**The Essay Encouragement Thread

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**The Essay Encouragement Thread

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1avaland
Avr 29, 2009, 8:47 am

Not so long ago, I had the ambition to read one essay a day. Turns out, it was a bit too ambitious for me; however, on Murr's suggestion, here is a thread to post our essay readings from books, magazines, and yes, blogs (see discussion started below). Please use this thread to post your comments on whatever essays you are reading, or comments on the essay form...

Here is the wikipedia entry on essays:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essay
An essay is usually a short piece of writing. It is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can be literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author.

And copied from my thread:

TomcatMurr said:
I'm very interested in your idea of reading one essay at a time (message 6) rather than a whole book of essays. I love reading essays! Perhaps one essay a week, might be more do-able?

It would be nice to get some more interest going in this neglected/overlooked form.


Dukedom_Enough said, responding to Murr:
Blog posts sometimes have the length and thoroughness of a good essay; maybe the rise of blogs has absorbed some of the appetite for essays in books and magazines?

2avaland
Avr 29, 2009, 10:30 am

Murr responds:
Yes indeed, you may be right. And many articles from the more serious journals and literary magazines also have the character of essays, as journals and magazines are the main platform for essayists. But only a few modern writers can steer the course between the Sybilla of an academic essay (saints preserve us from these) and the Charybdis of a meaningless puff piece.

Apart from the great essayists of the past (Bacon, Lamb, Hazlitt, Montaigne) there are comparatively few modern writers who really excel in the form: Gore Vidal, for instance, being one.

Any other modern essayists spring to mind?


Rebeccanyc adds:
I am very fond of Anne Fadiman's essays in Ex Libris; a great deal lies beneath the surface in them.

3avaland
Avr 29, 2009, 10:47 am

Murr, that sounds a bit purist which certainly narrows the field:-). I like the definition that wikipedia begins with, as noted above, which, imo, opens the field up much, much wider. Certainly, we want the essays we read to be both thoughtful, thought-provoking or insightful, whether they be serious arguments or humorous musings. Certainly, I want the essayist to be somewhat learned, but experience, especially if different from my own, counts for a lot also. Thus, what I referred to as essays on my thread were all form of nonfiction pieces on a specific topics by all kinds of individuals (I hadn't even thought about those very dead, white men:-).

4tomcatMurr
Modifié : Avr 29, 2009, 11:56 am

Well, avaland, I don't mean to be purist. Actually, I think your definition is better than Wikipedia's: looser, with more room for movement. I wrote my previous post in a terrible rush between classes (I was electrified by the topic) and perhaps didn't make myself terribly clear. Let me try again now I am at home and the HERRING is flowing.

Academic essays are unsatisfying to the general (educated) reader (ie me) because their audience/topic is simply too narrow for anyone outside the field. Any insight they may have is often so obtuse as to be meaningless in the general scope of things, and is usually buried under a mountain of obligatory turgid (unreadable) prose (I curse the influence of Derrida). Of course there are exceptions.

On the other hand, much of what passes for 'an essay' nowadays is either straightforward reporting, or simply puff, written to fill empty column space or 'increase traffic'. It's essentially verbal candy floss: undernourishing and formless.

Many (most?) essayists both past and present publish in journals and other newer media. But that does not mean that everything published in those media is a good essay. A good essay imho should have the characteristics you have so wonderfully outlined above - to which I would add also: 1) a sense of pleasure in the expression of ideas, the language, and 2) a sense of completeness, a sense of formal structure, either a template well used, or a structure indigenous to itself. It should really be a work of art. No?

So let's see now, apart from those already mentioned above:

Montaigne the Shakespeare of the art of the essay
Francis Bacon
Charles Lamb
Hazlitt
Coleridge
Gore Vidal
Anne Fadiman (chuck her on the TBR pile quick)

I would add:
Virginia Woolf Queen of the art of the essay
Dorothy Parker First Lady of the art of the essay
Iris Murdoch Dame of the art of the philosophical essay
James Wood
Isiah Berlin The Irving Berlin of the art of the essay
Frank Kermode anyone?
George Steinway sorry Steiner
John Bayley
Susan Sonntag blessed be her memory
Coleridge (very skittish touchstones, sorry about that)
G.K. Chestterton
Max Beerbohm
Saint Oscar Wilde
James Baldwin
Italo Calvino
Joesph Brodsky
WH Auden
Roland Barthes

etc

A lot of these are admittedly dead white males, but that is hardly their fault. ;-p

I'd like to hear more from others on their favourite essayists so I can expand my knowledge and appreciation of the genre. See whether we need to modify our definition.

Rebecca, can you tell us more about Anne Fadiman? Her name keeps cropping up for me.

Thanks for starting this thread, btw.
As a modest puss with my own pretension in the form, this is therapeutic for me. :-)

5tomcatMurr
Avr 29, 2009, 11:44 am

omg that was a long post. lol I think I need some vodka. Anyone?

