My Favorite Essay of 2010 (so far...)

My wife and I woke after noon this Sunday. Made New Orleans coffee. Set a French fry omelet to puff in the oven. Sat in our easy chairs, the hard winter creeping through the windowcracks—the ghosts of all who’ve fallen through thin ice. And read. She: The Missouri Review, Me: The Iowa Review, tattooing ourselves further into the flesh of delicious nerdhood. I started the best essay I’ve read so far this year. I take comfort in the fact that John D’Agata loved it too. Because I like John D’Agata. And I like affirmation from people I like. On page 21 of The Iowa Review 39:3 lurks Karen Hays’ “Dear Martlet,” another essay that reminds us of the genre’s capabilities and, dare I say, ultraviolet bounds. The essay does nothing short of providing us with, in the language of spent rhetorical flourish (because nothing else will work, really), new ways of seeing. Whether viewing the world, damn-near literally, through the eyes of an infant or bee, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut about this piece as I read it. It was an immediate love affair, requiring no digestion, through digestion only works in its favor. I kept interrupting my wife’s reading, to recite paragraphs of Hays’ piece aloud. Soon, my wife was hooked, and I couldn’t stop reading aloud until the piece was finished. Then, I took a shower and felt, well, reborn.

The piece works as science writing, prose poetry, biography, memoir, treatise on parenthood, folklore, food writing, art appreciation, dream analysis, and so much more than that. In tracing a fascination with the physical and mental ways in which we approach, see, and make sense of the world, and how those ways affect and encourage one another, “Dear Martlet” instructs us to be exhilarated with the world again in its infinite complexity, and simple beauties. The piece traces and speculates on the life and obsessions of Swedish botanist (and ecologist, taxonomist, zoologist, physician...), Carl Linnaeus, interrupting the discussion for the related obsessions of the author, culled from extensive and careful research, and from her own life. As a reader, we are allowed to see as the bee (“A purely red flower, say a spring tulip, would look black to a bee, but with a purple UV glow invisible to most humans...like the bull’s eyes hidden in Black-Eyed Susans, and the nectar guides that radiate like landing strips from the centers of certain lilies. Those come-hithers are for the bees.”), and as Monet, as the infant, as Linnaeus, the swallow, the sleeping mind locked in dream and the sunlight that actually obliterates it like “the photographed faces of loved ones and lost youth.”

Like Alison Hawthorne Deming’s The Monarchs and the films of Charlie Kaufman, “Dear Martlet,” teaches us about being alive and about life itself—the push pull relationship of the worlds outside and inside us. It is about so much more, and nothing less. And I know such vagueness is not the stuff of a “money review,” but to enumerate the addictive specifics of the piece would require pageless typographical diarrhea. This is a crazy-articulate essay to inspire crazier-inarticulateness. According to the contributor notes, Hays “is a geologist at work on her first collection of essays.” I can’t wait for more. Until then, I’ll take comfort in blaming her for cold coffee and a burnt omelet.

John D'Agata's About a Mountain (I know it's a book, not an essay)

I wanted to say a little about John D’Agata’s new book, About a Mountain, even though it wasn’t published as an essay in a literary magazine, to me, it is still an essay albeit one in book-length form. What makes it still an essay is the way it accumulates information after focusing intently on one laser-fine point. The way About a Mountain accumulates and asserts its topics parallels the topics themselves. So when D’Agata begins About a Mountain by describing Las Vegas’s centennial celebration, he is laying out the formal strategy for the whole book and subtly tucking in the issues the book will address. From this narrow focus, D’Agata lays the groundwork for the rest of the text: the population explosion of Las Vegas, the high-concentration of freaks in Las Vegas, the multitude of Elvis’s. From a single instance, 2005 at a parade for Vegas’s centennial celebration, D’Agata touches on all the subjects the book will address. Take for example the multitude of cash stores the parade passes: “We marched past Kostner’s Cash, and we marched past Super Cash, and we marched past Gambler’s Pawn and Loan and then an empty lot” (12). The issues addressed by the whole book emerges from these first pages examples. Things will explode here. Things will proliferate. The mold of Las Vegas had been cast long ago and time will accumulate enough neon, enough Elvises, enough cash, enough waste, to fulfill that mold.

Proliferation, explosion, exponential growth. Each of these are words to be ascribed to what appears to be D’Agata’s primary subject: Yucca Mountain and nuclear waste. Half-lives and millennia and the semiotics of language and the multitude of things that go wrong serve to parallel those first few pages’ promise. The essay, unlike other forms of nonfiction, creates from its first images, scenes and words choices the path and exertions of the text as a whole. Said more simply, the essay makes a metaphor of itself early on and, through that metaphor, guides the reader on how to read the essay.

