Category Archives: Essays

I’m currently reading Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan, and oh my god, what a good book it is! I’ve read six of the 14 essays so far, and while they aren’t all at the same level of fabulousness, they are all pretty close. I just finished an essay on Michael Jackson, which sent me off to watch this video and appreciate him in a way I never have before. The first essay is on a Christian Rock festival, which he captures perfectly in all its weirdness, and there are also essays on Hurricane Katrina (with a haunting ending), his brother’s near-death experience, and the TV show The Real World. This last essay is written in a funny, hyped-up, super-informal tone befitting the subject:

I’d suspected there were puppeteers involved in The Real World, invisibly instigating “drama,” but to think that the network had gone for it like that and hired a shrink? One who, as the kids went on to assure me, was involved not only in manipulating the cast during shooting but also in the casting process itself? And she’s worked on other shows? This explained so much, about The Real World, about all of it. When I wrote that business earlier about how the casting people have made the shows crazier and crazier, I didn’t know I was right about any of that! This person is an unacknowledged legislator of the real world. Turns out Dr. Laura is a psychologist, not a psychiatrist, which is better, when you think about it, because psychologists don’t have to take the Hippocratic oath, and she’s definitely, definitely done some harm. No chance I was going to call her.

Or there’s this somewhat more serious passage from the same essay (don’t miss the last line):

People hate these shows, but their hatred smacks of denial. It’s all there, all the old American grotesques, the test-tube babies of Whitman and Poe, and great gauntlet of doubtless eyes, big mouths spewing fantastic catchphrase fountains of impenetrable self-justification, muttering dark prayers, calling on God to strike down those who would fuck with their money, their cash, and always knowing, always preaching. Using weird phrases that nobody uses, except everybody uses them now. Constantly talking about “goals.” Throwing carbonic acid on our castmates because they used our special cup and then calling our mom to say, in a baby voice, “People don’t get me here.” Walking around half-naked, with a butcher knife behind our backs. Telling it like it is y’all (what-what). And never passive-aggressive, no. Saying it straight to your face. But crying … My God, there have been more tears shed on reality TV than by all the war widows of the world. Are we so raw? It must be so. There are simply too many of them — too many shows and too many people on the shows — for them not to be revealing something endemic. This is us, a people of savage sentimentality, weeping and lifting weights.

Those are good passages, but not even the best I’ve found, just the ones I read recently. Sullivan’s voice is amazing. I love discovering a new great essayist.

AfterWord: Conjuring the Literary Dead is one of the first books I requested from NetGalley because it’s a collection of essays about writers and books, and I love a good collection about writers and books. I was a little disappointed in it, though; I thought the book’s idea sounded promising, but either I was mistaken about that, or the execution didn’t live up to the possibilities. I think the problem may be that the essays were uneven and perhaps, generally speaking, a little too short. They didn’t dig into their subjects deeply enough and so left me feeling a little dissatisfied.

The premise is that in each essay, a writer imagines a meeting with his or her favorite author, or perhaps an author he or she has written about or grappled with in some fashion. The various essayists tackle this task in different ways, some pretending that they have traveled back in time, some imagining they are meeting their subject in the present day or in some nebulous in-between space. In some cases, the authors know about things that have happened after their deaths, and in others they don’t.

Which, let me digress to say, is something I think about now and then: I remember somebody saying, or perhaps I read it, that the really sad thing about having to die is not knowing how things turn out. I agree with the feeling. I think about people who lived before the time of the novel and what it would be like not to know that a novel existed. Or not to know about Jane Austen or James Joyce or David Foster Wallace, or whoever. Who are the wonderful, amazing writers we won’t know about, and what genres will we not live to experience? Okay, best not to think about that too much…

Some of the essays in this collection are really charming — Cynthia Ozick on Henry James, Jay Parini on Robert Frost, Eugene Goodheart on Jane Austen, Francis King on Oscar Wilde, Jeffrey Meyers on Samuel Johnson. Others made me contemplate how difficult it is to create a convincing scene and realistic dialogue. There were some essayists who I presume were more academic types than fiction writers whose attempts at a kind of fiction writing were awkward. In a couple cases, I simply didn’t like the tone or the attitude expressed.

