Archive 2024
Click on the author's name: Jan Shoemaker, Beth Anne Fennelly, Sydney Lea, Ingrid Horrocks, Nicole Walker, Jill Christman, Tierney Oberhammer, Nikky Finney, Robert Root, Dorothy Parker, Kathryn Winograd, Marcia Aldrich, Tom Hennen, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Carls, Lawrence Sutin, Ou-Yang Hsui, Anne Carson, Tu Fu, Nicholas Montemarano, E. B. White, Diane Zinna, Hanif Abdurraqib, Pat Conroy, Michel Chaouli, Brenda Miller, Brian Dillon, David Abram, Roland Barthes, Robert Root, Susan Sontag, Jhumpa Lahiri, Georges Perec, Edward Hoagland, Maggie Nelson.
January 5, 2024
from “Story”
in Slow Learner
by Jan Shoemaker
Poet and essayist Jan Shoemaker is one of our finest prose stylists, and her second book of essays, Slow Learner, is a reason to celebrate. What I admire about her work is her range, her seemingly effortless eye for literary effects, and her complete control of tone throughout. By range I mean she can go from meringue to mystery in a phrase. She successfully pulls off more surprises in a paragraph than most writers do in an entire essay. And as for tone she can move assuredly from ridicule to reverence and back at will. I have written that I laughed all the way through this heartbreaking book, but it is heartbreaking in the end, so I set her humor aside in my choice for The Paragraph of the Week and in my comment try to honor the darker truths of her achievement.
The Paragraph of the Week
By any thinking person’s estimate, our actual 3.5 billion-year-old story is not headed for a happy ending—not for humans or starfish or the beautiful Sally Lightfoot crabs Steinbeck tried and failed to surprise. Billionaire global overlords and their apparatchiks aside, I think lots of us will concede that we are approaching the conclusion of what’s turning out to be a tragedy. And guiltily, bemusedly, anxiously, we wonder who, if anyone, can write the twist that will turn the plot around. There’s long been a buzz among editors, who’ve been scribbling for decades, “Don’t shit where you eat.” I drag my recyclables to the curb, overcome with the feeling of being small, smaller than I’ve ever felt before. From the dread of staring ahead, I turn back and look behind, and wonder about the narrative arc that landed us where we are. Did the engine of evolution, our author writ large, leave any wiggle room in our decisions at all?
—Jan Shoemaker
Commentary
In Jan Shoemaker’s view we live in a miracle and are enacting a tragedy. The miracle is the natural world around us that she describes in deliriously joyful and at times hilarious prose. I’ll choose one example for the delightful surprise that turns “elvis” into a verb. “From their pulpits in the creaking tree canopy, crows bellow their wild heresies with the bombast of Baptist ministers and, riding half-submerged logs, frogs elvis their velvety love me tenders. It’s a better noise than I get from the news.” Unfortunately, the news isn’t good. When she turns it on, Trump “redder and more bloated than usual...spread into the TV screen like a batter finding the edge of its pan, as he lobbed blame for our country’s slow response to the pandemic out into the world, trying to get it to stick somewhere.” We are, she believes, on a train headed for disaster from the beginning, and the end is at hand. I don’t know if there has ever been a sadder paragraph about the human condition than the Paragraph of the Week, with “shit” quite literally at its heart. The stories we create to buffer the pain of this unhappy end—including her own celebratory ones which she takes to task for aiming to please—will not change that hard truth, our only hope the question mark begging mercy from the “engine of evolution” that she leaves us with at the end.
—THE
January 12, 2024
from “What I Think When Someone Uses ‘Pussy’ As a Synonym for ‘Weak’”
in Heating and Cooling: 52 Micro-memoirs
by Beth Ann Fennelly
“In order to come back with the baby, I had to tear it out at the root.”
Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2016-2021, teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi where she is a four-time teaching award winner. Her sixth book, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, was named an Atlanta Journal Constitution Best Book, a Goodreaders Favorite for 2017, and the winner of the Housatonic Book Prize. The Paragraph of the Week is a one-paragraph micro-memoir from that collection.
The Paragraph of the Week
What I Think When Someone Uses “Pussy”
As a Synonym for “Weak”
At the deepest part of the deepest part, I rocked shut like a stone. I'd climbed as far inside me as I could. Everything else had fallen away. Midwife, husband, bedroom, world: quaint concepts. My eyes were clamshells. My ears were clapped shut by the palms of the dead. My throat was stoppered with bees. I was the fox caught in the trap, and I was the trap. Chewing off a leg would have been easier than what I now required of myself. I understood I was alone in it. I understood I would come back from there with the baby, or I wouldn't come back at all. I was beyond the ministrations of loved ones. I was beyond the grasp of men. Even their prayers couldn't penetrate me. The pain was such that I made peace with that. I did not fear death. Fear was an emotion, and pain had scalded away all emotion. I chose. In order to come back with the baby, I had to tear it out at the root. Understand, I did this without the aid of my hands.
—Beth Ann Fennelly
Commentary
What I admire about “What I Think When Someone Uses ‘Pussy’ As a Synonym for ‘Weak’” is that it doesn’t build, but comes at you all at once. From the opening where the woman retreated into her deepest feminine self and “rocked shut like a stone” to the remarkable sneer of the last line “understand, I did this without the aid of my hands” she rages against insult without taking a breath. Along the way, she leaves behind “quaint concepts” of human relationship: “midwife, husband, bedroom, world” and becomes animal with clam shells for eyes and a throat “stoppered with bees.” Her anger cascades. The palms of the dead cover her ears. She is a wolf in a trap and the trap. Utterly alone, she is a rescuer “beyond the grasp of men.” Pain eradicates all fear and she makes a choice: “In order to come back with the baby, I had to tear it out at the root.” The paragraph is in the venerable tradition of the rant, and by its end we have blasted so far beyond weakness that the cliché in the title has been seared away for good.
January 19, 2024
From “Prologue”
In Such Dancing as We Can
By Sydney Lea
“I sat down on a porch bench and slid my feet in, rejoicing at how perfectly the boots fit. Merely to wear them was to yearn for a hike.”—Sydney Lea
The Humble Essayist Press is pleased to announce the publication of Such Dancing as We Can by poet Sydney Lea, the author of Hunting the Whole Way Home, a collection of essays and poetry. He was the founding editor of the New England Review and the Poet Laureate of Vermont from 2011 to 2015.
The Paragraph of the Week is from the “Prologue” of Such Dancing as We Can, his newest collection of essays about aging and mortality. What I admire in this apparently unassuming paragraph about finding boots in the back of a closet after nearly ten years is the way it draws together several strands of thought that lead to a low-key epiphany characteristic of this understated collection.
Sydney Lea has published twenty-four books: a novel, five volumes of personal and three of critical essays, and sixteen poetry collections. Such Dancing As We Can is his sixth book of personal essays. His second novel, Now Look, is due in spring of 2024.
The Paragraph of the Week
For the better part of a decade, I couldn’t find my favorite pair of many boots. They’re rugged enough, but they’re made of the lightest leather possible. I’m scarcely alone in such frustration; the thing we seek must be right at hand, but where? One day as last August waned, red maples in the wetlands beginning to show those heartbreak splashes of color, I found the boots in an unlikely closet, hidden behind boxes of my so-called papers. I let out a whoop, one loud enough to startle our three dogs. Then I sat down on a porch bench and slid my feet in, rejoicing at how perfectly the boots fit. Merely to wear them was to yearn for a hike.
—Sydney Lea
Commentary
Earlier in the “Prologue” of Such Dancing As We Can, Sydney Lea writes about an illness from a tick bite that nearly killed him and kept him from hiking in the woods. In passing he also mentions that he has “no notion of what becomes of us after the Reaper does arrive,” except for “an odd little inkling of continuity, of everything’s starting over,” repeating as the seasons do. He found an example in his boot because when he put it on he discovered an acorn that had waited all those years for his “foot to return” prompting him “to take certain matters up” where he had left them, including the hikes he used to love. Instead of tossing the acorn away, he holds it in his hand because “the thing we seek must be right at hand.” Gazing at it fills him with a mixture of joy, melancholy, “and a whole lot more” beyond his understanding.
–THE
January 26, 2024
from “Dissolving Genre: Writ with Water”
in Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction
by Ingrid Horrocks
“Nothing is more soft and yielding than water. Yet for attacking the solid and strong nothing is better.”—Tao Te Ching
Ingrid Horrocks is a writer and critic from Aotearoa, New Zealand. Her latest essay collection, Where We Swim, is a blend of memoir with travel and nature writing. The Paragraph of the Week is from her essay "Dissolving Genre: Writ with Water" which calls for a relaxing of genre boundaries to teach us how to yield to the rising waters of climate change and live inside the nonhuman world. I found it in the anthology Bending Genre edited by Margot Singer and Nicole Walker.
In the paragraph she thinks about a verse from her father’s copy of the Tao Te Ching that he shared with her when she was a girl and focuses on a single word from the Gia-fu Feng and Jane English translation.
The Paragraph of the Week
What I keep coming back to with a question is that term attack, sometimes translated as “overcoming”: Nothing is more soft and yielding than water. Yet for attacking the solid and strong nothing is better. What I see is water flowing through rigid social structures, seeping into a seeming collective belief that we must pour concrete, raise steel to the sky, buy primary-colored Legos in bright plastic boxes, wear tailored trousers. Perhaps the very threat of water, of floods on a scale we can as yet hardly imagine, might help us instead to seek more yielding ways to live alongside and within the nonhuman world. To soften with it, from the page into the ground.
—Ingrid Horrocks
Commentary
In order to “evoke being part of the nonhuman world” Ingrid Horrocks finds her writing “bending and yielding.” Her sense of family “ripples outward” to the world of whales. She thinks of them as “part of the fluid families we all inherit” and watches “the way even the most enormous adult appears light.” She wonders about whale songs: “What sounds do they float to acknowledge and guide one another?” She writes about her own encounter with water so that her “stories will have at least the weight” of her “human narrative,” at the same time resisting the urge to turn her experience of water into a metaphor for another creature’s experience of water. She imagines her “braided essay as a braided river” afloat on the “upswell” of contemporary eco-nonfiction with “water as the vessel of connection.” She reads this “new wave of bending, resistant” nature writing because her life, and ours, depends on finding “more yielding ways to live alongside and within the nonhuman world,” softening our hard edges “from the page into the ground” and returns ultimately to the word “attack” in an ancient verse from the Tao: Nothing is more soft and yielding than water. Yet for attacking the solid and strong nothing is better.
—THE
February 2, 2024
from “On Beauty”
in Sustainability: A Love Story
by Nicole Walker
How are we to be in this world while recognizing that “to be is still a verb?”
The Paragraph of the Week is from Sustainability: A Love Story by Nicole Walker, a tour de force on love and doom in the age of global warming and the tonic we need in our toxic times as we increasingly realize that being human, alas, is the problem. She is also the author of Processed Meat: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster, The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet, and A Survival Guide for Life in the Ruins. She’s nonfiction editor at Diagram and professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona.
The Paragraph of the Week is about her husband, Erik, a filmmaker who lifts her spirit when she agonizes over the looming ecological disaster.
The Paragraph of the Week
It was Erik who told me the oysters were dying as the oceans turned acidic from global warming but it was also he who strapped on his camera and said let's make a movie about people who are not fucking up. About how people are unfucking if not whole oceans than at least whole puddles of nitrate-ridden water, about how people understand how microclimates pinch their Grenache grapes cold but ripen their Chardonnay grapes sweet and how, if we begin to follow microclimates that maybe we can be like the grape and reorganize the way we bend into the flow of canyon air streaming down to us in Sedona from Flagstaff on high, that if we massage micropreemie babies they will go home sooner and sooner and he brought the information to me in the way the internet brings information, in a flow, similar to water when I'm sunk in sadness at the memory of water broken by oil spills, broken by stupid fights, broken by nitrates, broken by pi, broken by global warming, broken by choose, he stands in front of me and agitates. Like a washing machine.