So it makes sense that the idea of proliferation, desert-craziness, populations, the multitude of cash stores act early on as a metaphor for what D’Agata’s primary subject seems to be: nuclear waste storage. And so, when one learns on CNN that the whole Yucca Mountain as storage site has been quietly scuttled thanks to a deal between Obama and Harry Reid, you wonder, does this hurt the topicality of D’Agata’s book?

Since the problem of nuclear waste storage doesn’t go away with Obama’s signature, I’d argue no. But I’d also argue no based on the argument that the essay’s larger subject is about proliferation, form, explosion, and exponential growth and while this does work nicely with the issues surrounding nuclear waste, it also parallels nicely with what I think is D’Agata’s larger project: to understand how language does or doesn’t work. Language is meant to communicate, he argues, but language proliferates, explodes, dies outside our control. Therefore, when D’Agata investigates how we’ll create a sign that will tell our future selves—no, don’t go here into this mountain full of waste, he’s really talking about how language, like population growth, like nuclear waste, changes, and even escapes us, without our being able to predict or manage that change or escape.

The essay works then, like a Matroyshka doll with a set of images and scenes that repeat themselves, in larger and broader contexts. So from that straightforward centennial celebration scene at the beginning, to the descriptions of Vegas’ exponential growth, to the politics of nuclear waste storage, to the problems of scientific authority, to the nature of language, we finally arrive at the to the particular-to-Vegas, proliferating, political, scientific and language-failures attendant to suicides. D’Agata never abandons his formal essay project about proliferation, explosion, and exponential growth and it’s subject is as explosive, proliferate and expounding as the nuclear waste that becomes just one of the many subjects D’Agata juggles.

Black Warrior Review (Fall/Winter 2009) 36.1

Essays:

Jehanne Dubrow, "The Lieutenant's Wife"
Janice Lee, "A Man Who Is a Red Tree"

brief, memory

The new Brevity is online. The two standouts for me are Jennifer Percy and Paul Lisicky.

I don't think I've read anything by Lisicky that I didn't immediately like. Also, he's a total dreamboat. And I was feeling this essay, getting in the groove of it, when I got to the penultimate paragraph, which includes this:

"Maybe that’s what my father already knew back then. And maybe that’s why he brought it up at the dinner table thirty years later, though I’d forgotten it, as I’d forgotten many things by then. His eyes looked through me, past me. He spoke as if that memory were just one more thing he’d been wearing around his neck..."

Ok, yeah, sure, it's beautifully rendered, just like the rest of the essay. And it's meaningful and poignant and appropriate. But is anyone else tired of (narrative, personal) essays that bring up memory and forgetting? Especially at important or climactic moments? I understand that essays lend themselves to considerations of memory, but when an essay goes in that direction I get turned off, bored. If only because so many essays feel the need to scratch that itch, as though it hasn't been scratched already, probably by that same author, in that same collection/issue, whatever. It's starting to feel like an empty gesture.

Anyone else getting tired of this? Am I just being bitchy? Maybe a better question, are there some recent essays that bring memory to the forefront in a new way?

on Design and Ninth Letter and April Freely

Ninth Letter is a journal you should know both for its design and its content, though the design is what speaks to you first. The work they publish is almost always interesting, but the way they publish it is what separates them from most other contemporary litmags. Example: a few years ago they accepted an essay of mine that talked about defunct and dying technologies. They printed it on fricking microfilm and tucked it in a pocket in the issue. While the effect of the design choice here was to formally reinforce one of the through-lines in the essay, the secondary effect was to render it unreadable unless you had access (as most of us do via library) to a microfiche machine. They also helpfully posted a pdf of it on their website (which you can download here--though the way to experience the actual essay, which is to say the way you are forced to perform the essay, to collaborate with the writer in order to read it at all, which may or may not be worth the trouble, is via the microfiche version).

The way they use design varies pretty substantially from piece to piece, and designer to designer, and I'm sure that each of their designers thinks about the function of design differently.

To the new issue, though: two essays deserve some of our time. Stephan Clark's "My Year of European Underwear" is hilarious and worth the read, though if you're squeamish about testicle-related trauma you may want to skip it (but I hope you won't, since it's worth the ride). That's not the one I'm talking about here. Like the essay, its design is pretty straightforward.