Mostly, though, I kept thinking about how none of this was real, how all of it was mere speculation. That’s what it’s supposed to be, of course, but it felt a little like reading a description of someone’s dream — an interesting dream, but not much more than that. If I’m going to read about an author’s life, I think I’d prefer either something more straightforwardly critical and argumentative, whether it’s a biography or a critical essay (no matter how imaginatively done) or a fully-realized novel along the lines of Colm Toibin’s The Master.

However, there are some essays I’m glad I read. Perhaps the best approach with this book is to read selectively, finding the essays about authors you find interesting and focusing on those. And for another view entirely, read Stefanie’s post on the book. The book did make me consider who I would write about if I had been a contributor to the collection: perhaps Virginia Woolf or Mary McCarthy. Oh no — it would be Laurence Sterne, definitely. But what in the world would I say to any of these people if I could meet them, even only in my imagination?

I enjoyed Mary McCarthy’s essay collection On the Contrary, although many of the pieces felt dated. But there’s a certain kind of datedness that’s interesting, particularly when the topic is literature. It’s fun reading about the literary scene as it existed for McCarthy in the 1950s — the authors she was paying attention to and the ones from previous generations whose reputations she was busy sorting out. She has a way of starting out with a ridiculous claim such as there are no characters in fiction anymore or nobody is writing real novels these days, and I get ready to dismiss the entire essay as absurd, but then she starts defining her terms and giving examples and building up her arguments, and before I know it, I am beginning to agree, at least a little.

Other essays in the book are about the political and social scene, including some essays on feminism; some of these struck me as both relevant to today (in that way some essays can make you think that things never change) and also as dated. The datedness comes from the way she drops references to people and events without explaining them, because of course her audience at the time didn’t need these things explained. This makes me think that McCarthy writes wonderfully well about topical subjects, because in spite of feeling as though I’m out of the loop and lacking the context to understand her references, the essays are quite entertaining and good. How often are topical essays interesting 50 or 60 years later? This book kept me engrossed the whole way through.

The best essays, though, are “Artists in Uniform,” which I wrote about here, and “Settling the Colonel’s Hash,” the title of which is truly awful, but which is a wonderful companion piece to “Artists.” “Settling the Colonel’s Hash” was inspired by responses she got to her the “Artists” essay, in particular, a letter from a school teacher wanting to know, among other things, “how closely do you want the symbols labeled?” Her students had spent a great deal of time discussing the story and while some of them insisted that it had no other meaning than the literal level, most students found it to be full of symbols.

Well, McCarthy didn’t answer this letter, except indirectly in the form of the essay itself, but she came down on the side of the students who read the piece on the literal level. There are symbols in the story, perhaps, but not the kind the students were looking for. The various shades of green she wore on the day described in “Artists in Uniform” were simply what she happened to be wearing that day, not an invention on her part meant to say something about fertility and growth. The contrasting greens she wore might possibly symbolize her desire to look like an artist, a little bohemian, but that’s where it ends. Similarly, the Colonel’s hash might say something about his desire to eat food considered properly manly, while McCarthy chose a more feminine sandwich.

This leads her into a discussion of various types of symbols, those that take the reader out of the text toward the world of archetypes and myths, and those that lead the reader back into the text:

In any account of reality, even a televised one, which comes closest to being a literal transcript or replay, some details are left out as irrelevant (though nothing is really irrelevant). The details that are not eliminated have to stand as symbols of the whole, like stenographic signs, and of course there is an art of selection, even in a newspaper account: the writer, if he has any ability, is looking for the revealing detail that will sum up the picture for the reader in a flash of recognition.

This is the interesting kind of symbol, she argues, the kind that merely is what it is — the shades of green McCarthy wore, the food she ate — while at the same time telegraphing, signaling something about her personality. In another example, there is the train in Anna Karenina:

The train is necessary to the plot of the novel, and I believe it is also symbolic, both of the iron forces of material progress that Tolstoy hated so and that played a part in Anna’s moral destruction, and also of those iron laws of necessity and consequence that govern human action when it remains on the sensual level.