—Nicole Walker
Commentary
Nicole Walker worries about everything. Here’s a short list: guns, drought, trees, sex too early, and plastic, her marriage, her children, alcohol, science, and plastic, micropreemies, oil spills, suicide, impossible choices, endless fighting, and plastic. She spends as much time arguing with her husband, Erik, as loving him, which is a lot. They can’t resist going to the mat over stuff that matters little such as the best way to describe the concept of “pi,” though neither of them is a mathematician. Her prose is the perfect vehicle for these raging anxieties. Robert Frost characterized poetry as ice gliding on its own melting. Her writing is popcorn flying everywhere. Her biggest worry is this: the only way to save life on a carbon-choked planet is for humans to stop being human: stop desiring, stop striving, stop savoring the taste of meat. How are we to be in this world while recognizing that “to be is still a verb?” How do we sustain both love and life on a planet we are turning brown? She knows the beauty we are destroying because she’s seen it “raining upward as the clouds pull water from the pines” and feels it encircle her like the endless string of numbers after 3.14. When she is shattered by our destructive ways, nothing helps, but love, that may not sustain the ecosystem, stands undeterred before her “and agitates. Like a washing machine.”
—THE
February 9, 2022
from “Editor’s Notes”
in River Teeth 25:1
by Jill Christman
“The crucial lesson that Joe Mackall taught Jill Christman in his comments on her first draft of ‘Going Back to Plum Island,’ is that time happens differently in nonfiction than in life.”—THE
Jill Christman is the author of If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays and the Senior Editor, with her husband Mark Neely, of River Teeth magazine. In her “Editor’s Notes” she discusses the way the founding editors of the magazine—Joe Mackall and Dan Lehman—helped her grow as an essayist and, now that she is an editor of the same magazine, discusses the relationships she forges with the authors she mentors during the editing process.
Since the relationship between author and magazine editor is so important, I would like to devote several features to it, beginning with the lessons that the founding editors of River Teeth taught Christman. From Joe Mackall she learned not to write past the ending and from Dan Lehman she learned the importance of naming names in her essays. But the most important lesson—advice that has become “the cornerstone” of her teaching and writing—is about the need to savor decisive moments in an essay. In the initial draft of the “pivotal scene” of “Going Back to Plum Island,” she knocks twice on the door of a man who raped her as a child and, when the knock goes unanswered, abruptly leaves with little discussion of what went on in her mind at that crucial moment. In the margins Mackall simply asked “Can you linger in the uncertainty here?”
The Paragraph of the Week
In life, I had stepped forward and knocked a second time, but in the essay, I didn't know what to do with this moment. I had, as personal essayists often do, traveled back in memory to a place and time I needed to return to figure something out, entirely on my own volition and within my own control, and panicked. I wanted to get out fast. I'm always reminding my students that “life doesn't come with plot,” but dang, if ever there were a narrative climax in my own life—a decision to be made, an action to be taken, and a life that would never again be the same? Here it was. And, yet, Joe was showing me how I'd come right up to this pivotal moment and flinched. I had backed away. I returned to that moment—and then I asked myself to stay. Joe knew I needed to stay in the place that scared me a little longer. He knew also that I would emerge into the light, brighter than before.
—Jill Christman
Commentary
The crucial lesson that Joe Mackall taught Jill Christman in his comments on her first draft of “Going Back to Plum Island,” is that time happens differently in nonfiction than in life. According to the clock every minute of our lives is the same length, but that is not the way we experience time, and a personal essay is about capturing the experience. Sections of an essay devoted to exposition move quickly through essential but unimportant information: who, what, when, where. Other sections, such as dialogue, take about the same amount of time to read aloud as they did in life. But for pivotal moments the author has the chance to slow the clock, filling the event with the significance it deserves. In the final version of the “Going Back to Plum Island” which appears in her collection If This Were Fiction, Christman lingers for several paragraphs over the momentous knock. Dogs snarl, “throwing themselves against the door—muscle on metal, convulsive, so loud.” She wonders what she would say if a stranger came to the door: “I wonder if you would mind if I just walked around the yard?” But she knows if the creep who raped her showed up, she would not cower, but stand up to him for her sake and the sake of her daughter. She knows what she would say: “I am not afraid of you anymore.” In the end no one answers and she walks away, but as the clock of her prose slows, the moment fills with meaning.
—THE
February 16, 2024
from “God Forbid a Black Girl”
in River Teeth
by Tierney Oberhammer
“Take Tierney Oberhammer’s ‘God Forbid a Black Girl.’ Not only is this Oberhammer’s first published personal essay, it's her first personal essay. Like ever.”
—Jill Christman
Last week we devoted our paragraph to advice that Jill Christman received from the founding editors at River Teeth, Joe Mackall and Dan Lehman. Now Christman is a senior editor at the magazine, and I thought I would do a feature on the passion that she, like so many great editors, brings to the task by turning to a comment she made on “God Forbid a Black Girl” by Tierney Oberhammer in her “Editor’s Notes” for the Fall 2023 issue.
Oberhammer’s essay about her struggle as a black girl raised in a white family and culture is technically ambitious, amping up the intensity of her experience in a collage of short paragraphs, Google searches, lists in different fonts, words in all caps and bold, cancelled words, and repetitions that grow in meaning with a relevance that slowly become clear. These technical moves do not distract, but inexorably reveal the transformation that impressed her River Teeth editor.
The Paragraph of the Week
Things I will say to my future child
- You are all the things we are and more, and they're all yours.
- You can climb any tree you want, but please, not too high.
- If you need help, I'm here.
- We wanted you and chose you. We love you.
- You can have ice cream every day, but not too much.
- I'll carry you for as long as I can, whenever I can.
- I don't know the answer, but I understand.
—Tierney Oberhammer
Commentary
Take Tierney Oberhammer’s “God Forbid a Black Girl.” Not only is this Oberhammer’s first published personal essay, it's her first personal essay. Like ever. Opening the attachment she'd sent in order to prepare for our meeting together, I saw that the title of the document was simply “CNF experiment_final?” Oberhammer had been playing with her words. She was using the form of the essay, a form I love for this reason, to explore her mind and memories, to transform the bewildering experience of growing up the Black daughter of a white mom into something she could live with, a narrative she could move into the future with: “Maybe I am writing about being a mother, though I am not one. I am afraid to have a daughter like me, untethered to any race.” Throughout the course of the essay, an essay quite unlike anything I have ever read before, Oberhammer transforms herself into the mother she did not have, the not-yet mother who could imagine telling her not-yet conceived, mixed race child, “You are all the things we are and more, and they're all yours.”
—Jill Christman
February 23, 2024
from “Hotbed 66”
in Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems & Artifacts
by Nikky Finney
“Hotbed: An area of decaying organic matter, heated earth, a soil environment, enclosed in glass, fermenting, used for the germination of seeds, favoring rapid growth.”—Nikky Finney
Nikky Finney’s publisher writes: “Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry is a twenty-first-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life. National Book Award winner Nikky Finney’s fifth collection contains lighthouse poems, narrative hotbeds, and treasured artifacts—copper coins struck from a new matrix for poetry, one that testifies from the witness stand and punctuates the occasional lyric within a new language of ‘docu-poetry.’”
Finney describes the contents of her collection as “minglements.”
Our Paragraph of the Week is “Hotbed 66,” a tribute to the woman who spotted the Mother Emanuel Church murderer and alerted police and an indictment of a society that allows such racially motivated gun tragedies happen.
The Paragraph of the Week
They tell me that she spent her days staring at the eyes of peonies, the fragile skin of day lilies, the open mouths of daffodils, the waxy and waning winks and pinks of peace lilies. I'm telling you this woman knew flowers. They say she was driving to work when she saw him, or did they say she was delivering a bouquet of fresh cut flowers to someone on their birthday, or had just come from the door of some sweet couple's fiftieth anniversary? I can't remember all of that right now. All I can think about is what she must have known about flowers before this moment began. I know she was a woman out on the road driving and paying very close attention to the world around her. She was also a woman who did not look away when she saw his soup-bowl haircut pass by one lane over. Was his upside-down empty vase of a neck the giveaway? In the car that was not going too fast and not going too slow. In the car that had a backseat. Was the backseat where he put the gun that he had just used to kill the nine praying sunflowers of Mother Emanuel? Or was the gun there in the front seat with him? By then, back in Charleston the nine passion flowers were slumped on the basement floor inside the church. The nine calla lilies had been snapped in two. She saw his funny haircut and quickly recognized him as the one who had just taken the lives of the nine human beings, in mid and full bloom, who had welcomed him, called him son, invited him to sit and be with them in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost. Twelve fragrant gardenias had welcomed him to their circle and the flower lady was the one who recognized the long flowerless vase of his neck and made the call. What did she say on that phone? Hello. I'm calling to report a sighting. That young man you are looking for... who shot up that church... he's here on the highway with me... a black Hyundai. I know it's him, he's covered in pollen.
–Nikky Finney
Commentary
Throughout the poems and hotbeds of prose that make up Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, Nikky Finney uses the language of a master of ceremonies to guide her readers. In “Hotbed 66” the MC introduces us to the woman who turned in the Mother Emanuel Church murderer and directs our attention to center stage. “I'm telling you this woman knew flowers.” The rest of the paragraph is pure hotbed: words planted in “decaying organic matter, heated earth, a soil environment, enclosed in glass, fermenting, used for the germination of seeds, favoring rapid growth.” I am deep in the sultry box of all the poetry that prose can muster as “waxy” evolves in a sequence of shifting vowels and consonants to become “lilies”: “waxy and waning winks and pinks of peace lilies.” I see it in the “upside-down empty vase” of the killer’s neck as he drives with apparent calm past the “flower lady.” Words from the hotbed stir me when I try to see the “gun that he had just used to kill the nine praying sunflowers of Mother Emanuel?” And because images bowed heavy on hotbed stems are unforgettable, how can I unsee “back in Charleston the nine passion flowers...slumped on the basement floor inside the church?” How do I unhear “the nine calla lilies...snapped in two.” How do I unknow the lost “lives of the nine human beings, in mid and full bloom, who had welcomed him, called him son, invited him to sit and be with them in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost.” How do I get the stench of gardenias out of my nose. And what, by God, do I do with all this pollen?
—THE
March 1, 2024
from The Arc of the Escarpment: A Narrative of Place
by Robert Root
“My experience with the arc of the escarpment has surprisingly given me a spiritual certainty about existence.”—Robert Root
Robert Root has spent much of his career writing about place and the people it shapes. He edited and contributed to Landscapes with Figures: The Nonfiction of Place, an anthology of essays and writers' commentaries. His first full-length work of creative nonfiction, Recovering Ruth: A Biographer's Tale, was named a Michigan Notable Book in 2004 by the Library of Michigan. His nonfiction of place also includes Following Isabella: Travels in Colorado Then and Now and Walking Home Ground: In the Footsteps of Muir, Leopold, and Derleth and two essay collections, Postscripts: Retrospections on Time and Place and Limited Sight Distance: Essays for Airwaves. He is also the author of two memoirs, Happenstance and Lineage.
The Paragraph of the Week is from his newest book, The Arc of the Escarpment, about a geological formation that comes to symbolize his place—and, by extension, our place—in the universe.
