The Essence of the Essay

Georgetown Public Library

1 – 3:00

Sat April 11

Thank you for being here!

I’ve been delighted to give lectures at this library on poetry, James Baldwin, and Jane Austen.  I’m grateful to Jay and the staff for the invitations.  

A few months ago, when Jay suggested I give a series of talks, lots of people were reading, and were very moved by, the essay you have in front of you – A Battle with My Blood by Tatiana Schlossberg – and I happened as a result to be thinking about the essay as a literary form, and why it can be so powerful.  It seemed only natural for me to take advantage of the attention being riveted on this particular essay to focus on that genre.  Why did Schlossberg choose the essay form?  What is the essay, a genre whose name means an attempt, a stab at, something?  What types of essays are there?  How can we account for the intense effect of the very best essays?

Before I run away with praise of the essay, a word about its neglect and dislike.  For many of us, the only place we actually spent time reading, analyzing, and writing essays was in the dreaded required English Comp class in high school or college.  Few schools call it that anymore, so unpopular has the course become; but under whatever name, it tends to be the same deadly mix of rather formulaic polemic about the usual suspects – the death penalty, abortion rights, assisted dying. Even worse, buying or plagiarizing your college admissions essay seems something of a national sport.  So the whole subject of the essay – there is a vast BUY YOUR ESSAY HERE industry – has a tendency to arouse emotions of boredom and cynicism.

And yet that same formulaic thing – that five paragraph thing where you first state your argument, then move it along with evidence and personal narration and the use of transitional phrases; and conclude by restating your argument in your final paragraph – ain’t at all bad as a way to begin learning to write and appreciate the essay.  Note, for instance, that this is precisely what Schlossberg, in a much more complex way, does.  Her final paragraph indeed reiterates her first, giving her essay not merely structural shapeliness, but also, in its circularity, a sense of her entrapment in therapeutic repetition rather than actual improvement.  One could go even further with that circularity as a figure for her inability emotionally to get anywhere past a stubbornly recurrent sense of incredulity about what she beautifully calls “the strangeness and sadness of what I was being told about myself.”

A 34-year-old mother has been charged after her 8-year-old son allegedly got ahold of her loaded handgun and took it to his elementary school.

Gloria Luster, 34, of Kent [Ohio], pleaded not guilty to a first-degree misdemeanor count of endangering children …

Municipal court records show Luster was also charged in September with a first-degree misdemeanor count of child endangering after another one of her children, a 2-year-old girl, was found wandering in the dark of a parking lot outside Luster’s apartment complex.

A complaint states Luster “did not know the child had left, where she had gone to, or how long she had been gone.”

**************

When does Child Protective Services decide Gloria’s a bit too much?

The long day’s journey into court that is Rutgers – a bastion of filth and corruption (read the sports posts I just linked to) even by Jersey standards – moves appreciably closer to an actual court date. To revisit my Rutgers athletics posts over many years is to marvel again at the special brew of shiftless greedy presidents, vile and violent coaches, criminal gang team players, invisible and indifferent fans, etc etc, that has made Rutgers what it is today.

When removing student fees ($138.1M), university support ($146.2M) and state funding ($42.1M) from the revenue total, Rutgers’ deficit since joining the Big Ten surpasses $516 million, marking the biggest in the league by a significant margin.

Most Big Ten schools rely on some form of subsidy, NJ.com analysis shows, but none come close to Rutgers. In the past four years, the New Jersey school took in the most combined state support, direct-university support and student-fee revenue ($109.6M) by a wide margin.

Some American universities are, because of economic/demographic changes, in a state of near-existential crisis. It’s adorably retro to watch Rutgers kill itself for the oldest reason – football/spectacular greed.

A massive seven-year project exploring 3,900 social-science papers has ended with a disturbing finding: researchers could replicate the results of only half of the studies that they tested.

**********

And I mean… 50%! That’s a lot more than I thought it’d be.

It’s a lesson maybe too late for the learnin’, but the extended Bible Belt — here, South Dakota — is just as bizarre as the rest of us.

Suppress that truth long enough and it explodes, like something out of Philip Roth’s The Breast.

******************

Odd that this columnist touches on all possible motivations but the most plausible one: A vengeful desire to destroy his wife. Worked beautifully.

From a white Republican official/yachtsman/Trump worshipper, to a black San Francisco champion of the poor, to a Chinese-American school official in Los Angeles and her Indian—origin partner in crime — and all the way up to her Hispanic Superintendent boss — the ethnic richness of our thieving class is a wonder to behold. In no other nation will you find people from such different backgrounds working – singly or in conspiracy – to remove all the public money meant to help struggling people and give it to themselves.

Antonio Brown thinks of something funny to say.

*************

Brown isn’t only witty; he’s a pioneer:

Brown applied to Florida State University. His admission was denied over academic concerns.

Gotta be the first time that happened.

News from Texas.

A report claiming the number of young people attending church in England and Wales had skyrocketed has been retracted, after the underlying data was found to be flawed...

The original report claimed to show that 4% of 18-24 year olds surveyed in 2018 told YouGov they were Christian and went to church at least once a month, rising to 16% by 2024…

… [A]cademics [had] questioned the findings, pointing out that the results seemed out of step with other data. Results from the long-running British Social Attitudes Survey, and even the Church of England’s own figures, show a long term decline in church attendance.

In 2012 and 2014, [HOA president Tara] Howie took plea deals in New Jersey for stealing $800,000 from wards in her care while working for a guardianship attorney. She was sentenced to a total of 9 years in prison.

Right now, she’s facing criminal charges in Orlando for stealing over $500 worth of merchandise from Target.

Plus she just stole all their homeowner fees! Shocker.

Dumb parents help the head of their charter school reportedly steal all of its tuition money. Even Madoff only promised 10 to – TOPS – 20%, but the good people of Croft School just kept forking it over to the head guy until the school went bankrupt.

Just as my sympathy for Madoff’s idjits was limited, so my sympathy for these people is … not so much.

Lawyer Marc-André Fabien on behalf of the [Hasidic Jewish] Hamshuchas Hadoirois International Association, which is active in Canada and the U.S., said there can be no secular state in Canada because Canada is a constitutional monarchy that is a parliamentary democracy which derives its authorities from a British sovereign — the King — who gets his power from “divine authority.”

So, he said, “it is unconstitutional for the Canadian parliament and all of its legislatures in the provinces to declare that the state is secular, or lay, without a constitutional amendment.”

*********************

Curious to see Monsieur Fabien defend a regime in which no Catholic, let alone a Jew or a Muslim, can get anywhere near the throne. All praise divine Anglican authority!

Like oy my aching MS, gotta visit my mom, I’m a mental wreck, it’s an Islamophobic conspiracy…

And of course he can still appeal blah blah.

But as a career rapist who enjoyed practically killing his numerous prey, the eminent Oxford don Tariq Ramadan – for years one of the highest-profile, most respected, representatives of Islam to the West – was eventually going to be found guilty.

You recall – if you read this blog – that Oxford took forever to dump him… Kind of an Epstein thing. Boys will be boys.

He got 18 years. We’ll see whether he serves any of them.