One can read the whole novel, however, without being conscious that the train is a symbol; we do not have to “interpret” to feel that import of doom and loneliness in the train’s whistle …

The essay ultimately turns into an argument about how best to read, which does not involve the kind of symbol-hunting the unfortunate high school teacher encouraged her students to do:

The images of a novel or a story belong, as it were, to a family, very closely knit and inseparable from each other; the parent “idea” of a story or a novel generates events and images all bearing a strong family resemblance. And to understand a story or a novel, you must look for the parent “idea,” which is usually in plain view, if you read quite carefully and literally what the author says.

To illustrate this idea, she gives a close reading of her “Artists” essay, describing what her main point was and how the details of the story relate to that point. This is very satisfying, largely because “Artists” is such a great essay and it’s fun to hear McCarthy discuss the thoughts that went into it. It satisfies our curiosity about what the writer really meant and whether we “got it” or not.

And then she ends with this:

In any work that is truly creative, I believe, the writer cannot be omniscient in advance about the effects that he proposes to produce. The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero…. Hence, I would say to the student of writing that outlines, patterns, arrangements of symbols may have a certain usefulness at the outset for some kinds of minds, but in the end they will have to be scrapped. If the story does not contradict the outline, overrun the pattern, break the symbols, like an insurrection against authority, it is surely a still birth. The natural symbolism of reality has more messages to communicate than the dry Morse code of the disengaged mind.

I’m not sure anything McCarthy says in this essay isn’t something I’ve heard elsewhere, but she says it all so well. There is something about the directness and forcefulness of her style that I love. Typical of McCarthy and the attitude that makes me love her is her statement that in “Artists in Uniform,” “I wanted to embarrass myself and, if possible, the reader too.” Any writer who sets out with that goal in mind is a writer I’m inclined to like.

One of the things I liked about Emily Fox Gordon’s Book of Days is simply that I feel that I’m a lot like her. I recognized myself in a lot of what she had to say. I liked Gordon’s passages on feeling ambivalent about her femininity and feeling like an outsider in social situations, and I appreciated her discomfort with the role of faculty wife and her pleasure at critiquing the faculty wives she found herself surrounded by. Her sense of humor is one I share. I also felt a moment of recognition when I read this:

The signal [that she should become a writer] was embedded in Phillip Lopate’s newly published anthology, The Art of the Personal Essay. The contents of this book were a revelation to me. I read Orwell’s “Such, Such Were the Joys,” Natalia Ginszburg’s “He and I,” Hazlitt’s “On the Pleasure of Hating,” Lopate’s own “Against Joie de Vivre” with delight, as well as with a growing conviction that I had found my genre.

I had known there was something wrong with the stories and novels I had been producing in spurts for decades … I was never very good at, or interested in, creating fictional worlds whose parts were set in motion by the force of psychological motivation. I never understood plot. Characterization, though it interested me, put me into a state of panicky agnosticism. I’d never had much confidence in my intuitions about how — as Eudora Welty put it — “some folks would do.” It seemed to me that folks might do any number of ways.

I’m not a personal essayist and don’t have any stories or novels of my own, but I share her uncertainty about fiction writing and bafflement in the face of plot. I can’t really comprehend writing a novel of my own, unless it were in the  plotless, essayistic Nicholson Baker style. I also share her experience of being inspired by Lopate’s anthology. I have that book to thank for my adoration of the essay genre, and if I were ever to want to write something besides the blog and the occasional book review, I would write personal essays. (I think I’m too lazy for that, though — another trait I share with Gordon, except she got over it long enough to write quite a lot!)

