at The Volta. Here is a bit of it:
“A city must remain open to what it knows about what it doesn’t yet know about what it will be”
This is the last sentence of the quote from Derrida that we have on the Counterpath website. It’s meaningful to us in a number of ways. First is the metaphor we are implying: a press is like a city because it is a confluence of people, paths, constructions, voices, and ideas which sometimes come into a kind of harmony, or seem to (“Everything suddenly honks: it’s 12:40 of a Thursday”) and sometimes seem to be in a kind of beautiful discord. But this quote also reminds us that we started the press in order to be surprised by where it might take us, in order, in a sense, to learn from the authors we publish something about what seems necessary to do. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we are passive or without judgment or plan. But it does mean that at every moment, especially when we are deciding about a manuscript, we try to drop our preconceptions about who we are as a press (therefore as readers, as people) in order to see who we might become.
“A city must remain open to what it knows about what it doesn’t yet know about what it will be”
This is the last sentence of the quote from Derrida that we have on the Counterpath website. It’s meaningful to us in a number of ways. First is the metaphor we are implying: a press is like a city because it is a confluence of people, paths, constructions, voices, and ideas which sometimes come into a kind of harmony, or seem to (“Everything suddenly honks: it’s 12:40 of a Thursday”) and sometimes seem to be in a kind of beautiful discord. But this quote also reminds us that we started the press in order to be surprised by where it might take us, in order, in a sense, to learn from the authors we publish something about what seems necessary to do. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we are passive or without judgment or plan. But it does mean that at every moment, especially when we are deciding about a manuscript, we try to drop our preconceptions about who we are as a press (therefore as readers, as people) in order to see who we might become.