Another, "Real Men Don't Cry," by Sarah Klenbort, is almost unreadable (and not in a constructive or interesting way) through its design. Klenbort's essay takes what seems at first like a fairly tired idea, that of gender stereotypes and idealizations, and the double standard pretty much all of us apply with regard to gender, though some of us try to work against that. It's 23 segments (cool), each a strand in the braid of the essay (cool). Some are facts about the incidence of violence (both the acceptable kind--football, say--and the unacceptable kind--murder, say, or dogfighting) in Western culture. Some are more personal, as you'd expect. The literary history it brings to the table is its best note, talking Shakespeare and Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus and working the essay into an argument that is actually fairly surprising in the end.

But the design here is tough to take. The essay's segments are numbered to begin with, so the decision to assign different fonts (at least four different fonts are deployed in this essay, maybe more, some serif, some not), italics, small caps, changing font sizes, all caps, bold, underlining--all of this what we would refer to in my grad school workshops as typographical trickery (sometimes as "cheating," which always struck me as bogus)--is herein bogus. I suppose the idea behind this was to render each individual strand more obviously in the greater whole of the essay.

Which is entirely unnecessary. The reader is smart enough to tell "3. The average American child watches 200,000 acts of violence and 1,600 murders on television by the age of eighteen" from "7. When I was six months pregnant..." without having to render the first as all-small caps, underlined, in a smaller, sans serif font (whereas 7 is rendered in more traditional prose typography). It doesn't add anything at all. Worse, it condescends and obscures.

Let me be clear: I'm all for writers using the tools at their disposal (design, desktop publishing, those buttons in the corner of the Microsoft Word screen, etc.) to make meaning more elegant, beautiful, violent, interesting, or clear.

Yet the familiar objection to using typography to signify something as simple as denoting who's speaking, or someone shouting, or whatever is valid because ideally we're using design to achieve an effect because it is the simplest, most elegant, best way to meaning, not because it's the easiest way, even if it's kind of clunky and obtrusive, and maybe we could do it better via the craft of our sentences. (And let's admit it: we all need to work on our sentences.)

And there is certainly a value in limiting the ability of writers to deploy the tools of typography to turn in a beautifully-designed and typeset page that mimics the look and authority of the printed page, thus copping a faux authority that can short-circuit some of our abilities to read the words and not just how the words look. We want to be able to tear each others' work up if we can, to tear our own work up, so we don't settle for the draft that looked pretty on the page in that sweet new font we're in love with.

But the design of Klenbort's essay serves nothing, and certainly not the writer's words. At first glance it looks cool and complicated from a typographical standpoint (though those two things are not always equivalent), but in reading, it serves to flatten the tonal shifts from one strand to another, to make things obvious, so obvious for the reader. This reader reads it as pandering, and it made me much more likely to take issue with Klenbort's prose which, like her argument, is actually pretty good when you're not bitching about the design (which is almost impossible for me to do).

*

On the flipside, April Freely's essay ("Garden Valley") supplement to the issue (the issue has three separately-bound and -packaged supplements) is a lovely example of an effective and subdued design that flatters the essay. Freely's essay is laid out landscape on the page in two columns. Text runs concurrently down the pages which are all attached, accordion-style, so that you could stretch the whole thing out on a wall and just read down, scroll-style. This buttresses the natural design of the actual writing (provided that this was how the essay was written, which I have to imagine must have been the case) and strips almost everything else away. The essay is typeset in a small serif font (same font), left column right-justified and right column left-justified, with a stroke down the middle to separate the two.

As so:

The essay is occasionally oblique, elliptical; it's not totally clear how you're meant to read it (like a regular page, left to right, then start left again? or a few lines left then a few lines right). I don't mind that kind of thing. There are a number of places where we get some nice crossovers, which is what you'd want out of a piece like this, though they don't always connect obviously, which creates an unbalancing effect which I find frustrating, but not so much that it takes me out of the essay. It's about the space between black english vernacular and "correct english" as well as the space/divide between oral and written, between at least two different kinds of spaces and within those space ("I mean I can feel the space between each syllable" ... "The words were separable and this was essential"). Obviously the essay goes pretty poetic, since it's mostly paired (or not) strophes rather than paragraphs. And it breaks up in places and is generally quite lovely and lyric and formal.

The enclosing folder is doing something else, maybe connecting to one of the other supplements. I'm not totally sure about that yet, but it's not particularly distracting.

