New Essays on the Essay
The joy of nonfiction is in its introspection, its ability to turn its head like an owl and consider its subject from another, often surprising, angle. So, too, are the joys of essays on the essay, as we turn our gaze on the genre itself to consider it anew. We hope you enjoy these new additions to the conversation.
In Praise of Navel Gazing: An Ars Umbilica
Charles Green
5.2
In 2012, the Belly Button Biodiversity project, a group of scientists exploring the bacterial habitat of the human navel, published their first peer-reviewed paper. They had swabbed 60 navels and found over 2,300 species of bacteria; of those, 1,458 “may be new to science.” Commonality was rare: only eight phylotypes appeared in more than 70% of participants. One person’s navel “harbored a bacterium that had previous been found only in soil from Japan,” where he had never been; another two navels had “extremophile bacteria that typically thrive in ice caps and thermal vents,” places inaccessible to the human body. The vast majority were lonely travelers: they appeared only in one belly button. As it happens, what our navels share may be rare and far-flung.
I do want and to know what might be found in mine, and, at the same time, I don’t want to know. I’ve been the caretaker of a particularly filthy navel, and I was ashamed to have it exposed. In high school, a long-time friend and I briefly became much more than friends in some undefined physical intimacy. One weekend, her mother was out of town; I spent most of the weekend at her house. Saturday afternoon, a lazy day, the sun bright on the hardwood floors of her bedroom. I’d never been that naked that long with anyone else. We were in her bed. She paused over my belly button and said, “Wow, your belly button is really dirty.” I already knew; I’d been caught. And here I’m confessing. I had a nubbed outie in the shape of a cinnamon bun. Dirt and lint gathered in the folds. In bored, private moments, I’d excavate grayish flecks, only to grow frustrated at what seemed like an interminable project. She smirked at me. To my surprise, though, she wasn’t disgusted by the muddled unknowns stowing in my navel. But had the situation been reversed, I would have recoiled and pulled away emotionally. Eventually, I would. Click here to continue reading. |
The Essay: Landscape, Failure, & Ordinary's Other
Sarah Kruse
5.2
The nuance of the incomplete, wandering thought comes to the forefront of the essay as genre. From Montaigne to Thoreau to Benjamin to Barthes to Boully, the essay could be called a kind of wander. Objects as well as ideas often figure prominently, but do I cling to the detail as an artifact of the ordinary all the while because the ordinary object is all that remains of a shattered world? Is the smooth functioning of everyday ideology made to signify through its absence in the essay? What is lost through experience and repetition comes to rest in the ordinary object as a kind of objet petit a, a surface that haunts the essay because it has been unmoored from its foundations in everyday reality. Once the ordinary is visible in the newspapers, the street sign, the plate glass window, it has already ceased to be. The cession of the ordinary or the break remains in the object itself. The object we then learn to read through the negative work and negation is inherent to the essay’s form. Click here to continue reading.
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Something More Than This
Desirae Matherly
5.2
Near the turn of the millennium, I wrote an essay that explored the Fibonacci sequence through the death of my father, filled with many numbers, but mostly five: the number of digits, and how they form a living hand. I had been reading an old out-of-print book called Patterns in Nature and falling in love with the photographs of spiraling succulents and sunflower seeds. I don’t understand numbers well enough to understand why these patterns are beautiful, but I believe in their calculability. In a sequence of the first twelve Fibonacci numbers, eight and one hundred forty-four are “non-trivial perfect powers,” which is meaningless to me. When I multiply eight and one hundred forty-four together, I am given one thousand seventy-two. Still meaningless, perhaps. But if imbued with meaning, or if explored in other contexts as more than a number, I find an essay. Click here to continue reading.
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Essaying Vanity
Jane Silcott
5.2
“Look! A geriatric!” The voice sang out from somewhere behind me in the woods. I was standing hip deep in an icy mountain lake, two thousand feet up from the road where my husband and I had begun two hours earlier. My legs were growing numb. It was late summer. It was hot. I’d been promising myself that swim all morning. My husband had gone back along the trail to see if there were better entry points, but I’d forged on, avoiding what looked to be a rusted piece of metal, several tree branches. I looked to see who belonged to the voice and to check in case there was someone on the trail behind me, someone frail, leaning on hiking poles, wearing a Tilly hat. There was no one. The voice was clear as a bell in the mountain air.
Should I call out? “I can hear you?” Or, “I’m not that old!” I remained silent, a gray haired woman in a teal blue swimsuit, curious to hear what I might hear about myself next. A second voice said, “How did she get here?” “Maybe there’s a flat road in here somewhere.” It was hard to stay silent at this, but again I said nothing. There had been some points where I would happily have followed a road if one had appeared (or better still, some secret tunnel with an escalator marked “geriatrics only”), but I wasn’t about to admit that. “Well, good for her. That’s how I want to be when I’m old,” the first voice pronounced, then continued with a final jab after a pause: “Except I wouldn’t be wearing a bathing suit.” My husband returned. I told him. He said, “I would have said, I may be geriatric, but I’m not deaf yet.” Click here to continue reading. |
Unruly Pupil
Susan Olding
5.2
In my second year of university I took a job at an independently-owned bookstore. The place was called Reader’s Den, but there was nothing den-like about it. No mahogany, no oak, no crimson curtains, no whisper of sweet tobacco, no leather club chairs—no chairs of any description. Instead, the place boasted bright track lights, row upon row of cheap white melamine shelves, a long newsstand continually in need of restocking, and an enormous floor-to-ceiling plate glass window that jutted on an angle to the southwest. The window overlooked busy Bloor Street. Across the road loomed the Royal Conservatory of Music, and beside it, Philosopher’s Walk, a curving pathway to the campus shaded by horse chestnuts and maples. From the raised dais behind the cash, I could see its wrought-iron gates and the leaves on the old trees, lime green in spring, darker in the summer rains. I could see people come and go from the nearby shops and pubs and doctor’s offices—mothers tugging their children’s hands, lovers licking each other’s ice cream cones, tourists consulting their maps. I liked this vantage point. High enough to offer prospect, yet close enough to yield details. It gave me licence to stare. Click here to continue reading.
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