The Paragraph of the Week
A map of the Niagara Escarpment often shows up online, with a red line arcing from New York through Ontario and Michigan into Wisconsin. How little that image tells me about what it means to be grounded at any point along that trajectory. I've filed hundreds of photographs in laptop folders, images that help me remember locations and formations: bluffs and cliffs, cataracts and gorges, crevices and caves, sea stacks and alvars, islands and peninsulas, sinkholes and springs, shorelines and quarries. If I close my eyes after viewing one of them, I can feel myself standing on a prospect, listening to waves and waterfalls and woodland winds or to the silence within the cuesta. So much of it stays with me, comes back to me at the slightest provocation, and because the arc of the Escarpment encompasses most of the major milestones of my life, personal memories surface as well: childhood, youth, adulthood, and beyond. My experience with the arc of the escarpment has surprisingly given me a spiritual certainty about existence.
—Robert Root
Commentary
In The Arc of the Escarpment Robert Root patiently records his journey along the rocky geological formation that runs from Wisconsin, where he lives now, to New York where he was born and raised, learning along the way “a spiritual certainty about existence.” The first lesson is that he is a small part of what endures. “If I am but a particle of Silurian strata, that strata has endured for an almost inconceivable length of time and will endure for an almost unimaginable time to come.” But looking at the crumbling rockface of the Escarpment he takes away an equally powerful lesson in change, “that mutability is part of its nature too, that the very rocks we stand upon are impermanent.” These are not just ideas for him conjured up from lines on a map, but lived experience, and by writing about them with such attention to detail we share in his spiritual discoveries. Along the way, we learn the language of the quest, from bluffs, cliffs, and sea stacks to alvars, cuestas, and quarries. “Connecting to the land we temporarily occupy at least links us to the vast ages of planetary existence, links us by proxy to all living things that ever were and ever will be, including the very earth itself,” Root writes. “It’s not immortality but it’s an existence long enough for me.”
—THE
March 8, 2024
from “Good Souls”
by Dorothy Parker
in The Glorious American Essay
“As usual, you are way ahead of me, gentle reader—it is indeed the Good Soul.”
—Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker was an American poet, writer, critic, and satirist best known for her caustic wit. She wrote for the New Yorker early in the twentieth century and held forth at the famous Algonquin Club Round Table where clever writers gathered.
I found her essay “Good Souls” in the anthology The Glorious American Essay edited by Phillip Lopate. Her topic? Irritating do-gooders.
The Paragraph of the Week
The activities of the adult of the species are familiar to us all. When you are ill, who is it that hastens to your beside bearing molds of blanc-mange, which, from infancy, you have hated with unspeakable loathing? As usual, you are way ahead of me, gentle reader—it is indeed the Good Soul. It is the Good Souls who efficiently smooth out your pillow when you have just worked it into the comfortable shape, who creak about the room on noisy tiptoe, who tenderly lay on your fevered brow damp cloths which drip ceaselessly down your neck. It is they who ask, every other minute, if there isn’t something that they can do for you. It is they who, at great personal sacrifice, spend long hours sitting beside your bed, reading aloud the continued stories in the Woman’s Home Companion, or chatting cozily on the increase in the city’s death rate.
—Dorothy Parker
Commentary
A Good Soul is the one who brings tasteless “blanc-mange” when you are ill and reads aloud from the Woman’s Home Companion while “chatting...about the city’s death rate.” At the theater these Good Souls make a fuss about their seat being better than yours and insist on switching, inconveniencing all and basking in the “genial glow of martyrdom—that is all they ask of life.” Phillip Lopate in his introduction to the essay points out that the author, Dorothy Parker, “did not suffer fools (or nice, pleasant people) gladly” and considers her piece “Good Souls” to be “a prime example of the contrarian essay, which inverts the usual pious assumptions about worthy behavior and dares to adopt a misanthropic or at least antisocial stance for the sake of laughter and surprise.” It is cynicism delivered with a wry smile—a tone perfectly suited to the personal essay. Parker admits that Good Souls are often put upon by others who say “Oh, he won’t mind” and eventually that they will receive their reward in Heaven, but wishes, cattily, “that they were even now enjoying it!”
—THE
March 15, 2024
in “3 a.m. and Taking the Puppy for a Pee Beneath a New Moon.”
from This Visible Speaking: Catching Light through the Camera’s Eye
by Kathryn Winograd
“It was the 3:00 a.m. mewling, the new puppy nudging me into suburban dark and moon milk, that made me think of the moon snail propped on my study window sill...”
—Kathryn Winograd
Kathryn Winograd is a poet, essayist, and photographer. She is the author of three books of poetry and two essay collections: Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation and Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children. She is married to the playwright Leonard Winograd, and they divide their time between a home outside of Denver and a cabin in the Colorado mountains.
The Paragraph of the Week is the prose poem “3 a.m. and Taking the Puppy for a Pee Beneath a New Moon.” It is from her collection released on March 15, a book of her photographs and ekphrastic prose poems called This Visible Speaking: Catching Light through the Camera’s Eye published by The Humble Essayist Press.
Like most Humble Essayist Press books it comes with a study guide for teachers. For our feature, I thought it would be fun to take a question from Winograd’s study guide and answer it in my commentary. You can find more about This Visible Speaking and read the Study Guide including question 6 that I answered in my commentary at the press website here.
The Paragraph of the Week
It was the 3:00 a.m. mewling, the new puppy nudging me into suburban dark and moon milk, that made me think of the moon snail propped on my study window sill between the photos of the moth orchid and Wilson’s snipe I fashioned into postcards. How long has this moon snail gathered dust there, shifted my afternoon sun to richest shadow? Nameless to me once at the edge of tidal spume and broken cockle shells but now a spiral perfect of nipple-brown apex and hollow umbilicus. Leonard keeps asking me why we are here. Why this cup of tea? Why this pen beneath a soda straw width of galaxies uncountable? Nights, the predatory moon snail plows nocturnal shores, drills the shells of clams with holes we string and wear. It lays a thousand eggs into collars of sand, shaped, we say, into ones our priests wear. For this puppy, unlike us—everything is new: the curly cues of dried snail and earthworm beneath the gutter spout, the blue bachelor button in bloom it chews happy at the driveway’s edge. Once conjured by my camera into dark and shadow, this moon snail pixelated into swirls of pigeon-blue and rose-flesh: somewhere, someplace else, there is a constant sea rain of tiny moon snails and this moon, too, where beneath my puppy and I, just us, blink.
—Kathryn Winograd
Commentary
So what is the answer to Leonard’s question? Why are we here? “Why,” I picture him saying, “this cup of tea,” spreading both hands in exasperation? And Kathryn Winograd is careful to honor the apparent randomness of the things in their world: the “mewling, new puppy” sending her out into the night, the moon snail stuck on a window sill between postcards of a “moth orchid” and a “Wilson’s snipe,” the pen shaped like a soda straw which when focused on the night sky encircles “galaxies uncountable.” But the author likes to gather random things that catch her eye in boxes, and that gathering connects them, puts them into relationship with one another, thrown together, yes, but given meaning by her selection. She names the nameless and connects them with metaphor, the moon snail becoming “now a spiral perfect of nipple-brown apex and hollow umbilicus.” She learns about them, the snails’ predatory ways and nocturnal habits, through careful study propelled by a curiosity her bloom-chewing puppy shares. She recreates them lovingly, the moon snail emerging from shadows in her photograph “pixilated into swirls of pigeon blue and rose-flesh,” according to beauty in the eye of the beholder. Gathering, naming, learning, studying, loving—that’s why we’re here. That’s why she and her peeing puppy standing “in suburban dark and moon milk” at 3 a.m. blink in wonder like her camera.
—THE
PHOTO: KATHRYN WINOGRAD
PHOTO: KATHRYN WINOGRAD
March 22, 2024
from “I, Swimmer”
in Studio of the Voice
by Marcia Aldrich
“Swimming in a pool is like a meditation, an act of faith.”
—Marcia Aldrich
One of the ways that Marcia Aldrich handles her “sometimes burdensome solitude” is by swimming. She fell in love with water when her mother dropped her off at the country club swimming area: “glittering pools, a square, a rectangle, and a bean, set like sapphires in a tiara with a yoke of profoundest green.” She immersed herself in her solitude by sitting “Buddha-style” underwater and holding her breath “as if frozen within an ice cube.” It was the first stage, she writes, of “hundreds of incarnations on my infinite path to enlightenment.” She swam competitively for many years, but lost interest when she tried, but failed, to impress a boy she had a crush on by swimming across a lake. But as an adult she returned to her meditative ritual at night in her local swimming pool where “the lighting is kept low, in a soft, ageless cast of anonymity, and the muted sounds from outside the gleaming glass walls doze on the breathing water.” She and the other swimmers, she writes, “never exchange greetings; we’ve come for the silence.”
Our Paragraph of the Week and the amplification of it in the Commentary are the last two paragraphs of her essay “I, Swimmer” from her new book Studio of the Voice. I could not resist breaking precedent and including the cover of her book as well. Aldrich is also the author of Companion to an Untold Story and Girl Rearing.
The Paragraph of the Week
Swimming in a pool is like a meditation, an act of faith. I like to swim at night when the pool is illuminated with underwater lights. When I stand before it, on the verge of entering, I feel a lump in my throat, a homesickness. I carry no purse, no identification. What I have done or have not done lies behind me, my accomplishments and my mistakes deposited in a locker. In my bathing cap pulled low over my hair and ears, my goggles covering my eyes, no one knows me. There is nothing and no one to lean on. Other swimmers are there, shafts of moving color, but I am alone. We never exchange greetings; we’ve come for the silence. Someone sits in the lifeguard chair, a blotch of red. I see a blurry body of water before me like a blank sheet of paper. The water is cold, always a shudder when I first descend the steps. I push away and begin my breaststroke, in the first laps trying to quiet my mind, musing on my father astride the clubhouse veranda, watching with an opaque gaze, on stopwatches and canoes and far shores. Then I am a ship in a limitless ocean, and I have lost my bearings. I concentrate on laps, lap on lap; swimming is the only word my body says. I throw the spool of myself out and reel it in, over and over. I no longer know I am swimming.
—Marcia Aldrich
Commentary
The swimmer I want to be does not require acclimation; trepidation is not in her vocabulary. She wants quick immersion. Stripped of jewelry, not even a thin wedding band, the swimmer makes you believe she is unharnessed from the world, owns no clothes, belongs to no house, and that a heavy purse, with its wallet and identification cards, would drag her down. The swimmer swims for herself and checks her baggage before she enters the water. The swimmer I want to be stands in the middle of a blank canvas, facing forward with hands firmly on hips. The bend in her elbows makes a white space like the V of Canada geese in skies of migration. When I see her, I think water. It must be nearby, not far from the path of vision, not even a stone’s throw away, for her stance is one of readiness. The canvas is blank, no pool, no lake, no ocean, no body of water the mind can see, yet everything suggests it is always at hand, that she carries water with her wherever she goes, ready to plunge in. Plunge in, I say.
—Marcia Aldrich
March 29, 2024
“The Life of a Day”
in Darkness Sticks to Everything
by Tom Hennen
“For some reason we like to see days pass, even though most of us claim we don't want to reach our last one for a long time.”
—Tom Hennen
Tom Hennen’s publisher writes: “Born into a big Dutch-Irish family in 1942 in Morris, Minnesota, Tom Hennen grew up on farms. After abandoning college, he married and began work as a letterpress and offset printer in 1965. In 1972 he helped found the Minnesota Writers’ Publishing House, printing with a press stashed in his garage work that included his first chapbook, The Heron with No Business Sense. He worked for the Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Division in the 1970s and later worked as a wildlife technician at the Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge in South Dakota. Now retired, he lives in St. Paul near his children and grandchildren.”
The Paragraph of the Week is a prose poem from Hennen’s collected and new poems Darkness Sticks to Everything published by Copper Canyon Press. I listened to it in the Audible version of Good Poems selected and read by Garrison Keillor.
