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.”

Let Cecil Beaton’s terse eulogy for Evelyn Waugh be also the eulogy (he hasn’t died yet) for Andrew M-W.

UD loves Beaton’s clever statement, and was sorry to see, years after using variants of it in many contexts, that she’d been misquoting it. He actually wrote So Evelyn Waugh is in his coffin. Died of snobbery.

On the meaning of his late in life song ‘A Thousand Kisses Deep’:

“We don’t write the play, we don’t produce it, we don’t direct it and we’re not even actors in it… Everybody eventually comes to the conclusion that things are not unfolding exactly the way they wanted, and that the whole enterprise has a basis that you can’t penetrate. Nevertheless, you live your life as if it’s real. But with the understanding: It’s only a thousand kisses deep, that is, with that deep intuitive understanding that this is unfolding according to a pattern that you simply cannot discern.”

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From ‘Continuing to Live’:

And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
      To exist.

And what’s the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
      But to confess,

On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
      And that one dying.

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From his memoir, Palimpsest:

I’ve… been reading through this memoir, adding, subtracting, writing over half-erased texts, ‘palimpsesting’ – all the while looking for clues not so much to me, the subject, if indeed I am the subject, as to what [my] first thirty-nine years were all about… [on] the small planet that each of us so briefly visits.

First off, it’s got a good title, one that sardonically covers the theme of the piece: THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF PRINCE ANDREW.

Next, note how the writer’s basic point – that this new book has killed, not merely covered, the prince – establishes itself with morbid, hilarious, language, and sustains the morbidity. Will Lloyd doesn’t jump from death metaphors to other figurative stuff; he keeps it going, avoids having it get boring, and gives the piece depth and shapeliness. First paragraph:

Prince Andrew must be dead already. Biographies about breathing men have an inconclusive, interim quality. There are years to be lived: decisions to be made; books to be written; marriages to end; wars to be fought. The biographer whose subject is still with us apologetically and necessarily punts real judgements about them into the future. But in Andrew Lownie’s Entitled: The Rise and Fall of The House of York, there is none of this sense of suspension, only the sound of the biographer’s axe falling, again and again, on the ragged bodies of Andrew Mountbatten–Windsor and Sarah Ferguson.

You know, not just the point that the book’s not a hit piece but an execution, but vivid and funny over the top (“axe” and “ragged” are very good) death knells. Second paragraph:

The first subheading in the book, clinically regarding Andrew when he is barely out of the crib, is called “Baby Grumpling”; the second, surveying his years at Heatherdown Prep School, is called “A Tiresome Little Shit”. According to Lownie, Andrew was a bad baby, who became a bad boy, who became a very bad man. We knew Andrew, following revelations about his relationship with the late child-trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein and his now imprisoned accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, was disgraced. Lownie shows us that the Duke’s predicament is even more funereal, a living death. 

Laughed out loud on tiresome little shit. Funereal, a living death, keeps us on the not a toff but a stiff track.

The book

reads as a nihilistic satire of Royal biography itself. The typical Windsorist book that parades birth, boarding, marriage, military service, foreign excursions, second marriage and so on, often written in threatless prose amidst an atmosphere of flummery, is not Lownie’s style. Less a biographer than a mortician, he has delivered a 456-page obituary for the Duke and Duchess of York. 

Nihilistic, Windsorist, threatless – these are fun, less familiar words… the phrase amidst an atmosphere of flummery has a pseudo fancy schmancy something to it which in itself reads as a nihilistic satire of royal pretensions. And then again the death thing. Look at that last sentence. It’s beautiful.

And then: The biographer’s three works on three royals represent a clutch of barrel bombs dropped on the Crown. “Clutch” is terrific; but notice he’s also produced some nice alliteration: clutch and Crown, barrel and bombs, with dropped and bombs assonantal.

