November 8th, 2009 / 6:55 pm
Random & Web Journals
What is an ‘essay’?
Over at the Brevity blog, we have this:
Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore is pleased to have published what he believes to be the shortest essay ever, in the new Mississippi Review.
Of Dinty Moore’s piece, Mike Scalise sincerely asks “can someone please explain to me, in sober, clear, and intelligent terms, what makes ‘I have a tendency towards glibness’ an ‘essay’?”
In the introduction to the issue, Jane Hamilton explains in postive/negative terms:
To the right of zero, we have “essay,” “hybrid” and “lyric”—positive terms, assertions of form in the absence of form. But as the works collected here demonstrate, these terms describe forays to the left side of the number line, attempts to fill in the lacunae of memory, find the truth in untruth or half-truth, to compensate for the limitations of language and labels. In these poetic non-poems and narrative non-stories, we can see what I’ve always suspected to be true—the real action is in front of zero.
What do you think, marmot?
(TOC here)
(definition of ‘glibness’ here)
Tags: Brevity, Dinty Moore, Jane Hamilton, mike scalise, mississippi review online
what is that, a beaver?
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November 8th, 2009 / 7:41 pmandrew sierra—
are you blind, its clearly an essay
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It’s certainly a nice sentence. I want to pat the sentence’s head and say, “there, there, little sentence.”
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it could’ve been shorter like ‘i tend toward glibness’
or i would’ve liked ‘i tend toward glibness.. in essay’
but that makes me wonder, maybe too much concision isn’t glib
or if something is funny, it’s not purely glib
so it must be ‘i have a tendency toward glibness’
that actually is glib and nothing else
so in a way his essay is ‘worthlessly true’ ?
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November 8th, 2009 / 8:22 pmRyan Call—
i like ‘i have a tendency.’
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November 8th, 2009 / 11:58 pmScalise—
I’ve been thinking about that. But is *glibness* what the “essay” is really conveying, or is it steered mostly by *irony*?
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mark, i like you.
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I think the title, “Self-Critique”, should considered part of the essay/non-essay.
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There is no such thing as an essay
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[...] HTLM Giant – What is an ‘essay’ [...]
I don’t think the marmot gets it.
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I’ll grant that it’s an essay, if Dinty will grant that it’s a crappy one.
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I guess he ain’t granting nothing
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funny that the bio is about ten times longer than the actual piece.
not sure how much control/foresight dinty moore had when sending it in (the bio), but seems funny
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