Sometimes I teach a class about the work of David Foster Wallace. Last semester was one of those times, and last semester also saw the release of a movie about Wallace, The End of the Tour. In the film, Jesse Eisenberg plays the journalist David Lipsky, and the movie is based on a book by Lipsky called Of Course […]
While a good deal of my week of reading was spent with books I’ve read before, including Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams and John McPhee’s Oranges, I’ve found once again that what Nabakov said is true: “One cannot read a book: one can only reread it.” This time Jamison revealed to me the deeper truths that can be obtained in formal […]
This week in my writing class we spent a good deal of time in workshop but spent most of today reading an essay that’s been with me for about twenty years, introduced—if memory serves—by the great Jesse Lee Kercheval at the University of Wisconsin. Jesse Lee had us read John McPhee’s Oranges, the first part of which […]
Next month, the writer Ada Calhoun will be visiting a class I teach titled The Courage to Sound Like Ourselves. She’s the author of the new book St. Marks is Dead, which of course it is not. Dead, though, is St. Mark’s Bookshop, which closes this week. Calhoun has written a searching piece for the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog that […]
A student asked this week if I’d occasionally post here what I’ve been reading; I’ll often mention something in class that, in the midst of the conversation, she doesn’t have the change to jot down. I said, “Sure.” This weekend I’ll be reading Marilynne Robinson’s new essay in Harper’s, “Save Our Public Universities.” She hits similar notes in her latest, quite […]
This week I read James Agee and Walker Evans’s Cotton Tenants: Three Families, originally a report meant for Fortune Magazine. Killed by the magazine in the mid-1930s, the piece was first published in 2013 by Melville House. I read aloud this week to just about anyone who would listen, highlighting a particular passage in Agee’s writing about the food of the […]
As the class writes personal essays about a meal they’ve each recently had, this week we discussed John McPhee’s 2013 New Yorker essay “Structure,” which makes any number of useful points about how to build an essay. Part of the essay seems like a pep talk, especially where McPhee appears to quote himself teaching at Princeton: ‘You can build a strong, sound, […]
Today after my food writing class I spoke with Lang Academic Fellow Marissa Gery about writing with a concern for an audience. We discussed what an audience might mean, how audiences form in our minds. About my own audience, I ended up telling Marissa that I often consider that the publications I write for have readers already in place (more or less), and that the […]