“Fergie” as they call her, was a redtop hounded by the Redtops. Fun. Meghan Markle fled to Montecito. More fun. This is lively, playful, writing. The Ferguson family home, the balefully named “Dummer Down” … Who knew? And more fun alliteration!

There’s sly stuff, such as the tiny killing clause in the middle of this sentence: The Prince was lionised by the press that would later become, besides himself, the major antagonist of his life.  There are wonderful similes: Lownie moves like a basking shark through newspaper archives.

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To be sure, royalty has long been the ultimate satire target — all the more reason why doing it well deserves recognition.

Now that Hulk Hogan has died at 71, the media, top wrestling honchos, and particularly the Trump administration are verbosely mourning this leather-skinned mass of steroids and bile stuffed in spandex. 

LOLOLOL go, Dave Zirin!

The Hulk Hogan of 2025 embodied all that is wrong with this country. He should be remembered as a living expression of our national decay: a hero exposed as a fraud, a fraud exposed as a coward, and a coward who cried with joy upon finding an authoritarian who told him that his sins were, in fact, virtues.

You know. Trump.

Brilliant writers, they brought steely accuracy and lyricism to their writing. Both carried to their prose a broody disposition, capable of being lifted up at times to a kind of gallant stoicism. Like Albert Camus in his Lyrical Essays, they infused their language with an undifferentiated but basically spiritual sadness, drawing the tragic nature of existence along as a drone through everything they wrote.

It didn’t matter whether the manifest subject was split elevators on an EgyptAir flight, or the way silos look against the flat fields of Kansas. They brought to their superb prose an ambient sensibility which I’d characterize as an incessant sensitivity to the enigma of earthly lives.

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Langewische, on the 2001 EgyptAir crash:

A computer captured what [Ann Brennan,the ATC] would have seen—a strangely abstract death no more dramatic than a video game. About two minutes after the final radio call, at 1:49:53 in the morning, the radar swept across EgyptAir’s transponder at 33,000 feet. Afterward, at successive twelve-second intervals, the radar read 31,500, 25,400, and 18,300 feet—a descent rate so great that the air-traffic-control computers interpreted the information as false, and showed “XXXX” for the altitude on Brennan’s display.  With the next sweep the radar lost the transponder entirely, and picked up only an unenhanced “primary” blip, a return from the airplane’s metal mass. The surprise is that the radar continued to receive such returns (which show only location, and not altitude) for nearly another minute and a half, indicating that the dive must have dramatically slowed or stopped, and that the 767 remained airborne, however tenuously, during that interval. A minute and a half is a long time. As the Boeing simulations later showed, it must have been a strange and dreamlike period for the pilots, hurtling through the night with no chance of awakening.

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Strangely abstract, “XXXX,” metal mass, strange and dreamlike period… You can extract, if you want to be analytical about it, moments when the surrealist substructure of this prose pokes out of its essentially technical content, and if you’re UD you’re reminded of Don DeLillo, also on the subject of flight:

At the boarding gate, the last of the static chambers, the stillness is more compact, the waiting narrowed. He will notice hands and eyes, the covers of books, a man with a turban and netted beard. The crew is Japanese, the security Japanese… He hears Tamil, Hindi, and begins curiously to feel a sense of apartness, something in the smell of the place, the amplified voice in the distance. It doesn’t feel like earth. And then aboard, even softer seats. He will feel the systems running power through the aircraft, running light, running air. To the edge of the stratosphere, world hum, the sudden night. Even the night seems engineered, Japanese, his brief sleep calmed by the plane’s massive heartbeat.

In our time, when even the nights are engineered, our best writers will sweep the darkness up, right along with the technology, to which they will give a heartbeat. Langewische could do all of that.

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Just found his piece on the disappearance of Malaysia 370. Interestingly, the best writing in the essay describes the very same moment as the Egyptian Air flight: The pilot is at the controls, experiencing a surreal tranquility before the crash into the ocean.

