A game of cat-and-mouse, sort of

I haven’t had reliable internet (or a TV for that matter) since moving here. I can get anything I need done at my office, so I haven’t been able to justify the expense. I wasn’t ever a full-blown screen addict, but I’ve always been like most 22 year olds in that I enjoy my streaming videos.

Without constant internet, I’ve been powering through the books I never got to read when I was busy watching shows and movies. Most of them are essays, which are my favorite, but I also have a huge collection of translated poetry and books about philosophy and formal logic.

In one collection of essays, Against Joie de Vivre by Phillip Lopate, I read an entry about the form of the personal essay and what happened to it. Overall, the book is delightfully cranky and critical.

Lopate is bemoaning not his generation - his prime was in the sixties - but the emerging writers of the eighties. These writers weren’t (and writers hadn’t been doing this for a long time, according to Lopate) writing expository, personal essays like they used to. He referenced familiar essays taking their form in lifestyle sections of periodicals at the time; they provide “tips for how to get the most from your dry cleaner’s, take care of your butcher block, or bounce back from an unhappy love affair.” Lopate said that readers today are “ill-equipped to follow the rambling, cat-and-mouse game of perverse contrariety played by the great essayists of the past.” I get what he means, probably more than he understands.

People in my age range are fed and feeding lists, filled with pictures, of the simple relatable “we” rather than the “I” of the great personal essays of the past. Lopate mentions a heap of writers that have been writing the personal essay under the disguise of other topics, some that I admire like Joan Didion, Gretel Erlich and Adrienne Rich. These are people whom I studied in classes, those that declared that they, specifically, felt this way, bearing the weight of criticism upon them for their involving themselves in their writing.

For better or worse, my generation - screen addicted, constantly consuming - is able to recall the art of the personal essay for the very reasons why Lopate felt it had gone away. The writing I have read by younger people is informal, maybe because we are less polite, but it carries the hot friendliness that late 19th century essays did, reaching the reader on the other side. Lopate said the formality of then-modern writing was preventing the pleasant experience of reading someone write about oddballs on the street or the joy of reading.

My generation also has a collection of references, literary in some ways but film and television based in others. A story is a story, a character is a character, and these references work just as well as establishing fact.

The writing I read today might not reference noble artifacts of poetry, philosophy, and literature but it is referencing something, creating a self-reflexive world within the text to talk about anything. While older folks might call people my age “the narcissistic generation” (which, I would remind anyone that each generation has been declared as such by at least one self-righteous publication), I would have to assert that we, at the very least, own ourselves and our behavior. Maybe it’s just that in the age of the web, no one can hide completely.

My writing has always been a little bizarre in the way that it references things, usually taking philosophical texts as common knowledge after studying it for years. It makes perfect sense to me, but to the lay person, the reader who doesn’t keep up with the specific things I keep up with, it’s a pretentious bore at least some of the time. In this way, looking at screens, watching video and television, might be more beneficial for me in the long run. After all, everybody wants to do things that other people like, at least a little bit.

In the general time that Lopate would have written this specific essay, he makes a point that no one writes essays for a job anymore, these kinds of forays into experimental consciousness and points of view. Still, he admits a great deal of journalism has become this way, focusing on the things that you can do with an essay, with telling a story. People today read memoirs and true stories told in plenty of different ways, having a close connection with the writer as they explain a little about themselves alongside a lot about something else.

As Lopate ends the section, he says that the essayist can always, upon criticism, fall back onto a plea of “what do I know?” which is a very fair question that I believe all people should ask themselves daily. The clamboring, subjective and idealistic points of view that one finds in the personal essay are just that - personal. The reader is the one who is tricked if they take this stranger, writing their essay, to accomplish anything more than basically observing, exploring a topic and at times, intentionally contradicting themselves.

The personal essay seeks to basically answer the question of what it is the writer knows, and that’s all. However, while I read beautiful essay after essay by writers close to my age, I can see that it’s very hard to contradict the self and admit the fallible nature of humanity, both writer and reader.