Monday, August 31, 2009

Essay: "What Are Masterpieces.... Gertrude Stein.

"What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of them." Gertrude Stein. 1935.


One-minute review: Convoluted sentences. Erratic punctuation. Miss Stein’s idea about masterpieces is almost like TS Eliot's effacement of the author's personality in creating a work of poetry. Stein says if you remember you are you, you cannot create a masterpiece. You are limited by your personality and identity. If you efface your identity, you can create a masterpiece. Automatic writing? Sensible ideas are occasionally thrown into what appears to be a random collection of thoughts in stream of consciousness. But the piece is well organized. She moves from defining a masterpiece to explaining why there are so few masterpieces--most writers remember themselves and their identities and therefore cannot produce anything truly original. I guess.


Quote: “And that is what a masterpiece is not—it may be unwelcome but it is never dull.”


Comment: Now I understand "A rose is a rose is a rose" or I think I do. RayS.


Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2000.

Friday, August 28, 2009

Essay: "How It Feels To Be Colored Me." 1928.

Zora Neale Hurston.


10-second review: The title is the best summary.


Quotes: “I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl…the granddaughter of slaves.” p. 115.


Quote: “At certain times I have no race, I am me.” p. 117.


Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2000.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Essay: "The Hills of Zion." HL Mencken. 1925.

10-second review: Mencken went to Dayton, Tennessee, to cover the Scopes monkey trial. While there, he observed a religious ritual of fundamentalist Christians who went into convulsions while howling hosannas.


Quote: “One of the men, in the intervals between fits, put on his spectacles and read his Bible.” p. 111.


Comment: Much of Mencken’s criticism was directed at irrationality in American life. Here is an example. RayS.


Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2000.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Essay: "Pamplona in July." Ernest Hemingway. 1923.

10-second review: Hemingway reports on the bullfights at Pamplona in Spain.

Quote: “The bull turned like a cat and charged Algabeno and Algabeno met him with the cape. Once, twice, three times he made the perfect, floating, slow swing with the cape. Perfectly, graceful, debonair, back on his heels, baffling the bull. And he had command of the situation. There never was such a scene at any World’s Series game.” p. 105.


Comment: The Hemingway style in full view. You are there. RayS.


Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2000.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Essay: "Tradition and the Individual Talent." T.S. Eliot. 1919.

One-minute review: Several ideas merge in this essay. Although the poets of the past are dead, the poetry of the past lives. The poet's craftsmanship puts emotion in the poem; it is not the emotion of the poet himself. The individual poet in the present must be aware of what lives in past work so that he can produce poetry that lives now and in the future as part of that past. Eliot is laying the groundwork for the "New Critics," who emphasized studying the work of art, not the poet, and certainly not, as Rosenblatt contends, to encourage readers to interpret the work of art with their personal experience.


Quote: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” p. 96.


Comment: Spoken like a poet. Cryptic. RayS.


Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2000.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Essay: "The Devil Baby at Hull House." Jane Addams. 1916.


10-second review: A rumor that a devil baby is at Hull House brings many women to see what they believe to be retribution for some domestic sin committed by a man against a woman or child. The stories of most of these women are of unrelieved tragedy at the hands of their husbands.


Quote: “…the eternal patience of those humble toiling women who through the generations have been held of little value, save as their drudgery ministered to their men.” p. 79.


Comment: The problem of the rights of women in a man's world. The women interviewed in this essay are bitter, and even wish for death. RayS.

Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2000.

Friday, August 21, 2009

"Coatesville." John Jay Chapman. 1912.

10-second review: Expresses his horror and rage at the burning of a black man in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, while hundreds of white onlookers did nothing.


Quote: “The only reason that slavery is wrong is that it is cruel and makes men cruel and leaves them cruel.” p. 73.


Comment: I live less than five miles from Coatesville. I had never heard of this monstrous behavior. Ninety-seven years later, I'm shocked. RayS.


Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2000.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Essay: "The Handicapped." Randolph Bourne. 1911.