“It is easy to imagine Zaharie toward the end, strapped into an ultra-comfortable seat in the cockpit, inhabiting his cocoon in the glow of familiar instruments, knowing that there could be no return from what he had done, and feeling no need to hurry. He would long since have repressurized the airplane and warmed it to the right degree. There was the hum of the living machine, the beautiful abstractions on the flatscreen displays, the carefully considered backlighting of all the switches and circuit breakers. There was the gentle whoosh of the air rushing by. The cockpit is the deepest, most protective, most private sort of home. Around 7 a.m., the sun rose over the eastern horizon, to the airplane’s left. A few minutes later it lit the ocean far below. Had Zaharie already died in flight? He could at some point have depressurized the airplane again and brought his life to an end. This is disputed and far from certain. Indeed, there is some suspicion, from fuel-exhaustion simulations that investigators have run, that the airplane, if simply left alone, would not have dived quite as radically as the satellite data suggest that it did—a suspicion, in other words, that someone was at the controls at the end, actively helping to crash the airplane. Either way, somewhere along the seventh arc, after the engines failed from lack of fuel, the airplane entered a vicious spiral dive with descent rates that ultimately may have exceeded 15,000 feet a minute. We know from that descent rate, as well as from [recovered] shattered debris, that the airplane disintegrated into confetti when it hit the water.”

Highly recommend this essay.

Headline, Rolling Stone. Excerpts from the article:

Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, his consulting firm said in a statement. The notorious war criminal was 100.

Measuring purely by confirmed kills, the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white-supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh…

McVeigh, who in his own psychotic way thought he was saving America, never remotely killed on the scale of Kissinger, the most revered American grand strategist of the second half of the 20th century. 

The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes “crimes of commission,” he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds. 

… Not once in the half-century that followed Kissinger’s departure from power did the millions the United States killed matter for his reputation, except to confirm a ruthlessness that pundits occasionally find thrilling. 

… American elites recoiled in disgust when Iranians in great numbers took to the streets to honor one of their monsters, Qassem Soleimani, after a U.S. drone strike executed the Iranian external security chief in January 2020. Soleimani, whom the United States declared to be a terrorist and killed as such, killed far more people than Timothy McVeigh. But even if we attribute to him all the deaths in the Syrian Civil War, never in Soleimani’s wildest dreams could he kill as many people as Henry Kissinger. Nor did Soleimani get to date Jill St. John, who played Bond girl Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever.

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More, from David Klion in the New Republic.

 In his obsessive mastery of his own public image; in his eagerness to share a stage with anyone who seemed to matter; in his zealous personal ambition, his total lack of shame about the human cost of that ambition, and above all how richly his ambition and shamelessness were rewarded, right up to the moment of his death, Kissinger was, as Greg Grandin has argued, the quintessential American…

The point of associating oneself with Kissinger wasn’t to express specific support for, say, wiretapping American journalists or disappearing Argentine dissidents—it was to present oneself as above caring either way about such things. 

INTERVIEWER

But why would a novelist want to deprive himself of the right to express his philosophy overtly and assertively in his novel?

KUNDERA

Because he has none! People often talk about Chekhov’s philosophy, or Kafka’s, or Musil’s. But just try to find a coherent philosophy in their writings! Even when they express their ideas in their notebooks, the ideas amount to intellectual exercises, playing with paradoxes, or improvisations rather than to assertions of a philosophy. And philosophers who write novels are nothing but pseudonovelists who use the form of the novel in order to illustrate their ideas. Neither Voltaire nor Camus ever discovered “that which the novel alone can discover.” …

[M]y intention is to give [philosophical] reflections a playful, ironic, provocative, experimental, or questioning tone. All of part six of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (“The Grand March”) is an essay on kitsch which expounds one main thesis: kitsch is the absolute denial of the existence of shit. This meditation on kitsch is of vital importance to me. It is based on a great deal of thought, experience, study, and even passion. Yet the tone is never serious; it is provocative. This essay is unthinkable outside of the novel, it is a purely novelistic meditation…

My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form. Nor is this purely an artistic ambition. The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas (those that occur in our beds as well as those that we play out on the great stage of History) and their awful insignificance. We experience the unbearable lightness of being.

