Interview on Writing. Life.
Monday, May 16th, 2011
The thoughtful and insightful Julija Sukys interviews me today on her blog. Thanks, Julija, for the opportunity to chat with you.
Proved on the Pulses: On the Essay and its Literary Cousins
Archive for May, 2011
David Foster Wallace on the Distinct Challenges of Fiction and Nonfiction
Thursday, May 12th, 2011
From his introduction to Best American Essays, 2007.
Writing-wise, fiction is scarier, but nonfiction is harder—because nonfiction’s based in reality, and today’s felt reality is overwhelmingly, circuit-blowingly huge and complex. Whereas fiction comes out of nothing. Actually, so wait: the truth is that both genres are scary; both feel like they’re executed on tightropes, over abysses—it’s the abysses that are different. Fiction’s abyss is silence, nada. Whereas nonfiction’s abyss is Total Noise, the seething static of every particular thing and experience, and one’s total freedom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and represent and connect, and how, and why, etc.
Facebook and the Personal Essay: My Name is Ned and I’m an Addict
Wednesday, May 11th, 2011
“First of all, how are essays different from Facebook? Alfred Kazin wrote, “In an essay it’s not the thought that counts, but the experience we get of the writer’s thought; not the self, but the self thinking.” William Gass said something similar: “The hero of the essay is its author in the act of thinking things out, feeling and finding a way. It is the mind and the marvels and miseries of its makings, in the work of imagination, the search for form.” And finally, in a similar vein, Edward Hoagland argued, “Through its tone and tumbling progression, the essay conveys the quality of an author’s mind.”
A personal essay offers us the tumble of the mind and is, at least potentially, a work of art. It may be brief by comparison to a memoir or a novel, and in its brevity more akin to a lyric poem, but it is longer, more sustained, more revised, more substantial, and more artistic than anything on Facebook. If an essay gives us the story of a mind thinking, Facebook gives us isolated thoughts. It gives us updates; it gives us fragments.
It can also be said, however, that Facebook gives us conversation, or at least exchanges. But the exchanges on Facebook are ephemeral, fragmented, interrupted conversations; that stream of Facebook updates keeps moving down the page and disappearing out the bottom. There’s something sad about that. It’s not a real conversation, because you pick it up only when you’re in the room. It is more akin to those unsatisfying half-conversations we have at high school reunions or wedding receptions than it is to a full and filling fireside chat.
But a trope for the essay from the beginning has been that it is a conversation, or at least that it is conversational. Montaigne wrote, for instance, “I am not building here a statue to erect at the town crossroads, or in a church, or a public square. This is for a nook in the library, and to amuse a neighbor, a relative, a friend, who may take pleasure in associating and conversing with me again in this image.” One of the important phrases in that passage is “in this image.” An essay is not really a conversation; it’s the image of a conversation, it’s a simulation of a conversation. Certainly it uses familiar language; it can sound spoken rather than written – and often does. It can simulate, as Walter Pater first pointed out, a Platonic dialogue. But finally, it is – or at least it usually is – just one side of a conversation. It’s a monologue. “We commonly do not remember,” wrote Thoreau, “that it is, after all, always the first person who is speaking.”
Facebook is something else entirely. It is a lot of people speaking. Sometimes it’s a chat, sometimes a cacophony. But its conversations are overheard, busy, fragmented, and again ephemeral. It’s akin to the crawl at the bottom of a news channel. By contrast, an essay, however occasioned and journalistic, is finally a revised and polished piece of art.”
Curious? Find out more. Ned Stucky-French, from Triquarterly Online. This piece began in a panel discussion at AWP.
Welcome Table Press Symposium
Tuesday, May 10th, 2011
I was sad to have to miss the first Welcome Table Press Symposium on the Essay. But the next one is coming in October. From their site:
Join us at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus on Saturday, October 15, 2011, for our next symposium, “In Praise of the Essay: Practice & Form.” Our honoree is Phillip Lopate. Speakers include Robin Hemley, Barbara Hurd, Helen Benedict, Joshua Wolf Shenk, and Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr (creators of Idiots’ Books).
More information and registration forms available at the Welcome Table web site.
New Publisher Dedicated to the Essay
Monday, May 9th, 2011
Thanks to Theresa Kishkan for the link to this article from The Guardian about a new UK press dedicated to the essay. The press is called Notting Hill Editions, and so far, it looks as if they will republish classics of the genre, with forewords by noted contemporary authors. As is usual with this type of book, sometimes what interests most of all is the pairing. What will Margaret Drabble have to say about Georges Perec? What might Christopher Ricks say about Regency raconteur Samuel Rogers’ Table Talk? The introductory essays promise to bring new perspective on the older works and make them fresh for a new generation.
If you visit the Notting Hill web site, you can read Lucasta Miller’s defence of the essay in full.
The site also includes an excellent library of classic essays.
