– XXXI –

Pity the poets, chronically underappreciated, all the while being offered as the greatest compliment and title. 

A Little Party Dress

August is summer’s au revoir. While the days persist with scrutinizing and punishing heat, they conclude quicker. August evenings maintain and retain their own quality. Whereas June is a month of uneven temperament. Spritely and green, while dour the next, pouring rain. July burns with enthusiastic fervor, and while the plants celebrate the newfound sunlight, they too become parched and pray for rain. In July’s unabashed brilliance and burning, insects are awakened and begin their assault. Swarming and swamping the unexpected, the uninitiated, and the casual summer holidayer with glee. August settles in. Surviving crops and flowerbeds who have not wilted or burned by the sun’s inquisition, have blossomed, ripened, and bloomed; while the harvest lurks like a shadow around the corner. August evenings deserve special mention. The light softens into a sherbert afterglow; August compliments itself with oranges warmth, abandoning the briskness of a still uncertain season. The clouds are more apt to blush in the evening light, rather than radiate in burning reds, all the while entertaining a blue tint. The evenings do moderate themselves, and one should be reprimanded if they say ‘cool off,’ or inject the accusation that there is a ‘chill,’ in the air. August evenings provide a necessary reprieve and entice the young to go out, embrace the night and enjoy it.  The evening skies in turn are equally changed by August’s arrival. Less convoluted by summer haze, with the few stars capable of pushing through the light pollution glitter away. There are absences as well. Mornings are reluctant and tiresome. The sun pulling itself over the horizon with exhausted enthusiasm. The robins are gone. Those harbingers of spring. Brings of dawn with their insistent twilight twitterers have pack since packed up and moved on for the season. A crow’s caw rings hollow, beckoning winters bite and hunger. With August aglow, winter is held back for now, but as the threshold of autumn, winter will inevitably begin to thread its frost in the morning, tracing its filigree across windowpanes.

The essay is the most mercurial and undefined literary form. In part thanks to academia and school, the introduction to the essay as a literary form is framed through a punitive perspective. Dry, boring, rigid, and constrained. The essay is the peak of academic vanity and exercise in frivolity. Research is conducted, followed by composition, ending with grading and subsequently deleted or abandoned of no consequence. Merely a taskmaster’s exercise, both futile and expected. The ability to write an essay marked one of those pre-requisite skills in engaging with the absurd ladder of the expectations called life. The essay is drilled to students as a compositional form with strict demands regarding mechanics and templated structure. Teachers and professors never indulge or reveal the essays fluidity or flexibility. Thankfully, editors and anthology series, such as “The Best American Essays,” seek to curate and expand the notion of what an essay is, beyond the limiting academic perspective which readers are inherently conditioned and oriented to. While writers such as Montaigne (the forms progenitor), Phillip Lopate, M.F.K Fisher, Adam Gopnik, Malcom Gladwell, Patricia Hampl, and Thomas De Quincy, prove that the essay is by far the most engaging and accessible form. Free of poetry’s strict discipline and adherence to form, line, rhythm and rhyme; while being completely disinterested in the concerns of novels or stories. The essay in turn, has been the prosaic medium for other writers, whereby they can drop fiction as a façade and engage in topics a writer is interested in, be it purely literary, personal, or inconsequently veering into the realm of public and political discourse. For a writer like Doris Lessing, the essay was both a natural medium for her early sociopolitical diatribes and then her scrutinizing candor of a century of ceaseless upheaval, existential threats, and upwelling change. For P.L. Travers, the essay presented the author as a serious scholar, as she resented continually being referred to as a children’s writer. While the beloved Mary Poppins character and series of novels brought her fame, fortune, and the love of readers, Travers found her young readership tiresome. P.L. Travers poured her intellect and anthropological curiosity into analyses and examinations of myth and folklore. Sadly, those critical texts and essays never found the same readership that her beloved Mary Poppins had.

For the late French writer, Christian Bobin, the essay was a chimeric entity. For Bobin, the essay was the natural form for his work, which had lack poetry’s rigours and intensity, demanding unwavering compliance and loyalty with historical poetic traditions, schools, and established formats. All the while impoverished regarding the basic ingredients and spices to properly define itself within the context of a piece of fictional prose. Rebellious still, Christian Bobin embraces the gilding of lyricism, without cheapening a poet’s appreciation and proclivity for language. For Bobin language is malleable. A material which can be kneaded and shaped. Bobin’s language is not static or didactic in application. Rather, its generous engulfing, where even the author embraces being swept away in the linguistic tides. This is of course where Bobin diverts from poets. Rather than distill and refine language to its ethereal essence, measured in precise lines and syllabic counts, Bobin embraces the freeform of prose. Christian Bobin’s essays are not without concern or topic. While they indulge in the finery of lyricism, they are meditative and contemplative. Not as grandiose as philosophy, grappling and wrestling with eternal questions of being, meaning, and value of existence; or proposing and arguing the nature of divinity in either a theological or personal context. Bobin’s essays observe, refine, and reflect reality through a multitude of facets. Where Annie Ernaux is the personal ethnographer, documenting and examining social waves, political events and movements with herself as the vantage point; Christian Bobin is the observer adrift within the aesthetics of reality and memory. A writer of purely literary terms, abandoning the need for social commentary and political discourse. Everyday life is enriched, enlivened, and enhanced by Bobin’s prose, as Bobin himself said, he writes to get out of himself. This otherwise brief and intensely lyrical essays are merely exercises of intrapersonal emancipations.

