Friday, July 30, 2010

Essay: "The Ring of Time." EB White.


Review: The essay begins in Florida at a practice ring for the circus. A woman is walking with a horse as it paces its way in a circle around the ring. The mood is like ".. .one of those desultory treadmills of afternoon from which there is no apparent escape.... The repetitious exercise, the heat of the afternoon, all exerted a hypnotic charm that invited boredom; we spectators were experience a languor..." The never-ending ring of time.
But then the scene changes to recall that this is a time of change in Florida—a time when white people ride in the front of the bus and black people ride in the rear. A time when black people are subservient to white people. A time when the Supreme Court has declared segregation must end. The narrator recognizes that change will happen. It is inevitable. The ring of time will be broken.
The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Essay: "The Crack-up." F. Scott Fitzgerald.


Review: Analyzes the stages in his crack-up and partial recovery in which he learns not to care about personal crises of others so long as it does not occur to him. "I felt like the beady-eyed men I used to see on the commuting train from Great Neck fifteen years back—men who did not care whether the world tumbled into chaos tomorrow if it spared their houses. I was one with them now, one with the smooth articles who said:
'I'm sorry but business is business.' Or:
'You ought to have thought of that before you got into trouble.' Or:
'I'm not the person to see about that.' "'
Quote: "Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effects all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick. The second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed."
Quote: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
Quote: "Life, ten years ago, was largely a personal matter. I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to 'succeed.' '':
Quote: "And then, ten years this side of forty-nine, I suddenly realized that I had prematurely cracked."
Quote: "But I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn't want to see any people at all."
Quote: ".. .that every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at dinner had become an effort." 
 Quote: "...occurred to me simultaneously that of all natural forces, vitality is the incommunicable one."
 Quote: "This is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness."
Quote: ".. .that end that comes to our youth and hope."
Quote: "...and my recent experience parallels the wave of despair that swept the nation when the [financial] boom was over."
The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Essay: "The Secret Life of James Thurber." James Thurber.


Review: As a child, Thurber used to visualize figures of speech as literal. A man who left town "under a cloud" literally went from town to town under a cloud. Can you imagine his visualization of the woman who was "all ears"? And his essay concludes with the visitor who was "crying her heart out" as young Thurber searched her room for her heart for fifteen minutes.
The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Essay: "My Face." Robert Benchley.


Review: Someone once said that the only thing you can never describe is your face in the mirror. Benchley goes further than that: He notes that his face in the mirror is always changing. "One day I look like Wimpy, the hamburger fancier in the Popeye the Sailor saga. Another day it may be Wallace Beery."
"Some mornings, it I look in the mirror soon enough after getting out of bed,, there is no resemblance to any character at all, either in or out of fiction, and I turn quickly to look behind me, convinced that a stranger has spent the night with me and is peering over my shoulders in a sinister fashion, merely to frighten me."
His fascination with seeing his face can also be found when photographs are passed around. He pretends to be interested when he is not in the picture, but he studies with fascination his appearance when he is included.
Benchley concludes this study of his own face by noting his "...impersonal fascination not unmixed with awe at Mother Nature's gift for caricature."
The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.

Monday, July 26, 2010

Essay: "On Being an American." HL Mencken


Review: "Where, indeed, is there a better show in the world?"
Whether it's politics and elections or America during Prohibition, Americans are full of joy. In Germany, elections stir you up and worry you. In England elections put you to sleep. "In the United States, the thing is better done. Here it is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance—and stuffed with such gorgeous humor, such extravagant imbecilities, such uproarious farce that one comes to the end of it with one's midriff in tatters. But feeling better for the laugh."
Mencken sums up his view of America: "Let the 100% viewer-with-alarm stay his tears. If this is not joy, then what is?"
Mencken gives issues perspective and you almost always laugh at his point of view, even when you disagree with him.
The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Essay: "Walking." Henry David Thoreau (3)



Review: Thoreau’s essay is like his walking—meandering. He wanders from topic to topic offering tidbits on everything. He provides the origin of the word “saunter”—probably apocryphal—but interesting anyhow. His man message is that existence of the wilderness is essential to the survival of civilized man. The wild needs to be a part of nature and of man. “I would not have every man nor every part of man cultivated any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated….”

Ideas:
Quote: “The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing; the poet today, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.”

Quote: “I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the wild.”

Quote: “In short, all good things are wild and free.”

Quote: “I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society.”

Quote: “A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful—while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.”

Quote: “Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the ;present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the ;passing life….”

Quote: “…but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy?”
The end.