The Paragraph of the Week
The Life of a Day
Like people or dogs, each day is unique and has its own personality quirks which can easily be seen if you look closely. But there are so few days as compared to people, not to mention dogs, that it would be surprising if a day were not a hundred times more interesting than most people. But usually they just pass, mostly unnoticed, unless they are wildly nice, like autumn ones full of red maple trees and hazy sunlight, or if they are grimly awful ones in a winter blizzard that kills the lost traveler and bunches of cattle. For some reason we like to see days pass, even though most of us claim we don't want to reach our last one for a long time. We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn't one I've been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when, we are convinced, our lives will start for real. Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted, as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night's meandering skunk.
—Tom Hennen
Commentary
It is the repeated word “pass” that leaps out at me here, and, when I listen to the prose poem read slowly at dawn this ordinary March morning, passing is what is happening. The yellow and maybe pink outside the window and the sun momentarily rimming the clouds phosphorous white lift my spirit when I put in my earplugs, but, as I hear the words about the life of a day read to me, clouds close in. How quickly the glow fades! Coppery beech tree leaves hanging on all winter go drab, the trunks of hardwoods leaning this way and that at the edge of the woods turn a uniform gray, and the feeder swaying on its hook marks time like a pendulum. The wisdom of the poem is that we are usually blessed by our inattention to this passing, allowed to take our days for granted. They “just pass, mostly unnoticed” unless they are “wildly nice” or “grimly awful,” and we like it that way. “We examine each day before us with barely a glance,” the poem in my ear tells me while the day outside my window goes gray, “and say, no, this isn't one I've been looking for.” We “wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when, we are convinced, our lives will start for real.” Pass: yes, it means what we miss, and followed by “away” it means that other thing too.
—THE
April 5, 2024
from “A Sweet Devouring”
in The Eye of the Story
by Eudora Welty
“The pleasures of reading itself — who doesn't remember? — were like those of a Christmas cake, a sweet devouring.”—Eudora Welty
Born in Jackson Mississippi in in 1909, Eudora Welty was known primarily for her short stories and novels, but she also wrote an autobiography, One Writer’s Beginnings, which became a nationwide best seller, and essays and book reviews that were collected in The Eye of the Story. Our Paragraph of the Week is from an essay in that collection called “A Sweet Devouring” about maturing out of the youthful love of indiscriminate reading—a stage lovingly and humorously rendered—to become a reader with taste.
The Paragraph of the Week
Our library in those days was a big rotunda lined with shelves. A copy of V. V.'s Eyes seemed to follow you wherever you went, even after you'd read it. I didn't know what I liked, I just knew what there was a lot of. After Randy's Spring there came Randy's Summer, Randy's Fall and Randy's Winter. True, I didn't care very much myself for her spring, but it didn't occur to me that I might not care for her summer, and then her summer didn't prejudice me against her fall, and I still had hopes as I moved on to her winter. I was disappointed in her whole year, as it turned out, but a thing like that didn't keep me from wanting to read every word of it. The pleasures of reading itself — who doesn't remember? — were like those of a Christmas cake, a sweet devouring. The “Randy Books” failed chiefly in being so soon over. Four seasons doesn't make a series.
—Eudora Welty
Commentary
When she first started reading, Eudora Welty “gobbled up” the Elsie Dinsmore series, The Five Little Peppers, The Little Colonel, The Green Fairy Book, and plowed through four seasons of the “Randy Books” all of which disappointed, but she “read every word” because what mattered was the “pleasure of reading itself.” She read so fast that the librarian scolded her: “Nobody is going to come running back here with any book on the same day they took it out.” But when she read two versions of The Camp Fire Girls—an authorized version and a fake one—she realized that series books kept going by allowing nothing really to happen. She suspected that “the whole thing is one grand prevention.” She thought of The Purple Jar in which a girl is tricked into spending precious money on a glass jar filled with purple water. “I wondered if I felt some flaw at the heart of things,” Welty writes, “or whether I was just tired of not having any taste.” Eventually she went back to the book shelves at home and her “lucky hand reached and found Mark Twain—twenty four volumes, not a series, and good all the way through.”
—THE
April 12, 2024
from “On Trespassing”
in Split Rock Review
by Elizabeth Carls
“I’m interested in boundaries both real and false.” —Elizabeth Carls
Elizabeth Carls is a poet and essayist writing across genres from her home in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her work has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Split Rock Review, River Teeth, Great River Review, and Under the Sun Literary Magazine, and she currently serves as the Assistant Editor of Creative Nonfiction for Water~Stone Review.
She is fascinated by boundaries: “the ways in which we as human beings attempt to compartmentalize and contain, the ways we divide our landscapes into states and nations, the ways we assign genres to the things we read and write.” In a haibun published in the Spring 2024 issue of Great River Review, Carls explores the French expression entre chien et loup which is “the time of day when it would be difficult to distinguish between a dog and a wolf, friend or foe, what is safe to approach and what should instill fear.”
The Paragraph of the Week is from her essay “On Trespassing” and the commentary is from her discussion of that essay called “‘On Trespassing’: A Walking Meditation on Borders Real and Imagined,” both found in Split Rock Review and available in full online here and here.
The Paragraph of the Week
When we’ve left the woods, walking once again under the full expanse of sky, in the open rolling fields of the Olsen Farm, the dog finds what’s left of a dead porcupine. Mostly what remains of the decomposing body are stiff hairs and delicate bones, which she thoroughly investigates but is wise enough not to roll in. Eventually, weather and an unseen army of micro-organisms will reclaim even the quills leaving no trace of the porcupine, no evidence of what was likely a meal for the coyotes who run these hills, the coyotes who have always run wild through these woods and hills.
—Elizabeth Carls
Commentary
I’m interested in boundaries both real and false—the ways in which we as human beings attempt to compartmentalize and contain, the ways we divide our landscapes into states and nations, the ways we assign genres to the things we read and write. This is a theme I explore frequently in my writing in general and in the essay, “On Trespassing” specifically. Metaphorically, borders real and imagined show up in this essay in several ways—my own act of trespassing, the coyotes and beavers who cross property lines, even the micro-organisms decomposing the porcupine defy containment. It is an expansive essay, as was the walk that inspired it. As such the essay also contemplates, as I frequently do, the ill-defined border between ourselves and our environment.
—Elizabeth Carls
April 26, 2024
from A Postcard Memoir
by Lawrence Sutin
“All the desires and the parts where I get disoriented are real.”
—Lawrence Sutin
Lawrence Sutin has published books in multiple genres: biography, history, novel, collage and erasure books, and memoir, including A Postcard Memoir, a series of vignettes based on his personal collection of postcards. Before he retired, he was a professor in the Creative Writing and Liberal Studies Programs of Hamline University and taught in the low-residency program of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He “tries to lead a quiet life devoted to writing, family, friends, reading and listening to music,” his website explains. “It doesn’t always work out quietly but he does the best he can.” You can learn more about him and his work here.
The Paragraph of the Week is his take on the postcard image below.
The Paragraph of the Week
In Jerusalem, during my junior year abroad, the woman I thought I would love forever and I became lovers. She had come separately to the Holy City after her graduation, at which point she had broken off with the young man with whom she had been in love for most of her college years. In the autumn, by accident, we met in the library of Hebrew University where I was a student. Obtaining her address and phone number, I persisted gently but obsessively with my attentions. It was fitting for my fantasy of her as a dusky angel nurtured and protected by the gods that she had found lodgings in a single-room garden house in the backyard of an old Jewish residential district. I could walk to it from my dormitory, by way of a semiarid valley. One night, after many shy visits there, we began to kiss and went on kissing for hours, yes, hours. Her black hair fell over my face, a robe of initiation. I was a virgin. My first orgasms with her were in my own jeans as we lay together writhing on her bed. At last, in the hoarfrost winter, we became lovers. Paul McCartney’s first solo album was playing in the German Quarter apartment of a friend of hers who was away. We were both fumbly. At dawn beside her I heard the muezzin’s call. She was asleep with her rich hair now falling over her black brows and ripening plum skin. It crossed my mind then that if I married her, as I intended, I would never have any other women.
—Lawrence Sutin
Commentary
In the “Author’s Note” to A Postcard Memoir, Lawrence Suttin claims that his memoir, based on photos of people he does not know, borrowed names, made-up details, in places where he has not been, is emotionally true. “All the desires and the parts where I get disoriented are real.” In this memoir of his desires he meets a woman who looks just like his first love and fantasizes about them reading books together “and “kissing with the slow, precise passion reserved for the spiritually chaste” though she had another boyfriend and his love remained unrequited. He met her postcard look-alike, pictured here leaning against a tree, years later in the Hebrew University library, and after “shy visits” to her apartment eventually began kissing her “for hours” while her “black hair fell over [his] face, a robe of initiation.” This love would not last. He made the mistake of peeking into her diary and grew jealous when he read of a “young, dark, Israeli soldier” who had seduced her before they met “with sizzling ease.” After their split, he entered a period of risk taking, “of travel, friends, drugs, attitudes that twisted harder than drugs,” passing time, believing in nothing. But desire remained. He still loved the frieze of Venus’ breasts which have “the delicious throb of wings, the fragrance of milk, lemon blossoms, and blood, the softness stone has when shaped into breasts.” He fell in love with the woman who would become his wife in his adult writing class. She knew he did not have a girlfriend because he wore “orange socks,” and he fell for “her draping fair hair, paled blue eyes and rosy mystic calm after sex.” In this made-up book of real desires, he writes that “I had the sense of having slipped into a garden I’d never seen and yet suddenly belonged in.”
—THE
May 10, 2024
from “Pleasure Boat Studio”
by Ou-Yang Hsui
“This, then, is why I named my studio after a boat.”—Ou-Yang Hsui
Ou-Yang Hsui, born in 1007, was one of the most distinguished writers during the Song Dynasty in China as well as a classical scholar, archaeologist, historian, bibliographer, political theorist, and statesman. He was a renowned writer among his contemporaries and is considered the central figure of the Eight Masters of the Tang and Song. He argued for a loose, informal prose style at court, letting the brush “write what it would,” and lobbied successfully for its inclusion on the imperial examinations. Even in translation, his classic, “Pleasure Boat Studio,” makes this less ornate style clear. You can read the entire essay in the anthology “The Art of the Personal Essay” edited by Phillip Lopate.
The Paragraph of the Week
Three months after I came to Hua I converted the rooms of the eastern wing of the government offices into a place for me to spend my leisure time. I named it "Pleasure Boat Studio." The studio is one room across and seven rooms long (the rooms being connected by doorways), and so to walk into my studio is just like walking into a boat. First, in a corner of the warm room I made a hole in the roof to let in light. Then on either side of the bright and open unwalled rooms I installed railings to sit on or lean against. Anyone who relaxes in my studio will find that it is just like relaxing on a boat. The craggy stone mounds and the flowering plants and trees that I arranged just beyond the eaves on both sides make it seem all the more that one is drifting down the middle of a river, with the mountains on the right facing forests on the left, all very attractive. This, then, is why I named my studio after a boat.
—Ou-Yang Hsui (translated by Ronald Egan)
Commentary
A writing studio that doubles as a pleasure boat is not all fun and games, as any writer knows. In the next paragraph of “Pleasure Boat Studio” Ou-Yang Hsui changes tone and points out soberly that in Chinese the phrase “cross the river” is used when escaping adversity suggesting that “the real purpose of boats is to deliver people from danger rather than to provide comfort” and admits that naming a writer's studio for a sight-seeing boat equipped with “railings to sit on or lean against” is deceptive: “was that not a perverse thing to do?” He himself barely escaped arrest by boat when he was younger, banished because of his crimes to a life on the Yangtze. He traveled thousands of miles on water enduring storms where “dragons and water-serpents” rose up and “high waves broke and surged on all sides.” Eventually exonerated of his crimes and taking a position in the government where he worked as a reformer, he still suffered nightmares from his past in his Pleasure Boat Studio. Writing has its rewards, but too often dread drives writers to it. “Who,” he wonders, looking at those fellow escapees on the water with him during his exile, “would be caught out here.”
