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Mariangela
Ian SeedThree texts
Rupert M LoydellVessel
Melita SchaumSome Guts
Simon Collings (with collages by John Goodby)Three Short Fictions
Meg PokrassThe Campus Novel
Peter RobinsonCharlie Boy and Captain Fitz: A One-Act Play
Alan WallSnapshot, Sachsenhausen and three more poems
Peter BlairSeven short poems
Lucian Staiano-DanielsFour prose poems
Olivia TuckThe Back of Beyond and two more prose poems
Tony KittTwo poems
Moriana Delgadofrom Reverse | Inverse
Lucy HamiltonSix haibun
Sheila E. MurphyKingfishers and cobblestones and five more new poems
Kitty HawkinsZion Offramp 76–78
Mark ScrogginsCome dancing with me and two more new poems
Marc VincenzPlease Swipe Right
Chloe Phillips‘Three Postcards’ and a prose poem
Linda BlackStill Life
Melita SchaumIn memory of
John Taylor with drawings by Sam ForderImmortal Wreckage
Will StoneNew in Translation
Snowdrifts
Marina Tsvetaeva, trans. by Belinda CookePoems from Prière (1924)
Pierre Jean Jouve, trans. by Will StoneSix Prose Poems
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A new Review of John Matthias’s Some Words on Those Wars by Garin Cycholl.
Anthony Howell’s review, A Clutch of Ingenious Authors: Michelene Wandor Four Times EightyOne: Bespoke Stories | Annabel Dover Florilegia | Sharon Kivland Abécédaire
Essays by Alan Wall
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· The Lad from Stratford
· Stanley Kubrick: Sex in the CinemaWill Stone’s Missing in Mechelen and At Risk of Interment
G. Kim Blank’s Civilizing, Selling, and T. S. Eliot Curled Up behind the Encyclopædia Britannica
Tronn Overend’s Samuel Alexander on Beauty
AND Conor Robin Madigan’s Master Singer, Simon Collings’s Robert Desnos, Screenwriter, and Igor Webb’s Never Again
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2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
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· The funeral of Isaac Albéniz
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· Cut with a dull blade
· Into the woods, everybody.
· Thought Leaders and Ted Talks
· How Mary Oliver ‘found love in a breathing machine.’
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A dilemma for educators:
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
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Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
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Montaigne’s ‘genial scepticism’.
How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
By Sarah Bakewell
Other Press 2011 | 400 pages | Paperback: £7.49 | $14.44
By ROBERT McHENRY.
WHAT FOLLOWS IS an essay, I think. The subject of the essay is — the essay. It is occasioned by a reading of Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer.
Montaigne is conventionally credited with having invented the essay form. This does not mean that no one before him ever wrote a shorter-than-book-length composition. It does mean that he wrote down, then revised, then reconsidered his reflections on matters both large and small and then, despite having arrived at no certain conclusions, published a book of them. That was certainly original. Bakewell’s subtitle captures this novel style of sharing his thoughts perfectly.
By actual guesswork I estimate that half of all reviews of volumes of essays take the time to discuss the etymology of the word “essay,” back through Middle French “essai” to the Latin exagium, landing always on the senses of “trial,” “test,” or “attempt.” They are not always clear about what it is that is being tried, tested, or attempted in any given essay. Even less clear is what they mean when they refer to any particular literary composition by that label.
Among the myriad works that have claimed to be essays are Alexander Pope’s stately, philosophical “Essay on Man” (“One truth is clear, whatever is, is right”) and Josh Billings’s orthographically antic “Essa on the Muel” (“The muel is haf hoss and haf Jackass, and then kums tu a full stop, natur diskovering her mistake,…”). A definition that comfortably encompasses both is hard to imagine.
Then there is the question of those compositions that argue for a particular proposition or point of view, those we commonly call by such names as tracts, treatises, dissertations, and so on. In these the only thing being attempted is the persuasion of the reader. Ought that to suffice to qualify as an essay? If so, then what writing, apart from fiction and most verse, is not an essay?
Discount those writings that depend upon mere invention, mere hair-splitting, or mere verbal style, says Bacon.
Montaigne’s younger contemporary Francis Bacon offers an answer. Exclude, he suggests, all writing characterized by any of the three “distempers” of learning, the vanities of “imaginations,” “altercations,” and “affectations.” Put another way, discount those writings that depend upon mere invention, mere hair-splitting, or mere verbal style. Take seriously only those that engage with the real world in a search for truth and understanding.
The “real world,” of course, can be as stubborn a beast as the muel. Hence error; hence the need for continued engagement and rethinking; hence the “genial scepticism” that one nineteenth-century commenter identified as Montaigne’s outstanding character. It was he who, for example, wrote of social customs:
AS BACON ARGUED for a science of eyes-open and open-ended empiricism in place of the parroting of authorities (chiefly Aristotle, of course) so Montaigne threw over the notion that a piece of writing had to reach for a “truth” of some sort — and one in agreement with tradition, at that — in order to be worth reading. Indeed, he seemed to feel, a worthy essay is one that looks into some familiar aspect of life from many points of view, explores various ways of describing and understanding it, and then retires with a more or less explicitly provisional summary. The way is left open, even inviting, for later reassessments based on new and enriching experience.
A worthy essay is one that looks into some familiar aspect of life…and then retires with a more or less explicitly provisional summary, says Montaigne.
(As Bakewell explains, it may not be coincidental that Bacon published a book of “essays” just a few years after his brother had visited Montaigne in France.)
BAKEWELL’S APPROACH TO describing and understanding Montaigne’s method is the startling one of actually using it. As biography her book is unusual, in that it goes back and forth over periods of the subject’s life many times, each with a different question in mind and each bringing out details and considerations that might not otherwise have emerged. As literary criticism it is equally unusual, certainly for these times, in that it seeks to find the sources of the writings in the life, rather than declaring that they can have meaning only in the mind of some arbitrary reader.
It is useful to notice that while the book’s title is given as How to Live on the cover and the title page, in the table of contents and in the text it becomes How to Live?, the one question of the subtitle. A good sense of how Bakewell has read her subject emerges from the tentative answers she infers from the Essays, including
and, perhaps most telling,
As thus:
Bakewell homes in on the unique character of Montaigne’s thought in this way:
Nor is uncertainty limited to pathological circumstances:
But skepticism in Montaigne, however stern and thoroughgoing it may seem at one moment, retains always that geniality that has charmed so many readers over the centuries:
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Publication: Sunday, 18 January 2015, at 03:09.
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