Gordon wrote two memoirs, but in this book’s title essay, she claims she was never comfortable with them. She did her best to tell the truth about her life, but she believes that the contemporary memoir requires you to fit your life into a preset mold where the writer suffers, often at the hands of parents, and seeks and eventually finds redemption or transcendence or some kind of healing. She shaped her story to fit this model but was aware of the distortions this created. The essay form does a better job of capturing the truth of a life:

I learned that the memoir and the personal essay are crucially different forms. The memoir tempts the memoirist to grandiose self-representation. The essay, with its essential modesty, discourages the impulse. The memoir tends to deindividuate its protagonist, enlisting him to serve as a slightly larger-than-life representative of the sufferings of a group or community, while the essay calls attention to the quirks and fallibilities we take as marks of our essential separateness. The erratic zigzag of essayistic thinking — the process that E.M. Cioran calls “thinking against oneself” — makes the essay proof against the triumphalism of memoir by slowing the gathering of narrative momentum. The essayist transects the past, slicing through it first from one angle, then from another, until — though it can never be captured — some fugitive truth has been defensively cornered.

She comes to regret having written her memoir at all, except for the feeling of accomplishment it gave her, and, presumably, because it made publishing a collection of essays easier (and also provided material for one of them). I imagine there’s an argument to be made that the memoir is capable of more than Gordon acknowledges here, but I’m sympathetic to her point. It’s the sense of incompleteness, exploration, and provisionality that I like most about the essay form.

As part of my very slow read-though of Virginia Woolf’s major works, I’m am now reading The Common Reader, her collection of literary essays. And oh my goodness, have I made it clear how much I love Virginia Woolf? Because these essays are wonderful. This is my second time through the book, and I’m loving it. I just read her essay on Montaigne, and I marveled at the way she moves back and forth between writing about him in the usual way one writes about someone else and actually embodying him, taking on his persona. She will write something like “It is life that emerges more and more clearly as these essays reach not their end, but their suspension in full career” that is clearly evaluating Montaigne from an exterior perspective, but then in the same paragraph she will start describing his ideas as though she were Montaigne herself:

In short, the soul is all laced about with nerves and sympathies which affect her every action, and yet, even now in 1580, no one has any clear knowledge — such cowards we are, such lovers of the smooth conventional ways — how she works or what she is except that of all things she is the most mysterious, and one’s self the greatest monster and miracle in the world …

By slipping into his voice, she creates a strong sense of who Montaigne was; she brings him to life, and her affection for him shines through.

But then her own voice is incredibly convincing. Woolf writes with such assurance and poise — without coming across as arrogant — that I’m ready to believe whatever she says. I love this passage from the essay “Notes on an Elizabethan Play,” which compares plays and novels:

The play is poetry, we say, and the novel prose. Let us attempt to obliterate detail, and place the two before us side by side, feeling, so far as we can, the angles and edges of each, recalling each, so far as we are able, as a whole. Then, at once, the prime differences emerge; the long leisurely accumulated novel; the little contracted play; the emotion all split up, dissipated and then woven together, slowly and gradually massed into a whole in the novel; the emotions concentrated, generalised, heightened in the play. What moments of intensity, what phrases of astonishing beauty the play shot at us!

She makes everything clear — of course that’s how plays and novels work!

She also can conjure up the feeling of a place and time beautifully. Consider this passage about medieval England from her essay “The Pastons and Chaucer”:

For let us imagine, in the most desolate part of England known to us at the present moment, a raw, new-built house without telephone, bathroom or drains, arms-chairs or newspapers, and one shelf perhaps of books, unwieldy to hold, expensive to come by. The windows look out upon a few cultivated fields and a dozen hovels, and beyond them there is the sea on one side, on the other a vast fen. A single road crosses the fen, but there is a hole in it, which, one of the farm hands reports, is big enough to swallow a carriage. And, the man adds, Tom Topcroft, the mad bricklayer, has broken loose again and ranges the country half-naked, threatening to kill any one who approaches him. That is what they talk about at dinner in the desolate house, while the chimney smokes horribly, and the draught lifts the carpets on the floor. Orders are given to lock all gates at sunset, and, when the long dismal evening has worn itself away, simply and solemnly, girt about with dangers as they are, these isolated men and women fall upon their knees in prayer.

The essay is about Chaucer and how his writing springs from his time and place, but she takes a while to get to him, lingering instead on the landscape and the people who lived in his time and read his work. I finished the essay feeling as though I had  not just learned something about Chaucer but saw and heard and felt something about him too.