—THE
May 17, 2024
from “The Glass Essay”
in Glass, Irony, and God
by Anne Carson
“I am my own Nude.”—Anne Carson
I take the celebrated poet, essayist, and translator at her word when she calls “The Glass Essay” an essay. It is written as verse, but the lines break naturally at phrases, and the whole sounds like a story or a desperate explanation to make what is murky and ugly clear. So it is fitting that her Virgil on this journey to hell is the novelist of Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë.
Carson takes on a hard question: what happens to the meaning of life when love is stripped away and we “turn into two animals gnawing and craving through one another towards some other hunger.” What happens when the horrible masters us, when “Thou” moves upon “thou?” Brontë has one answer. Carson offers another with a terrifying clarity.
To achieve this hybrid of poetry and prose Carson does away with the basic unit of the essay, paragraphs, so we will call our “Paragraph of the Week” a passage. At The Humble Essayist we often celebrate prose that aspires to be lyrical like poetry, but Carson goes the other way, writing poetry that aspires to be narrative. It’s fitting as our ships pass on the sea of language to tip a hat to one another.
The Passage of the Week
It is chilling to watch Thou move upon thou,
who lies alone in the dark waiting to be mastered.
It is a shock to realize that this low, slow collusion
of master and victim within one voice
is a rationale
for the most awful loneliness of the poet’s hour.
She [Emily Brontë ] has reversed the roles of thou and Thou
not as a display of power
but to force out of herself some pity
for this soul trapped in glass,
which is her true creation.
Those nights lying alone
are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn.
It is who I am.
Is it a vocation of anger?
Why construe silence
as the Real Presence?
Why stoop to kiss this doorstep?
Why be unstrung and pounded flat and pine away
imagining someone vast to whom I may vent the swell of my soul?
Emily was fond of Psalm 130.
“My soul waiteth on Thou more than they that watch for morning,
I say more than they that watch for the morning.”
I like to believe that for her the act of watching provided a shelter,
that her collusion with Thou gave ease to anger and desire:
"In Thou they are quenched as a fire of thorns," says the psalmist.
But for myself I do not believe this, I am not quenched—
with Thou or without Thou I find no shelter.
I am my own Nude.
—Anne Carson
Commentary
After humiliating herself in loveless sex with a longtime lover who leaves her the next day, Anne Carson asks why she cannot stop reliving the horror. Why suffer this “vocation of anger?” She turns to her favorite author, Emile Brontë who was also lonely, tormented, and trapped in a loveless life like a “drop of blood under glass.” Brontë faced the horrors that mastered her—“reversed the roles of thou and Thou”—to “ease her anger and desire,” mistaking silence for “the Real Presence” and “imagining someone vast” to ease her agony, but Carson’s torment will not be so easily “quenched.” Instead she turns to the deck of thirteen nudes, images of women’s bodies in agony that come to her as visions and are the “naked glimpses” of her soul. In Nude #1 a woman stands on a hill as the wind whips off strips of her flesh. In Nude #7 she is in the “continuous satiny white membrane” of the fleshy inside of a womb as a voice whispers “Be very careful, Be very careful.” Nude #6 is so terrifying she cannot remember it at all. But it is the last card, Nude #13 in this tarot of torments, that most clearly separates her from Brontë’s consolation of “anger and desire” mastered and extinguished. Trying to stand on the hill of terrible winds like Nude #1, Carson becomes unrecognizable in Nude #13 as the flesh is torn away. She is no longer her body, or even a woman’s body, but “the body of us all” in a “cleansing of the bones,” a purgation of human pain not by escape, amelioration, or mastery but through more and more torment until the skeleton stripped of its tortured and chastened body stumbles “out of the light.”
—THE
May 24, 2024
“Moonlit Night”
in A Little Primer of Tu Fu
by David Hawkes
“When shall we lean on the open casement together and gaze at the moon until the tears on our cheeks are dry?”—Tu Fu
In A Little Primer of Tu Fu those who know no Chinese can get a glimpse of the power and beauty of the eighth century Chinese writer that some consider the greatest lyric poet of all time. In addition to translating thirty-five poems into prose English, David Hawkes also reproduces the original poem in Chinese characters and Pinyin, includes guides to pronunciation, and offers commentary and exegesis based on a deep understanding of ancient Chinese language and culture.
In prose, the lyrics of Tu Fu read like a memoir of a writer living in tumultuous times. We chose “Moonlit Night” for the Paragraph of the Week which describes a moment during the first year of the eight-year An Lushan Rebellion, perhaps the bloodiest civil war in human history, when Tu Fu was separated from his family. During the Mid-Autumn Festival “traditionally celebrated by eating ‘moon-cakes’ and crabs and drinking wine and, of course, looking at the moon” the poet thinks of his wife and children at home.
The simplicity of the content in Tu Fu’s poems masks the complexity of form making it hard for readers in English to see their beauty. Complicated rules of euphony and parallel structure govern each pair of lines, sounds that are often lost even on modern Chinese readers since the language has changed over time. In our commentary we look at a few of those formal elements that Hawkes taught us.
May 31, 2024
from “No Results Found”
by Nicholas Montemarano
in Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction
“‘No Results Found’ is about finding some way to describe putting down the family dog Ralph without becoming sentimental.”—THE
Nicholas Montemarano’s first memoir, If There Are Any Heavens, was published in 2022. He is the author of three novels, The Senator's Children, The Book of Why, and A Fine Place. His short story collection, If the Sky Falls, was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice.
“No Results Found” originally appeared in the anthology Brief Encounters edited by Judith Kitchen and Dinah Lenney.
The Humble Essayist takes the month of June off, but we will be back on July 5th to celebrate our tenth birthday! Check in on the festivities then and subscribe here for a free reminder.
The Paragraph of the Week
There is no other way. You must mention: the vet said it would be a matter of seconds. You and your wife held the dog, petted her, murmured endearments. Be brave and include them. Sweet dog, sweet Ralph, we love you, we're here, it's okay, we're right here, what a good dog you've been, what a good friend, thank you, we love you, we're right here, it's okay, honey, it's okay, we're here. With the injection her eyes closed, her back legs twitched slightly and stiffened, she wheezed twice. We're here, sweet girl, it's okay. The vet said he was sorry, something went wrong. You looked at her chest still rising and falling. The vet left the room and came back with his assistant, who shaved another leg, found another vein. You tried to comfort your wife: She's okay, she's in a deep sleep, don't worry, she's not in pain. Then the second injection, the vet bending with his stethoscope to listen. "I'm sorry," he said, "but her heart's still beating, I'll need to give a little more." You kept saying, "It's okay, we're here," but wanted to knock the needle from his hands and say, "Wait, stop, we've changed our minds, we want another week, another day." And then the third injection, the stethoscope, and finally: "Her heart has stopped. She's gone."
—Nicholas Montemarano
Commentary
“No Results Found” is about finding some way to describe putting down the family dog Ralph without becoming sentimental and throughout the brief essay Nicholas Montemarano turns to many sources for help: fiction and poetry about dead dogs, Google searches such as “grief dog died,” and low-brow films like Air Bud: Golden Retriever to name a few. The two guides he comes back to most, though, are an iconic essay from The Seneca Review that coined the phrase “lyric essay” and a writing tip from David Foster Wallace that he swears he read but cannot, much to his frustration, locate. The Seneca Review article suggests artfulness as a hedge against sentimentality. The lyric essay “might move by association, leaping from one path of thought to another by way of imagery or connotation, advancing by juxtaposition or sidewinding poetic logic.” It “does not expound. It may merely mention.” But David Foster Wallace wrote “something somewhere” urging writers to be more direct: “brave writers needed to get at real sentiment by risking sentimentality.” In The Paragraph of the Week Montemarano does both. He admonishes himself not to expound, but “must mention” step by step what went wrong with the injection but also to be brave enough to include the endearments: “Sweet dog, sweet Ralph, we love you, we're here, it's okay, we're right here, what a good dog you've been, what a good friend, thank you, we love you, we're right here, it's okay, honey, it's okay, we're here.”
—THE
July 12, 2024
from “Once More to the Lake”
by E.B. White
“Memories lead us to believe that the person in our head has never changed.”
—THE
We are nearing the end of this exercise. My annual goal was to produce a Paragraph of the Week with commentary for each paragraph in E. B. White’s classic essay, “Once More to the Lake.” When I started, I never thought that this page would go on for ten years, but now we are a week into year eleven and my task is nearly done. By my count there are thirteen paragraphs in this gorgeous essay. So when I finish this one I will only have two more left. I don’t know why I waited so long to do this paragraph that comes near the end of the essay, because it is so rich in the details of a time gone and filled with a feeling that never dies.
—Steven Harvey
The Paragraph of the Week
We had a good week at the camp. The bass were biting well and the sun shone endlessly, day after day. We would be tired at night and lie down in the accumulated heat of the little bedrooms after the long hot day and the breeze would stir almost imperceptibly outside and the smell of the swamp drift in through the rusty screens. Sleep would come easily and in the morning the red squirrel would be on the roof, tapping out his gay routine. I kept remembering everything, lying in bed in the mornings—the small steamboat that had a long rounded stern like the lip of a Ubangi, and how quietly she ran on the moonlight sails, when the older boys played their mandolins and the girls sang and we ate doughnuts dipped in sugar, and how sweet the music was on the water in the shining night, and what it had felt like to think about girls then. After breakfast we would go up to the store and the things were in the same place—the minnows in a bottle, the plugs and spinners disarranged and pawed over by the youngsters from the boys' camp, the Fig Newtons and the Beeman's gum. Outside, the road was tarred and cars stood in front of the store. Inside, all was just as it had always been, except there was more Coca-Cola and not so much Moxie and root beer and birch beer and sarsaparilla. We would walk out with the bottle of pop apiece and sometimes the pop would backfire up our noses and hurt. We explored the streams, quietly, where the turtles slid off the sunny logs and dug their way into the soft bottom; and we lay on the town wharf and fed worms to the tame bass. Everywhere we went I had trouble making out which was I, the one walking at my side, the one walking in my pants.
—E. B. White
Commentary
Memories lead us to believe that the person in our head has never changed. It is uncanny. One of life’s mysteries. The way memories latch onto sensory experience may be a clue to their youthful resilience. In E. B. White’s case details of summers at the lake long ago come wafting in without effort as the “breeze would stir almost imperceptibly outside and the smell of the swamp drift in through the rusty screens.” Hearing the red squirrel “tapping out his gay routine,” memories crowd in of girls singing and boys playing mandolins on a steamboat in moonlight with a “long rounded stern like the lip of a Ubangi.” He can hear sweet music, see “water in the shining night,” taste “doughtnuts dipped in sugar” and conjure up, because really he can no longer know, “what it had felt like to think about girls then.” Tactile experiences that make up so much of a summer by the lake also come flooding in—wriggling minnows, turtles sliding into cloudy mud, slimy worms that did not catch, but rather fed the fish, and the “pop” that would backfire up his nose. Qualifiers nag as these memories that fill who he is with what he was, creating, to use a phrase from our time, a cognitive dissonance. The dirt road in his past has been tarred over, and Coca-Cola fills shelves that once contained more “Moxie and root beer and birch beer and sarsaparilla,” but memory can be stronger than fact, living on in names that ring and resonate in the mind like echoes. No wonder White can’t make out whether he is himself or his son walking beside him because the person in the old man’s mind lives on unchanged as the boy he once was.