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Essay: "Walking." Henry David Thoreau (2)



Review: Thoreau’s essay is like his walking—meandering. He wanders from topic to topic offering tidbits on everything. He provides the origin of the word “saunter”—probably apocryphal—but interesting anyhow. His man message is that existence of the wilderness is essential to the survival of civilized man. The wild needs to be a part of nature and of man. “I would not have every man nor every part of man cultivated any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated….”

Ideas:
Quote: “…sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all wordly engagements….”

Quote: “…the moral insensibility of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, ay, and years almost together.”

Quote: “Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking.”

Quote: “What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.”

Quote: “As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in Paradise was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this country.”

Quote: “…in wildness is the preservation of the world.”

Quote: “I believe in the forest and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.”

Quote: “Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.”

Quote: “Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but inn the impervious and quaking swamps.”

Quote: “Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to  dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp.”

To be concluded.

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Essay: "Walking." Henry David Thoreau (1)



Review: Thoreau’s essay is like his walking—meandering. He wanders from topic to topic offering tidbits on everything. He provides the origin of the word “saunter”—probably apocryphal—but interesting anyhow. His main message is that existence of the wilderness is essential to the survival of civilized man. The wild needs to be a part of nature and of man. “I would not have every man nor every part of man cultivated any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated….”

Ideas:
Quote: “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.”

Quote: “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of walking, that is,  of taking walks.”

Quote: Evolution of the word “saunter”…. “…from idle people who roved about the country in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going `a la Sainte Terra,’ to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, ‘There goes a Sainte-Terrer,’ ‘A saunterer—a Holy-Lander.’ ”

Quote: “…no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.”

Quote: “…most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom and independence, which are the capital in this profession [of walking].”

To be continued.

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.

Monday, July 19, 2010

Essay: "Meatless Days." Sara Suleri



Review: The author is the product of two cultures, a Muslim father and a Welsh mother. The essayist teaches English at Yale University. The essay on the surface is about all you didn’t want to know about the contents of the food we eat. It begins with a secret ingredient of sweet meats, one of which is testicles. Actually, the subject of the essay is about reminiscences of her mother and her mother’s influence on her growing up.

Comment: This is not one of my favorite essays. It gave me culture shock. RayS.

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Essay: Why Do I Fast?" Wole Soyinka,



Review: Nigerian playwright is imprisoned and fasts during the Nigerian Civil War (1967 -1969). In this essay he describes the experience and the various psychological impressions he undergoes. His jailers want him to stop fasting but he will not. At one point the “Grand Seer’s” concern “…adds to the growing sense of superhumanithy. I need neither drink nor food. Soon I shall need no air.”

Quote: “What do I do all day? I watch light motes in the air. When eyes are shut a whole universe of colors fills the dome of darkness behind the eyeballs. In extreme fasts the open eye is treated to the same display on a lighter, vaster scale. The air is broken up in swirls of colored dots. Each speck of dust in a sunbeam is a fiery planet in the galaxy, its motion sedately plotted, imbued with immense significance.”

Comment: Reminds of the experience of being on drugs as described by other essayists. RayS.

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Essay: "How I Started to Write." Carlos Fuentes (3)



Review: “But no matter where I went, Spanish would be the language of my writing and Latin America the culture of my language.” The essence of this essay is in the quotes.

Quote: “Could I a Mexican who had not yet written his first book, sitting on a bench on an early spring day…have the courage to explore for myself, with my language, with my tradition, with my friends and influences, the region where the literary figure bids us consider it in the uncertainty of its gestation?”
Quote: “The novel is forever traveling Don Quixote’s road….”

Quote: “You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not do die.”

Quote: “This was, finally, a way of ceasing to tell what I understood and trying to tell, behind all the things I knew, the really important things: what I did not know.”

Quote: “I always tried to tell my critics: don’t classify me, read me. I’m a writer, not a genre.”

Quote: “Language is a shared and sharing part of culture that cares little about formal classifications and much about vitality and connection….”

Quote: “There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.”

Quote: “But no matter where I went, Spanish would be the language of my writing and Latin America the culture of my language.”

The end.

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Essay: "How I Started to Write." Carlos Fuentes (2)



Review: “But no matter where I went, Spanish would be the language of my writing and Latin America the culture of my language.” The essence of this essay is in the quotes.

Quote: “I learned in Chile that Spanish could be the language of free men.”

Quote: “An anonymous language, a language that belongs to us all, as Neruda’s poem belonged to those miners on the beach, yet a language that can be kidnapped, impoverished, sometimes jailed, sometimes murdered.”

Quote: “Rhetoric, said William Butler Yeats, is the language of our fight with others; poetry is the name of our fight with ourselves.”

Quote: “The English language, after all, did not need another writer.”

Quote: “The history of Latin America was a history waiting to be lived.”

Quote: “There is no creation without tradition; the ‘new’ is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.”

Quote: “I would agree with Luis Bunel that sex without sin is like an egg without salt.”