Like his buddy Hitch he was charismatic, sexy, unruly, hilarious. Also intensely and sensitively literary. Here are all my Martin Amis posts.

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Parul Sehgal on her love of Amis:

Amis’s saw-toothed sentences seized me by the scruff and carried me off for good. The insolence of the novels, the high silliness, the shame, the jokes: “After a while, marriage is a sibling relationship — marked by occasional, and rather regrettable, episodes of incest.”

Scathing Online Schoolmarm doffs her Watkins Glen souvenir sun hat to Halliea Milner, famous author of famous Kenneth Kenne Joseph Pluhar, Jr’s obit.

Most of the many comments on Pluhar’s Legacy page are from people – from around the world! – who never knew him (one of the comments is this post’s headline) but were so stirred by Milner’s obit that they had to say something.

And if you click that link up there you’ll see why. The substance of almost anyone’s life, rendered with lucid accuracy, would occasion some species of laughter (‘Anyone with brains understands that he is destined to lead a stupid life because there is no other kind,’ says a character in Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater. ‘I’m fairly positive that I’ll regret my stupidity the most in my final moment of awareness,’ said Alec Guinness to James Grissom in an interview.), but his daughter’s rendering of redneck Kenne’s sojourn is so piercingly brilliant you’ll be peeing yourself. People adore this obit because there’s something exuberantly liberating about encountering not evasion and platitude and Hello Jesus but head-on honesty about the actual life an actual person lived.

Ol’ Kenne, an irredeemable rascal, finds himself rendered an irredeemable rascal by the truth-teller he raised.

SOS doubts he’s shocked/offended. Wherever his gin-soaked, weed-smoked spirit wafts, it’s laughing too.

… in this Shakespeare and Company Bookshop appearance.

The news.

“[The] world is made to be pounced on and enjoyed, and … there is absolutely no reason at all to hold back.”

Writes Ernaux. And I … naux what she means, and I pounce on what she says, and I agree etc etc. ETC.

Live out loud!

And yet … even as I delight in images of revolutionary Iranian girls and women hurling hijabs heavenward or incinerating them, and demanding freedom in a revolution they lead… I fear for them.

She thought … of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as the monstrous darkness approaches.

A beautiful sentence, by David Frum, about the right-wing attack on America/worship of Putin.

Put her in high heels, so she can’t run
Carve out between her legs so she can’t come
Get her a dress, for easy access
Tell everybody that she’s just like all the rest

How long? How long, how long, how long
How long? How long, how long, how long

Tell me I’m ugly so I’ll buy your crap
Tell me you want me ’cause I don’t talk back
Tell me I carry the original sin
Tell me I’m holy when I cover up my skin

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Pushing all the buttons there, eh? We’ve got FGM; we’ve got burqas. “[S]ome radio stations have told her they won’t play it,” and good for her! Who gets to be seventy and still get banned? “I will not disappear,” she sings.

Her voice is still remarkably strong, and her guitar work has held up well.

For UD, the Ian song that’s held up beautifully over decades and decades is Jesse, which I love to sing and play at the piano.

‘All the blues and the greens

Have been recently cleaned

And are seemingly new

Hey Jess me and you’

The song has a drifty sad pace which really grows in dramatic focus and intensity; more than that, the poetry of the thing is remarkable: All of its details are banal and domestic – the bed, the hearth, the light on the stairs, the floors and the boards, the pictures, the table – but they heighten until we feel the pathos of her material as well as emotional isolation (she still sets the table at noon).

And then we have at the end this amazing image: ‘We’ll swallow the light on the stairs.” Come back, and we’ll become the light. We’ll become all the light we need.