Me and Your Essay

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

How do you read?...A few years back, at a site on Lake Newal, my clients found me both amusing and respectable. They were amused at how I had to keep microwaving my cup of coffee- I kept setting it down after drinking only a centimeter because I was so busy. They respected how I didn't surf the web during my working hours, and they made a point of telling me so. I guess they had seen too many people misuse the computer at work... I kind of knew such practise: I had read it in the newspaper; I had read how corporations were buying spy ware to track employee computer use, but I just couldn't really believe it, not until one of my bookmarked computer essay writers, Stevey, a man read by so many other computer guys, had so many readers tell him his stuff is too lengthy for at work- which is where they all read him.

The moral objection is obvious; my practical objection to surfing essays at the workplace will take some time to explain, and some talk about me.

(Sean)

To use a computer guy's analogy: You may have seen those rooms of chess players with those two-dial chess clocks. And you may know that some people play chess by mail, sans clocks. The postal game is, "the same rules, different game." To be reading on your employer's dime, however that feels for you, means you may perhaps, possibly, be frigidly "rushing over the same words, perceiving a different essay," even when the writer himself is still writing for a high school ABC level.

After high school my choosing to take career courses, for economic reasons, meant I had scarcely any room for the liberal arts. For English all I took was poetry. Something I taught myself, from an anthology reader, is that for modern literature short stories the authors will never write out, nor have a character speak out, any clear moral or thesis or theme. It has to be subtle. I groaned. This was like discovering that modern poetry does not rhyme.

My two year college ran a "third year level' course in rhetoric. As a prerequisite I needed six English courses to get in. I had one. Or, permission from the department head. This I hoped I could wrangle. So we met. I confessed, "You know how in high school they tell you to begin with a clear topic sentence and then outline your clear reasoning A,B,C each with subheadings 1,2,3? Well, I never do it that way. I am self-taught, from reading George Orwell. Would that be OK?" The man chuckled and said, "If you know George's name then you're doing better than most of the students here." And I was in. It turned out to be my favorite class; the teacher said I was one of his wild horses. So you can understand that I take the reading and writing of essays quite seriously.

(George)

I also obtained permission to take a "history of stage plays" class with the theatre majors. There I learned of theater movements such as "theater of the absurd." They say education is never wasted- especially when I can compare and contrast my two classes. You may have found that for certain "English 101" essays, of the ABC type, you can read the first half, or the middle half, or the last half, and know almost half the essay. The same might apply to reading certain plays- but never for the absurd ones. For plays like the one act The Zoo Story (two guys on a park bench) or Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf? (two couples at home) you have to read the entire organic whole. Similarly, while some essays are purely left brain, others include the right brain. For the latter, you may need to relax enough to let the whole essay wash over you.

Orwell had a neat concept in one of his essays. Alcoholism, he explained, can be both a symptom and a cause; the symptoms of alcoholism may "cause" you to mess up your life and then be more alcoholic. The point, said Orwell, is that the problem, the cycle, is reversible. He said this in Politics and the English Language using alcoholism as a conceptual means for examining the decay cycle of "language" and "thought." Quote: "But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." Well. Are workplace readers corrupting- causing their writers to do left brain linear concrete-thinking pieces? Are the writers then causing readers in their cubicles to expect each piece to be at a barren utilitarian level? A "piece" is what an artist calls his work, so you can guess where my sympathy lies.

When Orwell, a lover of literature, put in a "'conclusion' sentence" to his essays he seldom meant it narrowly and literally: he usually meant it as a subtle tip of the ice berg, expecting you to have first read the whole piece. Me too.

I for one (like Chekhov) think nothing of subtly putting a gun on the mantle for paragraph four of an essay and before part two having some one pick it up and fire it.

Here's a joke from many decades ago:

The boss put up a note, asking, What can I do to keep from catching my workers loafing?

Someone wrote: Wear shoes with leather heels.

Your Essay, Part Two

Who are you? I come from a six-child family with no artists, where I hold the only degree and where three of my siblings have graduated from technical institutes. Therefore someone with a technical outlook for reading, such as a stereotypical computer guy, is someone I can respect. And you? How do you read? Are you a concrete thinker, left brain and linear, or, when on the web, is that merely your default style? Could you also accept abstract thinking, be it linear or random? Have you a searching eye?

It is fine to read critically, however, the guy reading essays at work who goes too fast is likely to be too critical. Not good. He is likely to criticize simultaneously while he reads. Mal bono.

I try to read the way someone at a Quaker meeting tries to hear: wide-eyed and ears forward, wearing the other's shoes... During conversation, only after the person has finished speaking do I boot up my CPU to consider critically what I just heard; only after considering do I switch to thinking of what to contribute. Sometimes people try to jump in too fast; you see them stepping on other people's ending words. -Then you wonder how they could have possibly given some one else's contribution a proper interval of respectful thought.- And sometimes these folks will write in the scrolling comment section with disrespect.

In all the pieces I have ever read I may have disagreed with the writer but I have never, not even once, misinterpreted the writer. However, judging by the comment section following after essays, a good many readers have to explain things to their disrespectful fellow readers, by telling them "what the writer is saying is..." How irritating. So often I find the "misinterpreters" are not warm hearted but instead hot tempered and frigid. If I always "get it" the first time it is partly because my ego is in check, partly because I slow down enough to read what is said- not what my ego expects to be said.

(Martin)

I confess that some days nothing can satisfy me, that I emerge from the surf feeling hollow inside. On those days I should power down, determine what it is I am avoiding, and then go do it.

On those avoidance days I go-too-fast. Well. If I cease skimming, if I stop squinting at every second tree of a line of interesting trees, then they may become a fascinating forest; By slowing down I may grasp the writer's intended gestalt... I may think of things, feel things. Best of all, stuff may pop in from my subconscious. It's refreshing. But not if I am only half present, rushed, my hand tense on the mouse. Not if my poor brain is hovering, impossibly, between read and click-back, between boot-up and no-boot. That's not refreshing at all.

I think a web essay should be read at leisure at home or -for you wireles folks- in a coffee shop, over a nice cup of tea.

My rhetoric teacher once handed out pages of an untitled essay. As I looked at a middle page, at a couple sentences at random, I said with delight, "Oh, this is the Letter from Birmingham Jail" (by Martin Luther King Jr.). I was familiar with every part because I had not skimmed or rushed when I read it. Having read it, it was mine.

As you are willing to be present, as you are "on purpose" or "on task" or as "the zen is with you" then "an" essay becomes your essay. I hope, dear reader, you are reading with due care.

Sean Crawford,

(Hi Mom!)

Calgary, December 2008

Three conclusion-ending lines of Orwell:

The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish. (The Art of Donald McGill)

"Them" refers literally to risque post cards, but figuratively to society's outlet for impropriety.

And really it was like watching a flock of cattle to see the long column, a mile or two miles of armed men, flowing peacefully up the road, while the great white birds drifted over them in the opposite direction, glittering like scraps of paper. (Marrakech)

literally: a scene of white officers and black enlisted men, figuratively: while on paper the colonizers could excuse their oppression, one day these colonies, strong enough to survive on their own, would be free.

One cannot change all this in a moment, but one can a least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse- into the dustbin where it belongs. (Politics and the English Language)

This seems closer to a literal summary-ending- but the subject is in fact political thought. I include it to show how richly one can write. Not like all that barren prose, immortal, floating in cyberspace, of less beauty than a drifting dandelion seed.