BAE

Christopher Hitchens is going to edit Best American Essays next year.

Wait, what? Doesn't that seem odd?

Related, here are some people who have won awards for their essays, found on Google Image Search:

The Book-Length Essay

Ever since I finished D'Agata's About a Mountain, and I've been thinking about the book-length essay. Mainly, I've been wondering if such a thing exists.

About a Mountain reads like a series of well-linked essays (keeping the momentum of shorter work while tackling multiple, broad themes that seem wider in scope than what can be done in 20 pages), but I don't know if I can consider it an essay in and of itself. Another example of this is found in Eula Biss's The Balloonists, which reads like a 120 page braided, personal essay. With that said, there are bigger organization principles that amount to chapters, so would we call this a memoir, rather than personal essay? Is there a difference? Does it even matter?

I'm not making any real conclusions here, but I would like to try and generate some discussion here: How do we (or don't we) define the book-length essay? Other good examples out there?

Sonora Review Double Issue: 55, 56, and DFW Tribute

Issue 55
Sean Lovelace- Nachos
Henry Ronan-Daniell- Regicide
Jennifer Schaller- My Father Was A Traveling Salesman

David Foster Wallace Tribute
Sven Birkerts- The Sentence
Marshall Boswell- Heading Westward
Greg Carlisle- Wallace's Infinite Fiction
Glenn Kenny- I Remember David Foster Wallace
Michael Martone- Footnotes & Endnotes

Issue 56
Riley Hannick- Microphonics
Riley Hannick- The Pradelles
Louis Alberto Urrea- Sonoran Desert Sutras

Just got my hands on The Sonora Review double issue. I should start by noting the quantity/variety of nonfiction in the issue—we get the lyric, the memoiristic; we find explorations of form and ruminations on environment. The double issue has enough content that there's bound to be something that fits your aesthetic preferences (and the DFW Tribute section alone makes the issue worth a read).

However, the range also allows for a fair amount of hit and miss, highlighting the good and the bad of the contemporary essay. I'm going to hone in on two particular essays, Sean Lovelace's "Nachos" and Henry Ronan-Daniell's "Regicide," as they seem to be the journal's best examples of two different approaches to approaching personal subject matter.

"Nachos," in a way, highlights a lot of what I like in the contemporary essay. I'll start with movement: The terse, one/two sentence sections (paragraphs?) allows the writer to cover a lot of ground. He's able to jump between nachos, nacho lore, loss/grief, and escapism (whether beer or food or physical pain) without transition. These short sections also put a necessary weight on the individual sentence/phrases since they have to be able to stand on their own. Other than the form, Lovelace manages to look at personal anecdotes through the lens of the nacho, and in this way manages to alter our perception of both in a way I found extremely satisfying.

Alternatively, in "Regicide," Ronan-Daniell approaches a high-school memory (our narrator was elected prom king, but faculty called for a second election because they assumed it was a cruel joke) in a straightforward narrative style. I don't have a problem with the form, though I do believe that it can (and does, in this case) lead to some lazy storytelling/shaping. By that, I mean the narrator spends too much time in the present—reflecting on the past and not enough time putting together a story. For example, the essay spends a lot of time building the teenage-self as awkward/ugly/antisocial, and a section in the middle (stating "I'm not as ugly now as I was then," going on to ensure the reader that our narrator is now well-adjusted and normal) nullifies any stake I had in the essay: why should I care when the narrator essentially tells us that this story is inconsequential? The ending is similarly cringe-worthy. It ties the essay up too cleanly, reducing the essay to some two-bit aphorism.

A quick word on humor: both "Nachos" and "Regicide" use humor, but again the approach/frame shapes the overall effect. Lovelace's essay creates humor from surprising juxtaposition (in one early section, we jump from MTV to nacho preparation to whitetail deer hunting). Ronan-Daniell's essay gets humor out of self-deprecation, which feels too easy (who wasn't awkward/embarrassing as a teenager?) and somehow less effective. I'm trying to figure out why it doesn't work as well, and here's my best guess: the self-deprecation doesn't rely of timing, and a lot of the personal descriptions could be moved around within the essay without being more or less effective.

"Nachos" and "Regicide" are on different ends of the narrative spectrum, and the other essays in The Sonora Review have more of a mix of the two formats. Still, the essays that put their focus outside the self manage to be the most interesting and paradoxically personal.

hungry

David Shields is interviewed over at BookSlut. It starts off with the interviewer talking about a box of galley copies being brought to a creative writing course. I saw a couple galley copies of this book while I was in Iowa, read a galley copy when I was on the West Coast, and borrowed another friend's galley copy in Chicago. And I have absolutely no connection to David Shields, which begs the question, how many galley copies were printed? And why? Isn't that kind of weird, that they were being distributed to writing classes and handed off to drunk people at bars and what-have-you? The book isn't even released yet and I feel like everyone's done reading and discussing it.

If I were going to write a manifesto about nonfiction I would say the only people allowed to use numbered sections anymore are zombie Pessoa and Olena Kalytiak Davis is she ever writes a book-length essay.

What the frack, Hayden's Ferry Review?

Zero (0, zilch) essays in your Fall 2009/Winter 2010 issue? I mean, it has some good fiction (or as your submissions guidelines page calls it, "prose" which to this reader encapsulates more than just fiction), and some quality poetry, but you couldn't find nothing nonfictiony? I suppose the Hong Hao images, "My Things No 5, 5000 Things I threw away in 2005" and "My Things Book keeping of 6c" might be considered to be essay, though it's a stretch. (They are pretty cool though: they have that documentary capacity that can fuel essay, but don't otherwise operate like essays). And they make a nice cover.

Feel the weight of this blog's collective displeasure from here. Let our scorn--rising like a spider, or possibly a spire--spur you to opening your doors a little wider next time.

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.