6Jargoneer
Avr 29, 2009, 11:50 am

I can see both points of view. There a lot of articles that really don't add up to much (but that is probably due to the need just to create sheer volume of material in any newspaper/magazine); on the other hand, there are publications such as the London & New York Review of Books in which intelligent informative essays are the norm.

7tomcatMurr
Avr 29, 2009, 12:14 pm

absolutely! (I am lurking here) so which writers on those journals would you recommend, jargoneer? Kermode used to write a lot for the LRB, as did James Wood. I susbscribed to it for years, but their whole Middle East thang they had going there got to be too parochial for me and I had to stop.

Oh, Jenny Diski used to write for that as well. She's very good.

8tomcatMurr
Avr 29, 2009, 12:26 pm

Speaking of whom, I just remembered this brilliant essay by Jenny Diski, on the Master himself.

http://jennydiski.typepad.com/biology_of_the_worst_kind/2008/11/book-of-a-lifeti...

9rebeccanyc
Avr 29, 2009, 12:39 pm

Murr, I am delighted to tell you more about Anne Fadiman because I'm a big fan, starting out with her fascinating, insightful, and compassionate look at the devastating impact of cultural differences in a health care situation for both an immigrant Hmong family and the doctors doing their best to treat a sick child, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.

I then went on to read Ex Libris, a collection of essays about books, reading, a family devoted to words, etc. Two of my favorites are one about the difference between "courtly" and "carnal" book lovers and one about the challenge of combining her library with her husband's.

She came from a literary family (her father was Clifton Fadiman and her mother was a writer too) and edited The American Scholar. I like some of the essays in her other book of essays, At Large and at Small, but overall it isn't of the same caliber as Ex Libris.

10avaland
Avr 29, 2009, 3:43 pm

Murr, I agree with most of what you have laid out. You may have mentioned the academic essay in response to my frustration over the lit crit essays in the African fiction book. Have to agree at least with regards to that book. I have come to appreciate academics who write clearly without the jargon, thus are more accessible (should be a requirement!).

I would certainly add Joyce Carol Oates to your list. Possibly Cynthia Ozick (but I found her not to my liking and passed the book of essays along)

11NeverStopTrying
Avr 29, 2009, 4:40 pm

Would popular science and similar pieces count? I have a fondness for McPhee, Gould, that type of thing.

12dchaikin
Modifié : Avr 29, 2009, 8:39 pm

Kind of a random question - following up on post #11: Under Murr's definition, is a good essay essentially the same thing as good quality, short, "literary" nonfiction?

13tomcatMurr
Avr 29, 2009, 9:29 pm

yes, I guess we could call it that: short expository writing.

>11 NeverStopTrying: Tell us more about McPhee and Gould. I never heard of them. My knowledge of science writing is limited to linguistics, alas.

Rebecca, thanks for that! I think I have seen Ex Libris in the books stores here. I'm going to pick up a copy. Carnal and courtly reading sounds fascinating.

Avaland, I thought of Cynthia Ozick as well, after I had turned off the computer last night. What did you not like about her? She's rather dense, imo. What JCO essay(s) would you recommend?

14laytonwoman3rd
Avr 29, 2009, 9:36 pm

According to my tag list, I have 91 volumes of essays, or collections that include essays, in my catalog (many of which are also tagged "not yet read", but who's counting?). Among my favorites are those by Annie Dillard, Barbara Kingsolver, Andrei Codrescu, Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, Anna Quindlen and William Safire. I'm another admirer of Anne Fadiman, and have a collection of her father's work, which I have yet to sample.

15tiffin
Avr 29, 2009, 10:24 pm

Another vote for Ex Libris. Love the Woolf essays and have been reading the Lamb essays since I was a sprat (my grandfather read them out loud to me and, happily, I inherited his book). Sydney's A Defence of Poetry is another one I like. I'm having déja vu all over again: feel like I've already said this somewhere.

16dchaikin
Avr 29, 2009, 10:37 pm

#13 Murr - McPhee is one of the gems of a journalistic style of "literary" nonficiton. He is essentially a reporter, but a very thorough one with a very nice writing style. He happens to write a lot about geology - Annals of the Former World, a collection of his four book on USA geology won the Pulitzer for nonfiction. I highly recommend it, but then I biased because I love geology.

Gould was an paleontologist at Harvard with an excellent popular writing style. His most popular book is probably Wonderful Life where he bring alive a beautiful collection of Cambrian fossils from the Burgess Shale in Canada - but, I've been told, he has some mistakes. Also, his big ideas get a lot of criticism - see wikipedia.

17tomcatMurr
Avr 30, 2009, 12:18 am

Great Dan, I'll look out for these two essayists as well! Thanks

18Jargoneer
Avr 30, 2009, 5:15 am

>7 tomcatMurr: - Kermode and Woods are always worth reading. I like John Sutherland, and would recommend his essays on puzzles in British & American Classics - these are short 3-5 page essays that answer questions raised by close (interpretative) reading of texts: for example, he disputes Said's reading re slavery in Mansfield Park, discusses where Heathcliff was a murderer, etc. Good fun but also enlightening about the work.

