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Ebenezer
Aug. 22, 2008
In which I profess my career aspirations
In her book At Large and At Small, Anne Fadiman writes in praise of the familiar essay, the literary form I would most love to spend my time researching and writing. Such essays are simultaneously jocular and erudite, winsome yet full of the highest, best and most precise vocabulary-stretching language. Their authors examine everyday subjects, topics we think we may already know all about, yet, through slightly self-deprecating personal anecdotes and research of trivia, make them seem entirely new.
Really what Fadiman describes are the best blog entries you've ever read. They can be about life's minutiae, but they are not dull laundry lists. Rather, they straddle the line between the academic paper and the diary entry, putting the personal in the context of the universal.
Though she doesn't reference blogs, she does contrast the familiar essay with other types of "essays, " including the type of writing that appears on too many blogs:
If I were to turn [essayist Charles] Lamb's 1821 "Chapter on Ears" into a twenty-first century critical essay, I might write about postmodern audiological imagery in the early works of Barbara Cartland. If I were to write a twenty-first-century personal essay, I might tell you about the pimple on my left earlobe that I failed to cover with makeup at my senior prom....(snip) ... But I don't want to write -- or read -- either one of those essays. I prefer Lamb's original, which is mostly about his musical ineptitude but also about the sounds of harpsichords, pianos, operatic voices, crowded streets, and carpenter's hammer: in other words, about the author but also about the world. (p. xi)
As such a woman of letters, then, Fadiman presents a dozen of her own familiar essays, a genre she previously featured in her collection Ex Libris (a book I own perhaps only for the piece on what happens when you marry and must merge your personal libraries). Her topics include coffee, ice cream, American flags, lepidoptery and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Imagine the best dinner conversation you've ever had: that's what it's like to read these essays.
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Aug. 24, 2008 - essays