And one of the luxe features (Ninth Letter loves its luxe features) of this design is that the essay is letterpressed. Black on white, yes. The stroke down the center isn't printed with ink; it's just blank but imprinted. Also a nice touch. And the letterpress suggests the divide between oral and print even more dramatically, the space between these authorities. It also looks (and feels) cool. Here the design serves writing, serves meaning, which is what design ought to do, whether it's in the hands of designers or writers.

Speaking of DFW

Sonora Review published their double issue last spring (issue 55/56: order here), half of which was a tribute to DFW, and is certainly worth the read. Of course for the DFW-obsessed it is essential reading as is the issue of Five Dials mentioned below. I have a couple extra copies of said issue of SR which also includes an excellent essay by one Sean Lovelace. I'd love to pass these to someone who would be interested in taking a look and blog posting here about it if there's anything that interests you. Email me with your address and I'll send it off.

DFW

Five Dials has an issue of tribute essays/memorial essays for David Foster Wallace, including pieces by his sister, agent, Jonathan Franzen, George Saunders, and others. You can download it for free here. Thanks to HTMLGIANT for the link.

Shout out to John D'Agata

who probably doesn't need too many shout outs these days, but who am I kidding: we all need shout outs when deserved (and sometimes when not). Actually I have never officially given anyone a "shout out" before. Do people still do that? Do we still give props to our peeps? Hmm. Sad days when I'm not sure what pop culture I am trying to enter. Sometimes I feel like I am buried about eight years in the past. At any rate, John's new book-length essay, About a Mountain, comes out on 2/8 (though Amazon appears to be shipping it). One of its most fascinating features is his really extensive section of notes at the end (at least in my galley) which details many--presumably all, since what would be the point of just enumerating 20 pages worth if you're not going to go all out--of the ways in which he conflated or manipulated things in the book. It reads like a response to the oververificationists in the world who live to pull apart the new fudged memoirs. I'm not sure it's strictly necessary, but he is one of the smart kids, and I found it pleasing. He reads at University of Arizona on 2/22 if you're in Tucson. He reads up in currently snowed-in, snowblind Flagstaff a day or two previous.

Missouri Review 32.4

Essays:

Andrew D. Cohen, "Television Days"

Favorite line: "But our favorite [adult-themed cable access show] by far was Midnight Blue, whose host, a fat, hairy Jew named Al Goldstein, publisher of the infamous Screw Magazine, set the tone during the opening credits by performing cunnilingus on a dripping rack of pork ribs from Tony Roma's."

M.G. Stephens, "Francis Bacon's Studio"

Favorite thing I learned about Francis Bacon: When he was a boy, his nanny locked him in a cupboard. ("'That cupboard was the making of me,' he often said.")

Gulf Coast 22.1

Essays:

Ilya Kaminsky- Little Pot
Noam Dorr- Wouldn't It
Kelly Blikre- On Our Skin
Joe Wenderoth- Thinking about Elliott Pollard
Elena Passarello- The Wilhelm Scream

Critique a Intimate Experience Essay

"Broken of the remarkable types of assignments foreordained to students, entire would be that of a intimate sustain essay. As the delegate suggests, this endeavour focuses on a genuine familiarity that the yourself has had in the past. It comes under the aegis narrative essays, as you are narrating an experience. It is quite compare favourably with to an autobiographic essay."

from [here]

A word about the space

I hope this space will serve as a collaborative space to talk about some of the better (by which I mean more interesting) essays to appear in the literary journals that publish the majority of what we like to refer to as creative nonfiction, or literary nonfiction, as I've always preferred calling it since that way it owns its own snobbery, because a little snobbery is okay. Setting aesthetic goals is okay. Calling attention to language and craft is okay, as is the essayist's aspiration to something approaching art. Sites like Poetry Daily and Verse Daily along with the online poetry community do a good job of keeping (almost) on top of the poetry being published in literary magazines. Why not have a site that tries to be a little bit more methodical about the nonfiction that litmags are increasingly putting out? That was my thinking in creating the site. I hope this will direct some of your reading to essays that I and we here find interesting, and that you might not have otherwise stumbled upon. If you'd like to join us in posting, drop me a line.

At the least I plan on listing the apparent essay content of the many literary magazines that come across my desk. I'd like if y'all would do the same here. Then if you'd like to talk about an issue, a journal, or an essay (or a trend in essaying) that you're hot and bothered by, this would be a good space for that (along with things like Brevity's blog (on the sidebar) which is a fellow traveler here).

