good essay, Virginia Woolf wrote "must have A this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out." Sometimes that curtain is heavy and other times it is simultaneously translucent yet mirrored, so that the reader in seeing the outer world sees themselves with a little less miserliness and a little more clarity.
Such is my hope for Tallying the Hemispheres which puts together my musings on art, letters, culture, technology, pedagogy and how we make and unmake our way in the 21st century. While not a comprehensive collection of my prose-I've eschewed including interviews or overtly commercial pieces such as restaurant and music reviews-what follows nonetheless represents a selection of writing of which I feel proudest, even if I've changed my mind on some of the subjects under discussion (which we should all do, from time to time, particularly in our polarized, rigidified moment; indeed Zadie Smith has an entire collection of essays called Changing My Mind).
The speculative and subjective of course have always been Nirala Series.
modes of the essay, from 10th century Japanese author, poet, and courtesan Sei Shonagon's pastiche of anecdotal musings The Pillow Book to the 1580 publication of Michel de Montaigne's Essais (let's acknowledge the mother of the genre, if we are going to call Seigneur de Montaigne, its father). I also have Randall Jarrell in mind, a poet whose prose I more admire for its potent opinion and acerbic wit: "it is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life."
As example, I point to perhaps the most provocative essay in this collection, "In Praise of Abstraction" written for the Academy of American Poetry. In the piece, I advance an argument counter to everything I teach my Poetry classes whom I cudgel with the concrete image, irritate with the need to seek out specificity and abjure abstractions which can mean many things to many people.
But hey, as the cliché goes, rules are meant to be broken.
Here I wanted to put pressure on William Carlos Williams' notion that there are 'no ideas but in things' by comparing a short poem of his, full of the ponderous wheelbarrow-school of declarative nouns, with one, purely abstract, written by Rainier Maria Rilke, declaring the German the clear winner. My view inflamed some and I received vitriolic mail from teachers and language poets descended from the Objectivists, even engaging in a spicy polemic with critic Richard Deming still archived on the Academic website.
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