Status Updates From Essayism

Schlegel:

‘A fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and complete in itself like a porcupine.’

As the art critic Martin Herbert once said to me, ‘I don’t go looking for “ideas about photography” in that book; I read it for a certain kind of vulnerability.’ It’s that vulnerability that I value in Camera Lucida now, in Barthes’s writing in general, and in most or even all of the essayists I admire – no, love.

Nothing seems easier, says Perec, than making (or is it writing?) a list; but it is really a complex undertaking. You are bound to forget something, and you will be tempted to give up, or let the thing tail off, and write ‘etc’ – ‘but the whole point of an inventory is not to write etc.’

‘..ability in an essay is multiplicity, infinite fracture, the intercrossing of opposed forces establishing any number of opposed centres of stillness’

It is not Brian though, but him quoting William Carlos Williams.

God, the Irish never miss