Essays

I actually like Camille Paglia, even though I understand other people's aversion to her. Someone mentioned Agee up above, he's definitely a master -- not just for Famous Men, but a lot of other stuff. I have essay collections by Milan Kundera and Ralph Ellison but embarrasingly enough haven't actually read them. But I guess a lot of fiction writers kind of have sidelines as essayists (DFW is one of those, except that his essays are better and smarter and more convincing than his fiction). Oh yeah, along the same lines, I have a collection of Barbara Kingsolver essays -- it's pretty good. I love a good essay because it's kind of like having a really interesting conversation; you can respond in your head as you go, and if you get tired of listening you can just shut them up.

Accordingly, lines in first post should read:

The other day a big cardboard box and I arrived from Amazon

It's timely because it seems to chime with conversations the Pinefox have been having for the last five century

(I can't recommend the D'Agata anthology highly enough; last night I found myself reading Albert Goldbarth's contribution - an essay about fleas, the microscopic, Vermeer, tenderness and The Plague - and was utterly awestruck.)

A third of the way through I thought, 'Man there is alot here about the American Theater... oh, right...'

The topic of lyric essays' "worth" (or something) has been in my head for a few years now. I've been continually irritated by snooty frigid sorts such as Michael Wood (the critic and writer of The Book Against God, just in case I've got his name wrong) who railed against the inclusion of the expansive essayistic mood/tempo/range in some contemporary fiction. The best essays to me (original, thoughtful, searching) read like the dark side of fiction's moon... and for every great piece of fiction I enjoy I like to imagine its twin essay, and vice versa. As for how it will develop, that's a great one to ponder. I guess the natural direction is for more books about writers; 'tis a pity Sebald is no longer with us.

I can't believe I've not been reading ILB.

But that is not really true:

a) 'Shooting An Elephant': precursor of JtN's new genre?

b) there's always Big Ron's Chalkboard.

Lewis Thomas: Late Night Thoughts On Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony

K C Cole: Mind Over Matter, Late Night Conversations with the Cosmos

Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; For the Time Being

Barbara Kingsolver: Small Wonder; High Tide in Tuscon

All of these are wonderful!

20thC: Benjamin ("A Berlin Childhood Around 1900", each fragment a perfect essay in itself); Adorno (ditto with Minima Moralia); John Berger (less the critical writings than his beautiful 1967 reflection on a country doctor, "A Fortunate Man").

But best of all (and bearing in mind the brilliance of Sebald, Sinclair, Morley): the Yorkshire/Irish writer Tim Robinson. He's hardly known, I think, but his two volume "Stones of Aran" is fantastic; he writes about landscape in the way I wish Sinclair would do if he'd just concentrate a bit harder (on what he's looking at and on the sentence at hand). And the selected essays in "My Time in Space" are extraordinary: some tantalising opening paragraphs at http://www.iol.ie/~tandmfl/space1.htm.

c) what you think of the lyric essay as an exciting twenty-first genre.
I suspect it's the 21stC genre. I hope so. Is there something to be said about the odd affinity so many great essayists seem to have with photography (Barthes, Sebald, Berger)? Something about the reverie on a single topic/image/fragment of experience?

I'm off to read the new Didion, which I have a horrible feeling won't replicate the neurasthenic greatness of just-reread "Slouching Towards Bethlehem".

I will check out Tim Robinson.

(Blowing my own trumpet Dept: I wrote a Morley piece here www.freakytrigger.co.uk/morley.html )

There used to be a prose component to the equivalent of A-levels in Ireland, the Leaving Cert: my English teacher must have repeated once a week this "witticism": "lads, we have a mixed grill of essayists for you this year: Lamb, Bacon and Hazlitt"....

!!

(to be pronounced in the french manner)

(under 'massively coordinated' i was thinking of something that aimed for a sort of comprehensive covering of a broad topic by a single author, but i have just throught of the belknap-published 'a new history of german literature', which i think counts, and which i love to read: about a thousand pages of essays covering german-language stuff from about 800 CE to the late 90s (forget where it ends), selected to cover 'important dates' chosen inventively to include dates of publication, dates of biographical significance, dates which would live in infamy, etc.)

(the french one doesn't seem as good as the german one but maybe that's just me.)

which are the didion books to get?

my friend who is reading 'a supposedly fun thing ...' just sent me the following text message:

"david foster wallace is not entirely unlike you, is he?"

Greil is pretty much a tart, yes.

I think DFW's essays are better than his short fiction, but Infinite Jest is his most satisfying work.

Been reading Michael Wood's NYRB page. All locked articles seem to be free for a while, maybe because of the NYRB at 50 celebrations.

Really interesting to read his stuff from 30+ years ago - he was a lot less ambiguous, now he's a lot flatter on everything (and I don't mean that in a pejorative sense), I think (its been a while since I've read anything he has written recently). Good to read him on the all those 70s Latin American novels and poems, and a review of GR which makes me want to re-read it again, or read it for the first time - hardly remember a thing from the once over I gave it 10 years ago now.