Word Pirates

One of the core beliefs of Word Pirates is that writing should be entertaining. It should have a pace, avoid being self-indulgent, and keep the reader’s attention span in mind. I think the reason so few people read lit journals and anthologies these days is because so much of them are frankly boring. I mean, yes, people are reading less and there’s more competition for their time and blah, blah, blah, but also, for reals, much of modern literature is boring, stodgy and pretentious. (And much of it is over-commercialized and gimmicky, which is the other side of the same ugly coin, I guess.)

Anyway, all that to say, someone agrees with me–about essay anthologies, at least. I have had the 2007 Best American Essays sitting on my shelf for five months now, and I have yet to open it. Why? Well, David Foster Wallace edited it, and he is known for a brand of essay that I have low tolerance for: long ones about tiny things that don’t really interest me; essays that try my patience as the writer examines every side of the tiny thing or strings tiny things together with admittedly excellent language but just a hint of self-indulgence as well.

Is it just me who finds it hard to finish these kinds of essays? It’s such a chore. Your mind wanders. You count the number of pages to the end. You worry you’re not getting the point, assuming there is one. Well, I hope it’s just me, because apparently it’s the preferred tone for essays nowadays:

The essay that is considered “literature” in our day is not an ambitious or impassioned (if sometimes foolhardy) analysis of human nature. It is not an argument, or a polemic. It is not a gun-blazing attack on a social trend, a film, a book, or a library of books. Those sorts of pieces, sniff the anthologists, are mere journalism.

The essay they prefer has a distinctive tone, which Epstein has called “middle-aged.” I’m not an age-essentialist, but Epstein is, and what he means by “middle-aged” is clearly quiet. Slow-moving. Soft-hitting. Nostalgic. Self-satisfied. It’s the tone he perfects in his signature essay, “The Art of the Nap.”

I also liked this bit:

It’s tempting to create a composite portrait of the Preferred American Essayist: Educated at Harvard, he or she has spent significant time at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, written proposals for New York Public Library Fellowships (often lovingly paraphrased in the essays) and received medical attention at Sloan Kettering Hospital. Chances are good she’s a doting dog owner who has done such things as lace her pet’s dinner with “Prozac, Buspar, Elavil, Effexor, Xanax, and Clomicalm” (Cathleen Shine, 2005) or write gourmet cookbooks for his discerning palate (Susan Orlean, 2005 and 2006). More likely than not, he (if it is a he) has had a lifelong love affair with fishing or baseball, preferably both. An added bonus is to discover—or at least reassess—a Jewish ancestor in one’s family tree.

This article gets at another of my pet peeves: It seems like no one tries to address big ideas anymore in essays–friendship and wisdom and what is man and who is God and all that. Truth, after all, is big, scary, and seemingly subjective. We’re told that we can’t know truth, but really, I think it’s just easier not to try. (God? Who knows. But this paper clip on my desk, that is definitely there.) Could this be why our intellectual culture seems so stagnant? Why there’s so few new philosophies or political thoughts these days?

I understand the hesitation to take on a big truth. To write about a large issue is to take on all of its history, all that has been written on the subject, and to state that you have something interesting to add to this long, intimidating conversation. That is hard. But Cristina Nehring, who wrote this fine article, thinks it’s time for a change.

Today’s essayists need to be emboldened, and to embolden one another, to move away from timid autobiographical anecdote and to embrace—as their predecessors did—big theories, useful verities, daring pronouncements. We need to destigmatize generalization, aphorism and what used to be called wisdom. We must rehabilitate the notion of truth—however provisional it might be. As long as persons with intellectual aspirations are counted idiots for attempting to formulate a wider point, they will not do so, and even if they dared, most editors would not publish them and most critics would not praise them.

I agree.

Apparently, though, these thoughts are not new.

And Seneca, like Montaigne, like Francis Bacon, like Samuel Johnson, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, like Henry David Thoreau, was in the business of learning—and in the process of showing others—how to live and die. “Philosophy is good advice,” writes Seneca, before proceeding to mock the scholars of his own age who (precisely like those of ours) spend their time playing word games and toying with their navels. “I should like those subtle thinkers … to teach me this, what my duties are to a friend and to a man, rather than the number of senses in which the expression ‘friend’ is used. It makes one ashamed,” he declares, “that men of our advanced years should turn a thing as serious as this into a game.”

Exactly, Seneca. Exactly.

Read the article here. (Via)

~ Joy