April-May 2023
Thomas Beller, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bagel, 2005
Aleksandar Hemon, The Aquarium, 2013
Leslie Jamieson, The Empathy Exams, 2013
Karen Russell, Beeper World, 2014
John McPhee, Draft #4, 2017
Floyd Skloot, Gray Areas: Thinking with a Damaged Brain, 2003
* Part 6 of the Essays Project: A course of reading conducted with Charles Taliaferro. Note that these are my particular favorites and views, not CT’s, though no doubt some are influenced by him.
** The Contemporary American Essay, edited by Philip Lopate
Thomas Beller, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bagel, 2005
This essay describes the author’s summer job in “…the sensuous, arduous, choreographed world of the bagel factory.” It has a great opening: Short simple sentences that create a vivid and distinctive picture. There is a lot of concrete sensory detail: from smells to the layout of the bagel factory.
“His hands were large. My résumé lay flat on his desk. He had cleared a space amid the clutter, and he ran one of those big, sensitive, but also violent-looking hands over it again and again while he studied it, as though his hand were a scanner and would impart some key bit of information that reading never could.”
– Thomas Beller, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bagel, p 20, 2005
I also like the use of the repetition of “I counted,” as he is describing his inventory taking and entries into the ledger – the repetition captures the nature of the job, and also the multiplicity and diversity of items counted give a sense of the complexity of the work being done by the factory.
Also has good moments of drama: the running out of sugar; the artist Vincente and his self portrait; falling asleep in the back of the bagel van and dreaming of being in a submarine
Other memorable bits
“I think the breaking wave of the present tense is always accompanied by the whitecap of panic.”
– Thomas Beller, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bagel, p 22, 2005
“The pipes leading upstairs often sprang a leak and a fine mist of flour would fill the air. Sometimes it was so fine we would work through it, and after half an hour all of us would be very lightly frosted, as though we’d all gone a little gray.”
– Thomas Beller, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bagel, p 29, 2005
Aleksandar Hemon, The Aquarium, 2013 [source]
This essay is on the dying of a young child, and the experience of the parents and her sister. The parents describe their immersion in the world and language of the medical establishment, and how they felt invisibly separated from others. The child’s older sister (5) dealt with it by creating an imaginary brother for herself, and he in turn had a younger sister who was ill, as well as parents. The parents’ world contracted; the older sister’s, in a sense, expanded. Some trenchant observations, but not a lot of fun to read for obvious reasons.
We instinctively protected our friends from the knowledge we possessed, we let them think that words had failed, because we knew that they didn’t want to learn the vocabulary we used daily. We were sure that they didn’t want to know what we knew; we didn’t want to know it, either.
– Aleksandar Hemon, The Aquarium, p 318, 2013
…
The walls of the aquarium we were hanging in were made of other people’s words..
Leslie Jamieson, The Empathy Exams, 2013
A fascinating essay. She works as a ‘medical actor,’ to assist in the training of physicians. She has a persona with symptoms to play and a loose script to follow, and she grades the medical students on how effectively they interact with her – this includes who much empathy they show. This is interleaved with a presumably true account of her as a patient seeking and getting an abortion, couched in the same framework of medical acting. …I’m not sure what I take way from the essay, but it’s intricate and interesting.
I needed people Dave, a doctor, anyone to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it’s shown.
– Leslie Jamieson, The Empathy Exams, 2013
John McPhee, Draft #4, 2017
An essay on writing, and in particular the production of drafts, and the way it is done and the value a writer gets out of it. One of the things that has stuck with me is has comment that once you have a draft of paper, as opposed to in your head, your brain will continue to work on it in the background. “Until it exists, writing has not really begun.” He also has an interesting description of how he goes about finding the right word or phrase. It involves using a dictionary to get back to the root meanings of words, and often involves a sort of deconstruction of the definition.
The dictionary definitions of words you hearing to replace are far more likely to help you out than a scattershot wad from a thesaurus.
– John McPhee, Draft #4, p 433, 2017
[…]
This, for example, came up while I was writing about the Atchafalaya, the huge river swamp in southern Louisiana, and how it looked from a small plane in the air. […] From the airplane, you could discern where these places were because, seen through the trees, there would be an interruption of the reflection of sunlight on water. What word or phrase was I going to Use for that reflection? I looked up “sparkle” in my old Webster’s Collegiate. It said: «See flash.'” 1 looked up “Flash.” The definitions were followed by a presentation of synonyms: “flash, gleam, glance, glint, sparkle, glitter, scintillate, coruscate, glimmer, shimmer mean to shoot forth light.” I liked that last part, so I changed the manuscript to say, “The reflection of the sun races through the trees and shoots forth light from the water.”
Karen Russell, Beeper World, 2014
A fun essay about growing up in Florida during the early 90’s, and in particular, beeper culture. There was a moment, a few years, when teenages used beepers to communicate. 123 was “I miss you.” 143 was “I love you.” 345987: “I’m horny.” Captures the confusion, and excitement, and feelings of being an adolescent. Also begins and ends with a description of ephrae, the adolescent stage of jellyfish during which they drift off into the ocean. A nice, if implicitly drawn, analogy.
But there is also an intermediate stage: the ephyra. Ephyrae are goofy, adolescent beings. They develop at the tops of polyps; for a while, it looks as though the organism is dreaming of a baby jellyfish. Then they detach, like mutinous mushroom caps. Away they float, disk-shaped and aglow. This is sometimes referred to as “blooming.” Newborn zeros, they are tumid with light. They swarm into fleets- hundreds of thousands rising through the dark sea -but their movement is wobbly, desultory; their trajectory has a temporal, and not a spatial, destination: the future, when they will be old enough to mate with one another.
– Karen Russell, Beeper World, 2014
You return the page from a landline. If you’re out with us teenagers, in 1996, in Coconut Grove, you return the page from a pay phone mere feet away from the gusting mist of a pink mall waterfall, so close to this cascade that your arm hairs shine with chlorinated dew. To stand inside the phone booth makes you feel like the vibrating need at the center of a compass – on s weekend night, all Grove traffic will be moving in a vibrating blur around this booth.
– Karen Russell, Beeper World, 2014
We were tidaling ephyrae: translucent bubble creatures, cartwheeling through space, illuminating in electric pulses our own quierly panicked trails as we drifted through the black seas of nocturnal Miami. Back then, I clipped the beeper to my belt loop and read it like a tiny glowing book.
– Karen Russell, Beeper World, 2014
Floyd Skloot, Gray Areas: Thinking with a Damaged Brain, 2003
Has a great opening line: “I used to be able to think.” A description of a fascinating (and horrifying) experience, and how he has come to terms with it (though I think he goes a bit astray in his critique of “insult” as a medical term). He uses words very well, particularly in describing his mental experiences: “…the rapids of confusion through which I feel myself flailing…”
The lesions in my gray matter appear as a scatter of white spots like bubbles or a ghostly pattern of potshots.
– Floyd Skloot, Gray Areas: Thinking with a Damaged Brain, 2003
A slight interruption- the movement of a squirrel across my window view, the call of a hawk, a spell of coughing–will not just make me lose my train of thought, it will leave me at the station for the rest of the day.
– Floyd Skloot, Gray Areas: Thinking with a Damaged Brain, 2003
It is very difficult for me to “free-associate”; my stream of consciousness does not absorb runoff or feeder streams well, but rushes headlong instead. Mental activity that should follow a distinct pattern does not, and I experience my thought process as subject to random misfirings.
– Floyd Skloot, Gray Areas: Thinking with a Damaged Brain, 2003