—THE
July 19, 2024
from “Astonish”
by Diane Zinna
in Brevity
“In 1300, there was a word, astonien, which meant ‘to stun’ or ‘strike senseless,’ which came from the Old French estoner—to stun, daze, deafen, or astound. This came from Latin’s ex- meaning ‘out’ + tonare: to thunder.”—Diane Zinna
Diane Zinna is the author of the novel The All-Night Sun and Letting Grief Speak: Writing Portals for Life After Loss, a forthcoming craft book on the art of telling our hardest stories. The Paragraph of the Week is from her essay “Astonish,” an etymological exploration of an act of cruelty and near catastrophe followed by redemption as the author, who is a naked girl in the essay, is confronted by a car full of young men.
You can read it in full in the current issue of Brevity here.
The Paragraph of the Week
They’re speaking to my back. Their headlights light the wet grass around my feet. They are the headlights, I am the lightning. They are a doctor’s headlamp, I am feverish-sick. They are sun in a magnifying glass. I’m a butterfly and my wings are soaked and folded in the drip-rain. I’m standing, but I’m a beetle upside-down in a puddle. I’m shaking, but I can’t move. I can’t move. Thunder again: BAM. That was my heart. CREAK. That was their car door opening.
Get her, guys.
— Diane Zinna
Commentary
The guys don’t “get her” because she is astonished. The word is from the Latin “ex- meaning ‘out’ + tonare: to thunder,” Diane Zinna explains, tracing the etymology in her opening paragraph, and it is thundering when on a cruel dare from her girlfriends at her eleventh birthday party Diane runs naked in the rain to touch a stop sign and a car-load of guys pulls up. By the 1570’s the word astonishment meant paralyzed, and that’s what she felt standing in the rain as the car door creaked. But in the mid-15th century astonish, by the magic of verbal transformation, evolved into astound by adding an “unetymological -d.” In much the same way the word round apparently evolved, as in gather round, which the girl’s friends, in their nightgowns, did, tugging her gown over her head. Suddenly horrified at what they had wrought, they formed a protective circle in the mist to drive the men away and apologized to her “like they were all themselves as mothers from years in the future, looking back on this night, astonished.”
—THE
July 26, 2024
from There’s Always This Year
by Hanif Abdurraqib
“Out of all this nothing the writer creates a heaven, and the enemy is anyone who can’t see it.”
—THE
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. The Paragraph of the Week is from his newest book There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. It describes a photo of Michael Jordan in a dunking contest.
Take a deep breath and enjoy our feature. This book is a glorious read.
The Paragraph of the Week
But in ’85, it wasn’t the hair, and it wasn’t even the fact that Mike lost the contest. It is the photo of him soaring toward the basket, his arm cradling the rock with ill intentions, eyeing the rim like prey, like he’s already seen its demise. And Mike took flight in a pair of kicks the NBA had banned and the gold—yes, the gold—stretching up along his neck, almost angling toward his open mouth while he was in the air. Some might say that in any consideration of flight, one must also consider the excess weight of anything that might render you closer to the earth than to the sky, but one must also consider that you don't show up with gold if you only plan to take it off. There are those who demand to be buried with all their gold on. To reach heaven, perhaps, still wrapped in the arms of their earthly jewels. Mike was never as cool as he was when he climbed toward the sky with two gold chains around his neck, ascending, too, so there could be no mistake about that miraculous air that refused to let MJ down. I believe no gold to be subtle. I believe nothing to be subtle when it can be snatched from a neck in order to feed a family. But Mike said, again, you're going to have to catch me. You are going to have to climb, and I know you want no parts of the world from this high up. Find the point where you are unkillable and jump toward it if you can. Mike was never as cool as he was in ’85, when he hadn't yet begun to take a blade to his scalp. When he started at one end of Market Square Arena in Indianapolis and ran, catapulting himself from the free-throw line (yes, the actual free-throw line!) and remaining, suspended and extended, for what feels, even now, like a glorious hour. Your finest hour. The hour you've dreamed of living again ever since the final grains of it kissed the mountain of sand at the bottom of the hourglass. Have you ever been in the air so long that your feet begin to fall in love with the new familiar, walking along some invisible surface that is surely there, that must be, as there is no other way to describe what miracle keeps you afloat? How long have you been suspended in a place that loves you with the same ferocity and freedom as the ground might, as the grave might, as a heaven that lets you walk in drowning in gold might?
—Hanif Abdurraquib
Commentary
There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib is about building a “heaven out of nothing,” and the enemies are those who cannot see its beauty. Nothing is “the free-throw line (yes, the actual free throw line!)” that Michael Jordan left behind as he rose toward forever. Nothing is an empty basketball court in the neighborhood in Cleveland where the author grew up. Nothing is a father in with the wrong crowd, sent to jail for stealing cars “before he could even drive them.” Nothing is the “space on a dusty wooden floor crowded with the thin blue mattresses we all got shoved into our chests” when the son is sent to prison, “with no proper cots because there was no room, just your blue mattress and whatever you were allowed to carry.” Nothing is the ghost of a friend who died too young. It is an empty arena in Cleveland after LeBron James left it to play ball in Miami. Nothing is the blank page. But the heaven created out of all this nothing is Michael Jordon finding the spot where he is “unkillable” and walking up to it, “with two gold chains around his neck,” hanging in the air so long he begins “to fall in love with the new familiar, walking along some invisible surface that is surely there.” Heaven is John Glenn from Ohio telling a schoolboy that he had never been more afraid than he was curious. Heaven is “all manner of homecoming,” driving slow through town, kids running behind “all of them holding a paper, pointing at your face, as if it is their own.” Heaven is “a glorious hour” and “your finest hour.” It is winning Game 7 and entering the “church of silence and awe” where “mouths are open but nothing spills out,” where the “sun sets for someone, and the sky remains a parade of colors for someone else.” Heaven is LeBron James in a commercial huddling with the Cavaliers before the game and all of Cleveland walking toward them to join in the hug. Heaven is the winning shot “when the ball hangs in air, before it kisses the sweetest spot on the backboard...the spot that breathes the ball in before blowing it gently through the net.” Breathes the ball in—oh yes, words this beautiful on the page are a heaven as well, a glorious verbal palace rising out of nothing but marks on a page. Out of all this nothing the writer creates a heaven, and the enemy is anyone who can’t see it. Who sees nothing but slums, crime, drugs, gangs, a third-rate city, a ball and a hoop, and words words words. The enemy sees nothing.
—THE
August 2, 2024
from The Water Is Wide
by Pat Conroy
“So the day continued and with each question I got closer and closer to the children.”
—Pat Conroy
Pat Conroy was the author of a number of best selling novels including The Great Santini and The Lords of Discipline, but one of his first books was a memoir entitled The Water Is Wide about his stint as a teacher in a two-room schoolhouse on the impoverished and isolated Yamacraw Island near his hometown of Beaufort, South Carolina. As a result of racism and neglect by school officials for more than a hundred years, the Gullah inhabitants of the island were ignorant and illiterate and doomed to a lifetime of poverty and exclusion from the broader society. Conroy was unsuccessful in getting the board members to change and lost his job when he confronted them, and ultimately believed he had failed to make a significant difference, but for a year he found a way to get through to the kids.
The Paragraph of the Week
So the day continued and with each question I got closer and closer to the children. With each question I asked I got madder and madder at the people responsible for the condition of these kids. At the end of the day I had compiled an impressive ledger of achievement. Seven of my students could not recite the alphabet. Three children could not spell their names. Eighteen children thought Savannah, Georgia, was the largest city in the world. Savannah was the only city any of the kids could name. Eighteen children had never seen a hill — eighteen children had never heard the words integration and segregation. Four children could not add two plus two. Eighteen children did not know we were fighting a war in Southeast Asia. Of course, eighteen children never had heard of Asia. One child was positive that John Kennedy was the first President of the United States. Seventeen children agreed with that child. Eighteen children concurred with the pre-Copernican Theory that the earth was the center of the universe. Two children did not know how old they were. Five children did not know their birth dates. Four children could not count to ten.
—Pat Conroy
Commentary
What is most memorable about The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy is the way he “got closer and closer” to the children by using a Socratic method on steroids. On the first day he realized that none of them knew that their island faced the Atlantic Ocean, so he told them. When he asked Mary what “body of water they were on,” she said, “I don’t know about no bodies” but finally repeated what he had told the class: “Atlantic Ocean.” He asked the class “what ocean, everybody” and they shouted in unison the “Atlantic Ocean.” Are you sure he asked, making them agree enthusiastically. “Well it’s not,” he said in retort, and they looked at him stunned. The real name is “the Conroy Ocean,” and went into a ludicrous story about his great-great grandfather Ferdinand Conroy “a Spanish soldier of fortune who swam from Europe to North America, a distance of fifteen million miles” and “because of that feat they named this huge expanse of water after him.” As a result of the story the children started to fight with Conroy insisting that it was the Atlantic despite his protestations and arguing that he has just told them so. “I’m a liar,” he said. No, one shot back, “You’s a teacher,” and the child was right.
—THE
August 9, 2024
from Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins
by Michel Chaouli
“He admits that writing poetically the critic may be ‘prone to glibness or working too hard to be right’ and may at times become dumbfounded.”—THE
Michel Chaouli is a professor of German and comparative literature at Indiana University in Bloomington where he also directs the Center for Theoretical Inquiry in the Humanities. In Something Speaks to Me he argues that essays of literary criticism should be written “poetically” and in our paragraph of the week he offers his first of myriad attempts to explain what that means.
The Paragraph of the Week
So, the heart of the essay beats in the adverb [poetically], which is less strange than it may sound. Is that not the norm among phenomena that interest us here? Is it not true, for example, of poetry? The essence of poetry lies not in manufacturing a product that falls into a category labeled "poetry," but in making anything at all—but poetically. (I have no more than an inkling of the difference that doing something "poetically" makes, but might know more by the end of this book.) The same holds for "play," which is not limited to a range of acts and behaviors definable once and for all, for I can do anything playfully. To be sure, these mode of doing are not the same, though they do maintain an intimacy with one another, as they do with intimacy itself. Intimacy develops essayistically, poetically, and playfully. The same can be said of poetic criticism. It is adverbial: not a thing, but a manner of making.
—Michel Chaouli
Commentary
In Something Speaks to Me Michel Chaouli makes a case for “poetic criticism.” It came after years of pondering an incident when he embarrassed himself in class by reading passages from Kafka to his students unable to think of a word to say. He realized that when we read anything that speaks intimately to us we can feel the urge to explain it to someone, but not know how. The work calls on us to match it, to become, as the poet Novalis claimed, “the enlarged author” or, as Chaouli puts it, the “poet squared” and the task is daunting. It requires that we write poetically, an idea he struggles to explain for the entire book. He turns to other writers: Schlegel who invented the phrase, Emerson who argued that “one must be an inventor to read well,” and Stanley Cavell who claimed that “the burden of describing” a work of art “is like the burden of producing it.” Being both poetic and a critic is daunting, and often Chaouli resorts to metaphor: poetic criticism, he explains using a German saying, is like jumping over your own shadow and landing ecstatically beside yourself. He admits that writing poetically the critic may be “prone to glibness or working too hard to be right” and may at times become dumbfounded, but matching poetry with poetic essays allows you “to give yourself over to something surpassing you. Surpassing you, it prods you to seek ways of acting you did not know you had in yourself—a fragile and mysterious, a delicious freedom.”
—THE
August 23, 2024
from “Pantoum for 1979”
in An Earlier Life
by Brenda Miller
“Just a girl, broken down with few belongings.”—Brenda Miller
A pantoum is a poetic form written in any number of quatrains in which lines are repeated in a specific order creating a haunting, often claustrophobic text. In “Pantoum for 1979” Brenda Miller writes a prose version that uses repeated variations on sentences instead of lines. Miller is the author of six books of essays including most recently A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form. “Pantoum for 1979” is from her collection An Earlier Life.