10-second review: The inner thoughts of a disabled person. He analyzes his condition, the responses of others to him, and understands that his disability has advantages as well as disadvantages. He insists especially on developing and recognizing his individuality as opposed to the belief of those whom he encounters that disabled people do not have the potential for success as do the healthy.


Quote: “When he has been through the neglect and struggles of a handicapped and ill-favored man himself, he will begin to understand the feelings of all the horde of the unpresentable and the unemployable, the incompetent and the ugly, the queer and crotchety people who make up so large a portion of human folk.” p. 63.


Comment: A remarkably contemporary essay. RayS.


Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2000.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Essay: William James. "The Moral Equivalent of War." 1910.

10-second review: William James suggests that the "moral equivalent of war" would be universal service for young people in the country's behalf. Young people would be "drafted" to be trained to work in mines, on highways, etc. Thus the military virtues--the conceptions of order and discipline, the tradition of service and devotion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion, and universal responsibility, which universal military duty is now teaching--would be preserved without war.


Quote: “To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing, clothes washing, and window washing, to road building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stake-holders, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.” p. 54.


Comment: I wonder if the ideas in this essay influenced John F. Kennedy when he suggested the Peace Corps. Harry S. Truman suggested universal service after WWII. Couldn't get it through Congress. RayS.


Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2000.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

"A Law of Accelration." Henry Adams. 1906.


10-second review: The complexity of the modern world as bombs and knowledge double in power and ideas every ten years, leading to unresolvable contradictions.


Quote: “The movement from unity into multiplicity between 1200 and 1900, was unbroken in sequence, and rapid in acceleration.” p. 27.


Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2000.



Note: The summaries do not do the essays justice. If you are interested in an essay, read it. You can find the essay or where to purchase it on the Internet. RayS.

Monday, August 17, 2009

"Of the Coming of John." W.E.B. DuBois. 1903.

10-second review: John, a young black man, has been educated at a black college to think and to question. When he returns home to the South from college, he is met by the stone wall of racial prejudice—and cruelty.


Quote. The Judge: “Now, John, the question is, are you, with your education and Northern notions, going to accept the situation and teach the darkies to be faithful servants and laborers as you fathers were…?” p. 15.


Comment: A drama of the black experience in America. RayS.]


Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2000.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Essay: "Corn Pone Opinions." Mark Twain.

Introduction to This Blog


Over the years I have read many essays from throughout the centuries. I have learned that there are two basic formats for essays. One is from the inventor of the form, Montaigne, in which he seems to move from thought to thought. The other format is that of Francis Bacon and Addison and Steele’s Spectator Papers, in which the essay is organized with a beginning, middle and end. I don’t know what to call the essays we write in school. I suppose, because they are based on the format of the five-paragraph essay, they resemble more the Bacon, Addison and Steele approach.


I am going to begin my collection of essays with those that mark the decades in the twentieth century in America. They were collected by Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan and published as Best American Essays of the [Twentieth] Century. Some are funny. Most are not. Some are eloquent. Their formats are not easy to categorize. Some seem to be pure narrative. Some seem even to be short stories rather than the essay format we are used to. All of these essays, however, provoke thought.


Why read the Best American Essays of the Century? The essays are in chronological order, from Mark Twain's "Corn-Pone Opinions," 1901, to Saul Bellow's "Graven Images" in 1997. If you expect these essays to be pleasant, comforting and fun to read, you are mistaken. Joyce Carol Oates, one of the editors of the book, says, "My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment, and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish." Most of these essays provoke. Many of them I had never read, but they paint a vivid portrait of the twentieth century.


Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2000.


Essay: Mark Twain. "Corn-Pone Opinions." 1901.


10-second review: The source of most men's ideas is imitation of others' ideas.


Quote: “We are creatures of outside influences; as a rule we do not think, we only imitate.” p. 3.


Best American Essays of the Century. Editors: Oates and Atwan. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2000.