Quote: “So I entered the School of Law at the National University, where, as I feared, learning tended to be by rote.”

Quote: “But there were great exceptions of true teachers who understood that the law is inseparable from culture, from morality, and from justice.”

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.

To be concluded.

Monday, July 12, 2010

Essay: "How I Started to Write." Carlos Fuentes (1)



Review: “But no matter where I went, Spanish would be the language of my writing and Latin America the culture of my language.” The essence of this essay is in the quotes.

Quote: “When I arrived here [the U.S.], Dick Tracy had just met Tess Truehart. As I left, Clark Kent was meeting Lois Lane. You are what you eat. You are also the comics you peruse as a child.”

Quote: “…the history of Mexico was a history of crushing defeats, whereas I lived in a world, that of my D.C. public school, which celebrated victories, one victory after another, from Yorktown to New Orleans to Chapultepec to Appomattox to San Juan Hill to Belleau Wood: had this nation never known defeat?”

Quote: “To the south, sad songs, sweet nostalgia, impossible desires. To the north, self-confidence, faith in progress, boundless optimism.”

Quote: “The French equate intelligence with rational discourse, the Russians with intense soul-searching. For a Mexican, intelligence is inseparable form a malicious—in this, as in many other things we are quite Italian.”

Quote: “For me, as a child, the United States seemed a world where intelligence was equated with energy, zest, enthusiasm.”

Quote: “As a young Mexican growing up in the U.S., I had a primary impression of a nation of boundless energy, imagination and the will to confront and solve the great social issues of the times without blinking or looking for scapegoats.”

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.

To be continued.

Friday, July 9, 2010

Essay: "He and I." Natalia Ginzburg.

Essay: “He and I.” Natalia Ginzburg.

Review: Portrait of a marriage. Two people with different tastes and interests who yet prosper together while complaining about the other’s habits. The essayist, however, remembers when, twenty years before, she and he walked along the Via Nazionale, carefree, conversing about everything and nothing, unattached to each other, who could and almost did, never see each other again.

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995. 

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Essay: "Leaving the Movie Theater." Roland Barthes.


Review: Analyzes the experience of seeing a movie in a movie theater. We have all experienced that feeling of coming back to reality when leaving the theater. Watching a movie is hypnotic, but the essayist is aware the he is two people—one who is absorbed like peering through a keyhole concentrating on the movie and a second person who observes everything around him in the theater.

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995. 

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Essay: "Some Blind Alleys: A Letter." EM Cioran.



Review: Letter from a misanthrope. The essayist is the very epitome of a misanthrope.

Quote: “…you were resolved upon the practice, there, of detachment, scorn, silence. Imagine, then, my surprise on hearing you say you were preparing a book about it!”

Quote: “To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall?”

Quote: “Voltaire was the first literary man to erect his incompetence into a procedure, a method.”

Quote: “Examine the minds which manage to intrigue us: far from taking the way of the world into consideration, they defend indefensible positions.”

Quote: “One does not destroy, save as one destroys oneself. I have hated myself in all the objects of my hatreds….”

Quote: “I am far from trying to pervert your hopes: life will take care of that.”

Quote: “Hence it is in good faith and regretfully, that I have inflicted upon you this lesson in perplexity.”

The art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Essay: "Aunt Harriet." Hubert Butler.



Review: Aunt Harriet was a Christian Scientist true believer. The narrator’s reminiscences are about the Irish neighborhood on the Nore River where he grew up. The reminiscences are almost stream of consciousness, flitting from one to another with no real cause and effect. None is at all interesting except to the narrator’s family. The references are local, Irish and personal, of little interest to the reader.

Quote: “Aunt Harriet was the strictest sort of Christian scientist. She never admitted to any illness. She never went to a dentist but let her teeth fall out so that her cheeks contracted round three or four solitary tusks. This did nothing for her appearance.

Quote: Of the Nor Valley: “It is still a place where it is easier to believe in happiness than in pain.”

Rating of the essay: * out of *****.

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Essay: "Blindness." Jorge Luis Borges (2).



Review: Blind in one eye, mostly blind in the other, Gorges believes that his blindness is a gift—something to be used. He learns the Anglo-Saxon language, for example, as others read it to him. Being blind, as with so many other talented people, is a blessing. Homer. James Joyce. “It is one more instrument among so many—all of them so strange—that fate or chance provide.”

Quote: “A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art. One must accept it. For this reason I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. These things are given us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.”

Quote: Goethe: “…everything near becomes distant.”

Quote: “Old age is probably the supreme solitude—except that the supreme solitude is death.”

Quote: “…blindness, of which I hoped to show…that it is not a complete misfortune.”

Rating the essay: ***** out of *****.

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.