You can read the complete essay here.
Note: In the original commentary I misread the poem as being about an abortion rather than a miscarriage. My apologies to Brenda Miller. The commentary has been corrected.
The Paragraph of the Week
I’m twenty years old, barely an adult, my belly flat, though inside that belly a baby is growing. Or not a baby—a something, a cluster of cells, lodged in the fallopian tubes. In a few weeks I’ll be in pain, pain like a penknife stabbing me again and again. But for now I’m just a girl in a broken-down Toyota, moving her few belongings into a room in a big red house on the hill.
—Brenda Miller
Commentary
The opening paragraph of Brenda Miller’s prose pantoum sets up the story of her miscarriage when she was twenty years old. “Just a girl, broken down with few belongings” she moved into a house she found on “a message tacked on a bulletin board,” met a boy there, played basketball with him, he touched her “just once on the hip with the back of his hand,” she daydreamed about him in bed, they had sex, and she got pregnant. If that sounds breezy, it is intentional because that is the way the story comes across in her telling, too, but it doesn’t end there. In the last stanza of a pantoum the author often repeats lines from the opening, and Miller does, but instead of “not a baby—a something, a cluster of cells, lodged in the fallopian tubes,” she writes “the baby was gone,” allows that she was “twenty years old, barely an adult” and the phrase “the pain, like a penknife, stabbing again and again,” returns, not as physical pain this time, but as loss and a lingering sadness.
—THE
August 30, 2024
from Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction
by Brian Dillon
“Shall we take dust as the founding metaphor by which to broach the unruly topic of the essay?”—Brian Dillon
Brian Dillon’s books include The Great Explosion, Objects in This Mirror, I Am Sitting in a Room, Sanctuary, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives , and In the Dark Room. He is the UK editor of Cabinet magazine and teaches creative writing at Queen Mary University of London. Our Paragraph of the Week is from his collection Essayism which describes the essay as a paradoxical form simultaneously coalescing and collapsing on the way to "making the transitory eternal."
The Paragraph of the Week
Shall we take dust as the founding metaphor by which to broach the unruly topic of the essay? For sure, it sounds deathly, as though the form is lost to the world, consigned to libraries and anthologies. (As if those are ever really dead.) There have been times—ours is not one of them, I think I will want to say—when the essay has seemed antique and moribund, fit only for the classroom and to become an object of nostalgia for the improving or diverting literature of the past. Essays, ancient or modern, can seem precious in their self-presentation, like things too well made ever to be handled. Touch them however and they are likely to come alive with the sedimented evidence of years; a constellation of glittering motes surrounds the supposedly solid thing, and the essay reveals itself to have been less compact and smooth than thought, but instead unbounded and mobile, a form with ambitions to be unformed. Which is to say-I can't prove it yet-that the venerable genre of the essay has something to do with the future, with a sense of constant dispersal and coalescence. And for what it's worth my attachment to it seems of the same conflicted order: I want essays to have some integrity (formally, not morally, speaking), their strands of thought and style and feeling so tightly woven they present a smooth and gleaming surface. And I want all this to unravel in the same moment, in the same work; I want the raggedness, the patchwork, a labyrinth's-worth of stray threads. You might say I'm torn.
—Brian Dillon
Commentary
One and many held in paradoxical tension, that is Brian Dillon’s conception of the essay, and what makes his book Essayism so compelling are the many metaphors he finds to embody the idea. Here it is dust with its deathly overtones: touch any perfectly shaped essay “too well made to ever be handled,” and it is “likely to come alive with the sedimented evidence of years.” The “supposedly solid thing” turns out to be a “constellation of glittering motes.” Later he calls the essay a “conglomerate” and turns to the German Romantic writer, Friedrich Schlegal who compared literary works to a porcupine, both “delicate and indrawn” and “a verbal weapon” made of “spines or quills.” Dillon compares the essay to a web—beautifully constructed concentric circles—that draw bits of the world to it and holds the many together, and with it reminds us that an essay does not require a fixed idea, but something more amorphous and powerful: a governing metaphor. When writers fail to find it they may have something “serviceable” or “informative,” but they do not have an essay. He turns to Roland Barthes who argued that a photograph, like an essay, is a “stadium” of information, but to grip us it needs a “punctum: that aspect (often a detail) of a photograph that holds our gaze without condescending to mere meaning or beauty.” Essayism is “curiosity” and “consolation,” “extravagance” and “taste,” “dispersal” and “coherence,” and a “tightly woven" integrity unravelling. Most tellingly, the essay is an “experiment in attention: it invariably departs from the objects at hand to enter the realm of speculation and even fantasy because that is the liberty such attention allows.” Dillon concludes: “This form is selfsame and lucid and autonomous—it is also filled with the new and disparate elements, it ranges these new possibilities in series, or better in some curious arrangement.” Like him, the essay is “torn.”
—THE
September 6, 2024
from “The Ecology of Magic”
in The Spell of the Sensuous
by David Abram
“Living in a little hut in the rice paddies of eastern Bali, David Abram found himself ‘falling in space.’”—THE
David Abram is a cultural ecologist and philosopher who lectures and teaches widely on several continents. He is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (Vintage, 1997). In our paragraph of the week from The Spell of the Sensuous he considers the role of the shaman as the intermediary between humans and the natural world.
The Paragraph of the Week
The traditional or tribal shaman, I came to discern, acts as an intermediary between the human community and the larger ecological field, ensuring that there is an appropriate flow of nourishment, not just from the landscape to the human inhabitants, but from the human community back to the local earth. By his constant rituals, trances, ecstasies, and "journeys," he ensures that the relation between human society and the larger society of beings is balanced and reciprocal, and that the village never takes more from the living land than it returns to it—not just materially but with prayers, propitiations, and praise. The scale of a harvest or the size of a hunt are always negotiated between the tribal community and the natural world that it inhabits. To some extent every adult in the community is engaged in this process of listening and attuning to the other presences that surround and influence daily life. But the shaman or sorcerer is the exemplary voyager in the intermediate realm between the human and the more-than-human worlds, the primary strategist and negotiator in any dealings with the Others.
—David Abram
Commentary
Living in a little hut in the rice paddies of eastern Bali, David Abram found himself “falling in space.” A river of stars glowed above and their reflection in water seemed like “the abyss of star-studded space falling away forever.” Then, fireflies! It was magical. In The Spell of the Sensuous he explains that he earned spending money in college by doing sleight of hand tricks and travelled Europe as a street magician. Later. as a student of the psychology of perception, he studied the ways of the shaman from his hut in Indonesia. He learned that the tribal shaman “acts as an intermediary between the human community and the larger ecological field.” Through rituals and ecstatic “journeys” he ensures that nature and humanity maintain a “balanced and reciprocal” relationship. In the West we view nature mechanistically because the “inner world...like the supernatural heaven of Christian belief, originates in the loss of our ancestral reciprocity with the animate earth.” The shaman does not seek to transcend the earth, but to propel “his awareness laterally” “into the depths of a landscape at once both sensuous and psychological, the living dream that we share with the soaring hawk, the spider and the stone silently sprouting lichens on its coarse surface.”
—THE
September 13, 2024
from Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
by Roland Barthes
translated by Richard Howard
“Going through a stack of photos in which his dead mother has yet to die, Roland Barthes makes himself vulnerable again to losing her.”
Roland Barthes was an influential French literary theorist as well as a masterful essayist. He died in 1980 and his last book of essays, Camera Lucida, is perhaps his most poignant work. In an attempt to find a photograph of his dead mother that breaks though and moves him, he explores several ideas about the way pictures work on us. He “distinguished two themes in Photography,” giving them Latin names in his playfully ironic way. The first he called the studium or “the body of information” of “general interest” contained in the photograph. The second is the punctum which is the subject of this week’s paragraph.
The Paragraph of the Week
The second element will break (or punctuate) the studium. This time it is not I who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points. This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice. A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).
—Roland Barthes
Commentary
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes is on a quest to see the true face of his dead mother that in memory he cannot recall. He spends an evening going through photographs until he comes upon one of his mother as a girl in a winter garden and at last rediscovers her: “The distinctness of her face, the naïve attitude of her hands, the place she had docilely taken without either showing or hiding herself, and finally her expression, which distinguished her” and “constituted the figure of a sovereign innocence.” The expression on her face is the punctum which, Barthes asserts, is “no longer a sign but the thing itself” punching through to the viewer. It is also what the viewer brings to it, “what I add to the photograph,” Barthes explains. He becomes in part the creator of the picture like the operator of a camera lucida which casts an image through a prism onto a piece of paper, so the artist can trace his own drawing from life. Going through a stack of photos in which his dead mother has yet to die, he makes himself vulnerable again to losing her. “I shudder” he writes “over a catastrophe that has already occurred.” That is why the punctum, with the roll of the dice, wounds and pricks and bruises and cuts and stings.
—THE
September 27, 2024
from Time’s Passage: A Bystander’s Reflections
by Robert Root
“I remember feeling that our relationship with the solar system—with the universe itself—had changed.”—Robert Root
Of his long and distinguished list of publications, Robert Root’s newest book, Time’s Passage, speaks the most to me. I taught with Bob in the Ashland MFA program and for many summer residencies was his apartment mate. Time’s Passage reminds me of conversations we would have late into the night when we talked about books and writers and writing. Those summer talks were an education in the craft of nonfiction—they always gave me a stack of books to read over the winter—and made up some of my happiest memories in what turned out to be my last stint as a teacher.
Throughout the book Bob writes about family, friends, teaching, and his fellow writers, but his theme is the singular self. “No matter who you are, no matter how interactive, how social, how engaged you might be with others,” he explains, “the heart of your circumstance is always solitary.” We are born with this “distance” in us, and I feel it on every page of Time’s Passage where he gazes at the ever-changing world with childlike wonder. Bob’s book is elegant, his voice, pure and simple, offering profound and moving insights without once straining after effects.
I have chosen two sequential paragraphs that appear at the end in his essay “Moonlight” which illustrate his “solitary circumstance” and speak to ours. In the first paragraph Bob, the adult, thinks of his childhood when he simultaneously saw the distant moon in the sky and, for the first time, the close-up of the moon on a television screen. In the second paragraph—which feels like a commentary on the first—he is back in our pandemic world of toxic politics, his wife beside him in bed, and gazes at the moon again with renewed wonder.
You can learn more about Time’s Passage at The Humble Essayist Press website here.
The Paragraph of the Week
Unexpectedly, memories of moon-gazing flashed into my mind. I’d been in college when the first unmanned lunar landings occurred, living alone in an apartment in an old house in a neighboring town. I sat up past three o’clock in the morning to watch the first live telecast from the moon by a camera on the lunar lander. When the images began to appear, slowly, one strip at a time, I turned off the lights and pushed my face close to the screen, as if I could get even closer to the moon. On earth the physical moon could at that moment be seen through my apartment window high in a clear, cloudless sky. I looked out the window at that small bright circle in the darkness and then looked back at the image on the television screen, trying to reconcile the two, trying to appreciate how I could be seeing both the familiar remote and distant satellite and the close-up of its actual surface at the same moment. I remember feeling that our relationship with the solar system—with the universe itself—had changed.
—Robert Root
Commentary
Now, decades later, back in bed, leaning to keep the moon in view, I tried to memorize what I was seeing so that I might be able to call it up when I closed my eyes some cloudy nights, to reassure myself it was out there. In our daily lives, our attention to getting and spending keeps our line of vision low and lets so many aspects of the natural world be overlooked, ignored, forgotten about. I was happy to lie there quietly, envisioning the moon as vividly when I closed my eyes as when I had viewed it through my window. I tried for a moment to put pandemics and politics into perspective, but soon dismissed thinking about them at all. Even with my eyes closed, the moon was too bright, too close, too permanent for me to be distracted by anything else.