David Foster Wallace was always worth a read. Umberto Eco can be fun but just as often he falls into the cultural studies jargon that ties language and the reader up in knots (which is the common failing of those authors who are also academics).

I would suggest that any decline in the serious essay mirrors the decline in the short story - both forms are too long to be read in a glance (a la a newspaper article) but too short to immerse yourself in. The very short and the very long appear to be the preferred length of written communication for the modern reader. The one place where the essay still does well is on the radio - BBC Radio 3 has a series called The Essay which runs Mon-Fri, with five writers discussing one topic over the week. (This week, it has been on different poet laureates discussing how the role is viewed in their country).

19tomcatMurr
Modifié : Avr 30, 2009, 6:13 am

an interesting observation, Jargoneer.

I was under the impression that the short story was making something of a comeback. Do you think this is true?

20rebeccanyc
Avr 30, 2009, 7:18 am

#13, I guess I think of the essay as a specific kind of short expository writing, in that I think an essay takes a point of view, tries to make a point, and has a personal flavor. A journalistic article, or a review of some kind, don't seem quite the same to me, although I'm at a loss to try to explain the difference better. But I know it when I see it!

21dukedom_enough
Avr 30, 2009, 8:18 am

tomcatMurr,

Can you suggest a decent collection of Hazlitt pieces? My attention has been drawn to him because he features in Small World, by John Lodge, the novel I read during my recent trip.

(I moved this to here from avaland's thread).

22avaland
Avr 30, 2009, 8:55 am

>21 dukedom_enough: he means the author David Lodge.

23tiffin
Avr 30, 2009, 10:03 am

#20: d'accord.

24tomcatMurr
Avr 30, 2009, 12:37 pm

#23 & 20 Ditto. And well said.
Duke, let me ferret around and see what I can come up with.

25Nickelini
Avr 30, 2009, 1:32 pm

I don't think anyone has mentioned Salman Rushdie yet. I was assigned several of his essays in university, and have read many more since, and I find them more interesting than some of his fiction. And doesn't Margaret Atwood write essays? I can't think of any right now, but I'm sure she has some brilliant ones.

26polutropos
Avr 30, 2009, 3:39 pm

27avaland
Avr 30, 2009, 4:08 pm

>25 Nickelini: yes, some are gathered in her Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983-2005.

If people are interested in sampling essays, there are many decent choices when one searches Amazon under "essays" and then, of course, you can find collections of essays on more specific topics like literature or sports.

28NeverStopTrying
Avr 30, 2009, 5:42 pm

Glad someone covered for me on the McPhee and Gould question, AND that they would be included.

I have a couple of collections of essays by Terrence Des Pres that I love. He was actually noted for his first publication, a short study of holocaust survivors' literature called The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. I am putting it out there in case any one else checking out this topic has heard of him or read them. He killed himself fairly young. Having lived near where he taught, I believe that central New York winters took him out.

29Tid
Avr 30, 2009, 6:07 pm

"the Sybilla of an academic essay (saints preserve us from these) and the Charybdis of a meaningless puff piece."

Nice conflation! Is that the Roman Sybil mated with the Odyssean Scylla? (Damn, there goes my aspergers again ...)

30tomcatMurr
Modifié : Mai 1, 2009, 12:35 am

Tid, I could be really clever and say yes, it was thoroughly intentional, a reference to Sybilla Lusignan, the oracular Sybil or something like that. But actually it was a typo.
:(

31tomcatMurr
Modifié : Mai 1, 2009, 1:10 am

>21 dukedom_enough: Dukedom:

Hazlitt's main essays are readily available in Oxford World Classics and Penguin Classics editions. There is also an Elibron Classics edition. for a much shorter selection, I would recommend On the Elgin Marbles, to be read alongside Keats's brilliant sonnet.

I would recommend The Plain Speaker (Blackwell) which is edited with an introduction by Tom Paulin, who has been almost single-handedly responsible for bringing Hazlitt back from obscurity. The Day star of Liberty is his full length study of Hazlitt. I haven't read it yet, but it's fossilizing slowly on my TBR, along with a whole load of other stuff. Sigh.

Tom Paulin is an excellent essayist himself. Writing to the moment is highly recommended for those with an interest in the English Romantics.

Hope this helps. Let us know what you go for!

hmm. no touchstone for On the Elgin marbles. Damn. It's a nice slim volume with an intro by TP as well.

32dukedom_enough
Mai 1, 2009, 7:29 am

Murr,

Thank you! I will investigate abebooks.

I discovered that project Gutenberg has The Spirit of the Age (no, not the Huston Smith touchstone, grumble) and may look into that, too.

33BettyDunkin
Juil 18, 2010, 3:20 pm

Built a new home with a library. Unpacking 100's of books and found The Survivor by Terrence Des Pres., one I will have to read.