So, yeah, I’m not posting as often as I usually do. I’m not sure where my energy has gone. I used to post regularly even when I was busier than I am right now, but these days I just don’t seem to be able to. I think I may have had things in a delicate balance for a while — I was busy, but I managed life just well enough that I had enough energy left over to write a bit here — and now that balance has gotten out of whack. I’m riding more than I used to, going to yoga more than I used to, seeing friends more than I used to, and that’s been just enough to make me grateful that blogging is optional, and that I can skip posting as often as I want. I think I’m also, slowly, becoming a more relaxed, less driven person (thanks to those yoga classes, perhaps?), so I’m more likely to conclude that the world will be just fine if I don’t write that blog post I was thinking about writing.

But I don’t want to go too much longer without writing about David Foster Wallace’s book A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, even if it’s in a short and summary fashion. Because the book was just SO good. I’m sad now that I’ve read Wallace’s two essay collections and there aren’t any more out there to read. I’m imagining that there will be more collections of Wallace’s work coming out eventually, but they won’t be books he’s put together himself.

The book surprised me by being 350 pages long (and they are long pages with relatively small print) and containing only seven essays, one of which is less than ten pages long, and another of which is less than 20, which means that the remaining five are quite lengthy. Many of the pieces were first published in magazines (three of them in Harper’s) or journals, which makes me even more surprised that they are so long. But thank goodness people let Wallace publish long essays, because when he’s given room to explore a subject thoroughly, he really digs in deep and reports back in a most satisfying fashion.

Several of the essays are of the “explore an event or a subculture and describe it for the rest of the world” variety, and he takes his time to describe not only what he sees, but what he’s experiencing personally, so it’s an essay about the subject and also about the writer. They are very much personal essays, not purely journalistic ones (in fact, he sometimes makes fun of himself for the ways he plays at being a journalist).

I’m tempted not to mention the essays’s subjects, for fear that you will lose interest, because frankly I wouldn’t normally want to read about some of the things he writes about. And the truth is that Wallace is worth reading no matter what his subject. It’s the combination of journalism and personal essay, along with his distinctive witty, honest, self-deprecating, super-smart-but-low-key-about-it style that makes his essays so great. He has such a companionable voice that you are willing to read whatever he wants to tell you about, because surely he will have something interesting to say and will make the whole thing fun.

But I’ll tell you about the subjects anyway. The more journalistic essays are about the Illinois State Fair, David Lynch’s films (and the set of Lost Highway), the tennis player Michael Joyce, and a cruise. There is also a personal essay on Wallace’s experience growing up in the midwest playing tennis (which also touches on math and midwestern winds); an essay on television, irony, and fiction; and a short book review essay.

What really matters, though, is the voice in these essays. I think that Wallace tends to write in a similar voice whether he’s writing fiction or nonfiction. The fiction (well, Infinite Jest; I haven’t read his other fiction yet) is less personal and more varied, perhaps, but all of the writing has a similar sensibility and a similar use of language — wildly inventive, exuberant, funny, self-aware, playful, brilliant.

I’ve finished The Best American Essays 2008 and it’s confirmed how much I like the series. I haven’t loved every essay in every volume, but I am reminded as I read them what I like about the genre — a good essay writer can make any subject interesting. I’m continually surprised at the subjects I like reading about, in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing.

I suppose you can say the same thing about any type of writing: a good novelist can make any subject interesting too. But there’s something about an essay’s quick exploration of a topic that doesn’t happen in the same way in a novel. A novel requires a greater time commitment, and it’s much harder to make unusual subject matter work, whereas an essay can delight and surprise in the course of a half hour or so, and I find myself thinking, wow, I never thought I’d love an essay on … strip clubs.

I can’t even tell you how uninterested I am in reading about strip clubs, but Joe Wenderoth’s essay “Where God is Glad” is an essay on a strip club and I loved it. He starts off on the right note: “I hate strip clubs,” but then he goes on to say that his new book’s cover has a picture of him standing in front of his favorite strip club, and I’m full of doubts. As the essay goes on, though, and he describes what his favorite strip club is like, which is to say, unlike any other strip club out there, I’m brought back around. It turns out that this place, unintentially as far as I can tell, undermines the whole notion of the strip club:

Now that I have stopped to describe the place in more depth, it seems clear to me that Tony’s is not really a strip club at all. I hate strip clubs, as I said, and people who like strip clubs hate Tony’s. Folks who like strip clubs seek something that Tony’s decisively does not offer. Tony’s is not “nice,” does not feel like a risqué Applebee’s. It doesn’t attempt to dignify the goings-on it shelters.