—Robert Root
October 5, 2024
from “On style”
in Against Interpretation and Other Essays
by Susan Sontag
“Art is not only about something; it is something.”—Susan Sontag
Against Interpretation, published in 1966, was Susan Sontag’s first collection of essays and is considered a modern classic. It includes the groundbreaking essays “Notes on ‘Camp,’” “Against interpretation,” “Happenings,” and “On style” in her battle against philistinism in art criticism.
The Paragraph of the Week is from “On Style” in which she famously argues that a work of art is not a statement, but an experience.
The Paragraph of the Week
At least since Diderot, the main tradition of criticism in all the arts, appealing to such apparently dissimilar criteria as verisimilitude and moral correctness, in effect treats the work of art as a statement being made in the form of a work of art ... To treat works of art in this fashion is not wholly irrelevant. But it is, obviously, putting art to use—for such purposes as inquiring into the history of ideas, diagnosing contemporary culture, or creating social solidarity. Such a treatment has little to do with what actually happens when a person possessing some training and aesthetic sensibility looks at a work of art appro-priately. A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.
—Susan Sontag
Commentary
So what is my practice here at The Humble Essayist? I find essays to be thematically rich compared to poetry and fiction, not to mention the paintings, movies, happenings, and campy displays that fascinate Susan Sontag in Against Interpretation, a cultural touchstone of the sixties where “On Style” appeared. Essays let ideas—what she calls content—lurk just under the surface, embedded metaphorically, implied stylistically, or stated elegantly. My job is not to interpret them, but to ferret them out. I love style and spend as much space as possible describing it, and in Sontag’s case the crisp, learned, and astute texture of her prose explains much of its charm and power. As she wrote, looking back on her essays thirty years later, “my irrepressible taste for aphoristic statement conspired with my staunchly adversarial purposes in ways that sometimes surprised me.” But I don’t have much space and need to get to the point: for Sontag, style is substance—no need to dwell on the latter.
—THE
October 11, 2024
from “In Praise of Echo”
in Translating Myself and Others
by Jhumpa Lahiri
“The illusion of artistic freedom is just that, an illusion. No words are ‘my words’—I merely arrange and use them in a certain way.”
—Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri is a British-American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays, including Interpreter of Maladies a collection of short stories which won the Pulitzer Prize. She has also written original works in Italian and translated three novels by Domenico Starnone into English. The Paragraph of the Week is from the essay “In Praise of Echo” in her collection Translating Myself and Others.
The Paragraph of the Week
But what makes something original, as opposed to a derivation? As a writer, I can vouch for the fact that everything “original” I have ever written derives necessarily from something else, not just from my experiences but from my reading of other works, and through inspiration I have drawn, consciously and unconsciously, from countless other authors. Creativity does not exist in a vacuum, and much of it involves responding by imitating, as theorists from Plato to Erich Auerbach to Harold Bloom have reminded us. I am attracted to myths—incidentally, the very first stories I learned to read—not only because they point me back to my own origins as a reader, but because they are the only original stories that exist: stories with counterparts in all cultures that belong to everyone and to no one. When I began writing stories as a child, I wrote copies of what I read, and in many respects, that is what I've have continued doing, in only a slightly less obvious way. The illusion of artistic freedom is just that, an illusion. No words are “my words”—I merely arrange and use them in a certain way.
—Jhumpa Lahiri
Commentary
Translating Myself and Others tells the story of author Jhumpa Lahiri’s journey as an author of critically acclaimed novels in the English language to a writer and translator of novels in the Italian of her adopted home. She takes inspiration from the myth of Echo and Narcissus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses because the tale depends on the irony that besets any translator: Echo, a story-teller in her own right before being condemned by Juno to repeat the words of others, always comes after her beloved, Narcissus, merely repeating his words weakly. For Lahiri, she becomes a translator who begins with a beautiful original text that “will be impossible to maintain in another linguistic context.” But unlike Echo, the translator “converts this ‘punishment’ into a stimulating challenge, and often joy,” restoring the text by an “alchemical process that requires imagination, ingenuity, and freedom.” In the Paragraph of the Week she reminds us that all writing goes through this translation process. “Everything ‘original’ I have ever written derives necessarily from...countless other authors.” The words, she adds, do not belong to her. “I merely arrange and use them in a certain way.” Well, yes, if we remember that the “certain way,” requires the same “alchemical process” of “imagination, ingenuity, and freedom” as the translator’s art.
—THE
October 25, 2024
from “Notes on the Objects to Be Found on My Desk”
in Thoughts of Sorts
by Georges Perec
“Lists in essays always seem to me self-conscious in the extreme.”
—Brian Dillon
When I started Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris I was baffled—and in many ways I still am. A book of lists? Perec, the French novelist, film-maker, and essayist, chose a spot in Paris and over the course of three days in October 1974 wrote about all the unimportant things he saw. He saw a lot of pigeons, umbrellas, and buses go by--to my mind, going nowhere.
Reading Brian Dillon’s book Essayism helped me get a handle on this writer’s work, and in the interest of expanding our horizons here at The Humble Essayist I have taken a paragraph from Perec’s 1976 essay “Notes on the Objects to Be Found on My Desk,” which Dillon cites, side-by-side with a paragraph of Dillon’s commentary. For Dillon an essay is always a struggle between disorder and unity with the list as the most extreme example of disorder. Dillon’s commentary has been slightly edited to fit our format.
The Paragraph of the Week
A lamp, a cigarette-case, a bud-vase, a stone for striking matches, a cardboard box containing small filing cards of different colours, a large papier-mâché penholder with seashell inlays, glass pencil-holder, several stones, three turned-wood boxes, an alarm clock, a push-button calendar, a lump of lead, a big cigar-box full of knick-knacks (no cigars), a steel spiral device in which you can put pending mail, a polished stone dagger handle, ledgers, exercise books, loose leaves, various writing instruments and accessories, a big blotting stamp, several books, glass full of pencils, a little gilded-wood box.
—Georges Perec (translated by David Belloc)
Commentary
Lists in essays always seem to me self-conscious in the extreme. They sound as if they're explicitly about writerly ambition and its discontents, frustrations, disappointments. I love the lists in the work of Georges Perec: they are many and various and always poised, it seems, between pure pleasure in the descriptive act of noting in series, and a darker sense that the list will never be done with, and may well at any rate lead us astray. Nothing seems easier, says Perec, than making (or is it writing?) a list; but it is really a complex undertaking. You are bound to forget something, and you will be tempted to give up, or let the thing tail off, and write “etc.”— “but the whole point of an inventory is not to write etc.”
—Brian Dillon
November 1, 2024
from “On Aging”
in Best American Essays 2023
by Edward Hoagland
“What’s up with the clichés?”—THE
Edward Hoagland is an American novelist, travel writer, and essayist, noted especially for his writings about nature and wildlife. His essay collections include The Courage of Turtles, The Edward Hoagland Reader, and Hoagland on Nature. His essay “On Aging” first appeared in The American Scholar.
The Paragraph of the Week
Wax and wane. Did you burn the candle at both ends, or hide your light under a basket? The carousel swings up and down. Whatever goes around comes around. As to health, leave well enough alone. Heaven is on earth, Emerson believed. I'd love to be a passenger on trains again, ambling down the corridors toward the bubble car to chum with strangers while the scenery rises and falls. I'd rejoice in gazing out, crossing a continent with the random souls chance has thrown my way.
—Edward Hoagland
Commentary
What’s up with the clichés? I have always assumed that worn out ideas are only effective when the writer gives them a twist the way Phillip Roth does describing the road to hell as “paved with works-in-progress.” But in “On Aging” Edward Hoagland drops the rusted saws into his essays unchanged: “cat got your tongue,” “bearding the lion,” “burn the candle at both ends,” and many more. He is not using them as dulled expressions of his thoughts, though. They function as memories, not poorly stated ideas. They are words reified into souvenirs which serve his purposes, items he picked up over a lifetime coming to its end, “ambling down the corridors toward the bubble car to chum with strangers while the scenery rises and falls.”
—THE
November 8, 2024
from “Riding the Blinds
in On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
by Maggie Nelson
“My guess—my hope—is that, as I age, time will thicken further.”
—Maggie Nelson
On Freedom by Maggie Nelson is based on the idea, which she traces back to the essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates, that freedom “is built on a ‘we’ instead of an ‘I,’ that we are dependent on each other, as well as upon nonhuman forces that exceed our understanding or control.” It means that no one enjoys absolute freedom and that every act of freedom is a complex negotiation with others. The task of her book is to trace this complexity in four areas: art, sex, drugs, and climate. In each area she urges us to withhold judgement until we have placed any act of freedom in context because, well, it’s complicated. The book is multifaceted and intricately argued and there is no way I can do justice to it in a paragraph, so instead I bit off a small chunk of the section on climate for this feature.
The title “Riding the Blinds” refers to the dangerous hobo practice of riding between cars on a moving freight train to be out of sight of the train crew or police. In Nelson’s essay, the train is headed toward ecological disaster, and “riding the blinds” is one way to drop out of the doom narrative at least for a while.
The Paragraph of the Week
One benefit of riding the blinds, or dropping the story line, is that other senses of time can become more palpable, including the feeling of folded or intergenerational time—what femi-nist scholars Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker have called “thick time”: “a transcorporeal stretching between present, future, and past.” “Thick time” is neither repo time nor queer time per se, though I admit to feeling it most often when I look at my son, and behold all the selves and ages he has passed through folded atop one another. (My mother once told me that, when she would go to pick me up from our town's square, she would sometimes get momentarily confused about what kind of body she was looking for—a toddler body? A teenager body? A preteen body? At the time I thought she was a little nuts, but now I realize she was just touching the kind of thick time I experience all the time these days, when my son is explaining why a hot dog can't freeze in the freezer or how a realm differs from a world in Minecraft, and I'm distracted by noticing that his eyes look exactly as they did when he was an infant, nursing, in all that disordered time spent in the glider. My guess—my hope—is that, as I age, time will thicken further.)
—Maggie Nelson
Commentary
Maggie Nelson begins “Riding the Blinds” with her boy who loved to play on a park train when he was a toddler pretending to be the engineer shouting “WOO HOO, WOO HOO! DINGA, DINGA, DINGA! Eventually, though, she weaves into her story the idea that our ecological woes began with the invention of the steam engine and that our freedoms depend on the affluence that industrialism has provided. Sadly, our extinction—the defining quality of Anthropocene era in which we live—is where this train is headed. It is a story line moving in one direction with an unhappy ending, and it has already begun. One way to drop out of this doom narrative at least for a while, and hide while “riding the blinds” like a hobo between boxcars, is to layer time, to thicken it in “a transcorporeal stretching between present, future, and past.” Her example is her son who no longer loves trains and has passed through many stages which she experiences as “folded atop one another.” When he talks to her as a teenager she sometimes sees “that his eyes look exactly as they did when he was an infant, nursing,” and remembers that her mother often experienced the same collapsing of time with her. The sense that all times happen at once in a “temporal abundance” can bring relief, especially to those who grieve writes Denise Riley in Time Lived, without Its Flow who felt the comfort of this “abundance in loss” when her adult son died. It deepens the short time we have on earth, and Nelson hopes that as she ages “time will thicken further.” “Riding the blinds” this way does not, though, allow us to escape the train while its moving. “There you are, turning the ignition of your car,” writes philosopher Timothy Morton, and a thickening of time, going all the way back to the invention of the steam engine, comes over you with an inescapable realization: “I am responsible as a member of the species for the Anthropocene.”
—THE