If you'd like Essay Daily to track and write about a magazine you're involved in, please add us to your subscription list:

EssayDaily c/o Ander Monson
University of Arizona, ML 445,
1423 E. University, PO Box 210067
Tucson AZ 85721

Sarah Crosby's "The Black and White"

There appears to be a bird theme in this issue of Fourth Genre, birds showing up in both Jenny Boully's essay as well as this one. What I really dig about this piece is that from the get-go we are thrown into a world that is far weirder than we expected: "More often than not, when a bird flies into a window, it doesn't die from a broken neck." Okay. We start here and move quickly into some dead bird info, then into the ground situation, the real occasion for the essay, which our essayist craftily doubly buries a page or two into the essay:

"The dead bird that was in my freezer until recently didn't technically die from colliding with a window."

then into the past, the context for the essay and the author's admittedly odd (to us) interest in the subject:

"My father is a bryologist, a collector of mosses, and my mother was the daughter of a bryologist, so the impulse to accumulate things for any kind of study or measurement was not discouraged during my childhood."

What I love about this essay is that it goes from odd to odder. We are in a world populated by bryologists, by taxidermists, in which a lot of strange things can happen quickly, and which nothing seems strange while it's happening (key technique).

The essay goes on to recount a conversation with the writer's brother in which he, when hearing about the dead bird in the freezer, gets giddy about the possibility of getting the bird stuffed. The essay then extends to a set of longer interactions with taxidermists, the legal trouble with getting a migratory bird stuffed (hint: it's illegal), the author's volunteering with the Audobon Society's Project Safe Flight team to go help them collect dead birds, more conversations with hunters and taxidermists, a discussion of the process of gutting and stuffing birds, ending up with a great scene visiting Cornell University's Museum of Vertebrates. The subject matter and devotion to that subject matter is partly what makes this thing, er, fly, along with the solid sentencing throughout.

This is my favorite essay in this particular issue of Fourth Genre, which is on the whole a nice diversion from the previous aesthetic direction of the journal. I can't imagine Jenny Boully's essay, for instance, appearing in Fourth Genre until the editorial mantle recently shifted to Marcia Aldrich. I'm glad for this. This is a good piece, both Jenny's and Sarah's, and a little more expansive view of nonfiction on the whole. The issue in general is solid, but this one's my favorite of the bunch (close second: Jenny Boully's; there's also a good review of Jenny Boully's essaywork which is worth the read, both review and her work, if you're unfamiliar).

Fourth Genre 11.2

Thomas Lynch, "On the Brotherhood of Asses"
Heather Sellers, "Becoming a Mouth"
Sara Crosby, "The Black and White"
Ander Monson, "Geas"
Donna Steiner, "Elements of the Wind"
Gladys Haunton, "Privy Council: Revelations in an Outdoor Toilet"
Maggie McKnight, "Mother's Day"
Lisa K. Buchanan, "Rules for the Clinic Escort"
David Torrey Peters, "The Dressing Room"
Jenny Boully, "from NOT MERELY BECAUSE OF THE UNKNOWN THAT WAS STALKING TOWARDS THEM"
Joy Castro, "Grip"

Witness 22

Colleen Kinder, "Moderate Pomp"
Tom Whalen, "Carlier and Kayerts"
Catherine Taylor, "Duffer's Drift"
Lynne Sharon Schwartz, "Reality Tour"
Chris Abani, "Ethics and Narrative: the Human and Other"
Kelle Groom, "from CITY OF SHOES"
Arielle Greenberg & Rachel Zucker, "from HOME/BIRTH"
Yelizaveta P. Renfro, "Translation Perevod"

Water~Stone 12

Ira Sukrungruang, "Spinning"
Ander Monson, "If I Had a Heart I'd Die In It: Writing the Midwest"
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, "Ash"; "Brotherhood"; "Wreath"
Marcia Aldrich, "The Mother Essay"
Patrick Madden, "Where Am I Now?"
Chawawn Kelley, "International Geophysical Year"
Brian Teare, "On Prose"
Katie Hae Leo, "Going Back: a Story in Letters"
Sima Rabinowitz, "Bread/Bred in Concordance"
Dinah Lenney, "In the Frame"
Cheryl Strayed, "Kestrel Avenue"

Indiana Review 31.2

Essays included:

Claire Dunnington, "Green Eggs and Therapy"
Joan Cusack Handler, "Beanstalk"
Jen Percy, "The Usual Spots"
Tom Fleischmann, "On Alticorns"