I’ll leave some mystery about what Tony’s is actually like in case you want to read the essay for yourself, but I will say that Wenderoth manages to make the subject profound and moving.

Something similar happened when I read Rick Moody’s essay “On Celestial Music.” I got a little worried when I saw the essay was long and read the title of its first section, “Otis Redding as Purveyor of Celestial Music.” I didn’t really want to read an essay on Otis Redding and the whole thing threatened to be pretentious and dull. But the essay was magical and I loved it. Moody won me over.

Not all the essays here did that — John Updike’s essay on dinosaurs was just okay and Lee Zacharias’s on buzzards (mixed in with some autobiography) gave me way more information on buzzards than I could handle.

But still, the shortness of essays makes it easier to take a risk and read something I’m afraid I won’t like, and sometimes I’m wonderfully surprised at how wrong I was.

I’m about halfway through The Best American Essays 2008 and am greatly enjoying it. There are some stunningly good essays in the collection, and even the ones that aren’t stunningly good are still entertaining. There’s one on a lesbian wedding that I liked and one on how often great and famous quotations aren’t quoted correctly — the phrase “nice guys finish last” was originally “The nice guys are all over there, in seventh place,” but the longer phrase was shortened to make a better headline.

I also really liked Jonathan Lethem’s essay on plagiarism called “The Ecstasy of Influence.” Lethem argues that our copyright laws are too strict. All art is essentially borrowing and we should be encouraging the free movement of art and ideas rather than trying to turn them into property and to increase profits from them as much as possible.

These aren’t the most original ideas in the world, but, it turns out, that is kind of the point. I enjoyed reading the essay because about halfway through it I decided to flip to the end to see how long the essay was and I noticed some interesting-looking endnote-type things there, although there weren’t any endnote numbers. I looked a little more closely and realized that the endnotes explained where he got his material from — and that much of the essay was plagiarized. I just now looked over the essay to write about it and realized that the essay is subtitled “A Plagiarism.” A big clue I missed, right?

That made the essay even more fun to read because from that point on, I kept flipping back and forth to see what was original Lethem and what was plagiarized. I had to laugh at myself for really liking a certain line that I later found out is plagiarized from the introduction to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, something I’ve read multiple times and should have remembered:

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of the void but out of chaos.

That’s a good sentence to steal for my class on creativity, I think.

Lethem has taken big chunks of text from lots of different sources; I don’t really know what percentage of the essay is from other people, but that percentage is pretty high. But the essay isn’t really plagiarized, obviously, since he documents where his quotations come from pretty carefully. He also says the whole idea of writing a “collage text” isn’t new to him — of course.

One of the most interesting ideas in the essay is about how art participates in a gift economy, in addition to the market economy — the economy we are used to thinking of where things are bought and sold. The difference between the two is that “a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, whereas the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection.” We buy things and feel no connectedness to the salesperson, but when we receive a gift, there is an emotional connection between us and the giver.

Art participates in both these economies at once — it can be bought and sold, obviously; we buy books, tickets to plays, and paintings to hang on our wall. But it also means something to us beyond that:

Art that matters to us — which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience — is received as a gift is received.

The way art participates in both kinds of economies is complicated, but what it means is that while art is a commodity, it can’t be fully reduced to a commodity. The problem with copyright laws as they exist now is that they push art too close to commodity status and try to negate the gift element of it:

But if it is true that in the essential commerce of art a gift is carried by the work from the artist to his audience, if I am right to say that where there is no gift there is no art, then it may be possible to destroy a work of art by converting it into a pure commodity. I don’t maintain that art can’t be bought and sold, but that the gift portion of the work places a constraint upon our merchandising.

Interesting, isn’t it? Should I give Lethem credit for these ideas? Who knows.