Encounters involving clouds, wildflowers, a voice, parable, a butterfly in flight, the frantic flee of sparrows, a spark of memory, each one is masterfully captured in prose not marred by its poetic flourish and allegiances, but encapsulating, showcasing the fully breadth and appreciation Christian Bobin has for the literary language, and its ability to provide aesthetic context to the experiences of the everyday. Mistaken marketing professionals and publicists, often misapply the notion that Christian Bobin is a writer of some special kind of self-help book. As if somehow his essays will support or facilitate readers to have some form of self-actualizing event. They couldn’t have missed the point of Bobin or his prose. “A Little Party Dress,” is not a book about providing meditative guidance to curate further gratitude or finding the happiness in the small joys of life. These are not testaments or exercises on mining or developing happiness habits. These are beautiful essays and pieces of prose which verve continually and unapologetically into the poetic. An image, a thought, a memory becomes the anchor point where by Bobin dives in further, without consideration or concern for any goal or directive purpose. By and large, the language is not only the operational mechanism, it is practicality the point of the book. It is the authors purpose to observe the everyday capture it within the limitations of language, and in turn get lost within the description of language and the tangents that arise. The sojourns into metaphysics; or the parable of Joan enveloped by a whale, and a fickle god’s renouncement of his earlier judgement to smite in his indignation. There are examinations of fatigue from today’s world of rush and instant gratification, beautifully captured within the essay “May He Be Left In Peace,” whereas the existential anatomy of the businessman is dissected in “Promised Land.” A personal favourite was the titular ending essay: “A Little Party Dress,” a beautiful essay built of cubist images to finish up the collection, while sitting on the patio in the waning light of an August evening as summers heat burns off.

Unfortunately, under translated in English, Christian Bobin was often a bestseller in France. Bobin’s popularity may have stemmed from the European publishers and book market being less concerned with the marketization and taxonomical classification of a texts form. Fragment is as much a literary composition as essay or prose poem, readers are far more interested in the words use of language and their execution. “A Little Party Dress,” is one of the few collections of Bobin’s work available in English. There are two other collections of essays as well as appreciative reader pseudo-biography of Emily Dickinson, who Christian Bobin admired and adored; in addition to a mediative study and appreciation of the Saint Francis of Assisi, who was Bobin’s spiritual mentor. The defining feature of Christian Bobin’s work is heightened refined and distilled lyricism, never ostentatious but revealing in its craftsmanship. The fluidity of form between fragment, essay, poetry, and even diary, define Christian Bobin as a writer of his own caliber, however niche and eloquent they may be. As August burns itself into autumn with September’s yellowing leaves and harvest on the horizon, and October’s austere bone picked fields framed within gnarled knotted tree branches, with glowing pumpkins harkening and enticing the soul to return; it was pleasure to read a writer who captures the transience and fleetingness of everyday life and the passage of time.

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 

M. Mary

Tommy Orange, Named the Future Library Project Writer for 2024

Hello Gentle Reader,

The Native American writer Tommy Orange has been named the new contributor to the Future Library Project for 2024. Tommy Orange’s invitation to contribute to the project follows other critically acclaimed and internationally renowned writers from around the globe:

2014 – Margaret Atwood, Canada
2015 – David Mitchell, United Kingdom
2016 – Sjon, Iceland
2017 – Ekif Shafak, Turkey (exile: United Kingdom)
2018 – Han Kang, (South) Korea
2019 – Karl Ove Knausgård, Norway
2020 – Ocean Vuong, United States of America
2021 – Tsitsi Dangarembga, Zimbabwe
2022 – Judith Schalansky, Germany
2023 – Valeria Luiselli, Mexico/United States of America

Recently longlisted for the Booker Prize with his sophomore novel “Wandering Stars,” Tommy Orange has made an impactful literary name for himself with only two novels to his name, the aforementioned “Wandering Stars,” and his debut “There There.” In the same trajectory as other Native American writers, Louis Edrich, Joy Harjo, N. Scott Momaday, and Thomas King, Tommy Orange explores the complexities of Native American identity and authenticity, history, loss of traditions and cultural values, in addition to the social issues of addiction, depression, and unemployment. “There There,” was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, while winning the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2019 Hemmingway Foundation/PEN Award. “There There,” was praised by Margaret Atwood (who recommended Orange as a contributor) among others as a remarkable debut, showcasing Tommy Orange as a writer of not only social concern, but of literary execution and talent. “There There,” tackled the notion of Urban Indians through a chorus of twelve characters, who reckon with a complex and violent history and loss of identity and question the notion of authenticity. “Wandering Stars,” continued to explore the violent and sanitized history that Native Americans endured and suffered from during a push for assimilation, and have since been lost within.

In announcing Tommy Orange as the most recent contributor to the Future Library Project, Katie Paterson praised Orange’s writing being marked by an “exploration of identity, belonging, and intergenerational trauma, particularly within the context of Indigenous experiences.” Paterson theorizes that Orange’s work will resonate with readers of the coming century.

Tommy Orange’s induction as a contributor to the Future Library Project, shows the projects ranging literary tastes and treatments. Each writer spans generations, literary styles, languages, themes and concerns, and Orange is no different.

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 
M. Mary