Essays

Voltaire coined the term "essay", it comes from the latin word "essai" meaning "a path". That's how I imagine essays being, a sort of winding path that takes you from point A to point B and all along the while you're allowed to admire the scenery. The poorer examples have a very vapid surrounding, but essays I like are the ones that manage to spruce up what you see about you. Personally, I'm not a fan of pretension or Pedants so I really didn't like a lot of these essays, they seemed like they were an attempt to write an essay rather than to tell a story, to take the reader along on a trip. My favorite essay essay was "Sunday" by Henry Louis Gates, jr. I liked it because it seemed conversational and genuine. It wasn't caught up in form or anything, it could have easily been a story one hears when they are getting their haircut or waiting at a bus stop.
It read like it was being read, which is affective I think. What made it tangible was the attention to sensory details, specifically the ones about smell and taste. It might just be because I'm hungry, but when read about "fried chicken, mashed potatoes, baked corn (corn pudding)..." I was really hungry and I could imagine a quaint family dinner with a talkative family sitting down for the ritualistic Sunday Dinner. The use of vernacular speech made the already relate-able topic even more so and I'd rather read about this than hummingbirds or foxes or Cicero or whatever.

I read Sprung Up In the Years Since

By Di Blasi. It's pretty graphic. There were certain times that I had to put to the book down and think about something else because I had really nasty thought- especially about maggots and dead bodies and stuff. I get what it's doing- its trying to compare American pop culture to the reality of war torn countries and how sad is it that people who able to preoccupy themselves with minutia inevitably do. She writes things like "Gnawing/Sheryl Crow is dating a new man" or writes a story about a child soldier who rapes and kills while lining the sidebars with tabloidesque blurbs about Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.

She writes about how people are starving how children are dying from malnourishment, and to villify the celebrity class (whom I assume she expects to be helping) she creates a juvenille "connect the pictures" with multi-thousand dollar bags and the lap dogs that match them.


This is really experimental writing and I kind of like it, I understand why it is how it is, I mean no one wants to read UN reports about all this bad stuff that is happening, but by making it in a form that is fastly digestible I think it diminished her claims. She takes the absolute worst examples from both cultures and I think that, when you ignore the reality, you lose credulity. I understand that there are horrible things happening in the world, but her portrayal of celebrities and the attitude of Americans is exactly true. It is satirical, and whenever you attempt to compare satire to fact the juxtaposition is weakened.


I didn't really understand the drawing in the book, I feel like they were just doodles from the author and she wanted to add them in. I figure it might have to do with the corpearalness of humanity of something, but they aren't really good drawings so I didn't pay much attention to them. I thought her perspectives where off, which is kinda how I felt about the entire story. I really like the concrete imagery (even though it was a bit nauseating) but I wasn't all over the message. I know bad stuff is happening, but social commentary like this only effective when it legitamately understands the entire socio-culture spectrum, not just the extremes.  

“New York/ LA whirlwind Romance”

I’d like ot talk about the Short Story “New York/ LA whirlwind Romance”. I liked it because it seemed real- for anyone who has been in a long distance relationship, or more easily admitted, had “friends” in a long distance relationship these things that have been written are relatable. I saw that this piece started off as an excerise where the heard lines from passing conversations and wrote them down and I like that- it speaks to how similar everyone really is. It was almost written as if to show the stereotypical relationship. While I read it it seemed genuine to me, but looking back and taking the sentences a part one by one it seems almost comical. While the lines could be taken seriously, I could also see this as a humorous parody of what a the author deems to be the “average” long distance relationship. The line “Look, I’ll say it, I love you” really exemplified that- in the context of the character I believed that he would say it, but outside the story it seems kind of funny to me- like the kind of thing that is so cliché no one would actually say it. Overall, I liked this story, I was surprised, but I liked it. I was going into this reading under the assumption that it would be preachy and polemic but it seemed like an entertaining short story to me.