An Essay About Essays

I lied. You get another essay. 

This was inspired by Barrett Swanson’s latest essay “High & Dry”, which I very much enjoyed (all his stuff is great), though if you want to see this phenomenon taking place at its most cartoonish, check out “The View From Mrs. Thompson’s” or “Ticket To The Fair” or really any other David Foster Wallace essay where he interacts with his fellow midwesterners. 

Writing this was occasionally kind of tricky to navigate, because it’s sort of trying to be 

1. An indictment of a very specific kind of essay

2. A rumination on the philosophy of art and writing more generally, and the role of the author

3. And a piece of self-aware comedy, ultimately not really intended to be scrutinized at the same level as an academic paper

All at the same time. As with the previously uploaded essay about airports, there is a certain anxiety in uploading this that this exact topic has been already written about extensively, much earlier and much more eloquently, and that making a big show about it here only exposes me as an intellectual fraud who clearly doesn’t keep up with all the hot periodicals. Oh well. It feels like karmic penance, at least, that after taking potshots at the streamer community not that long ago, I should this time put academia in my crosshairs, thus restoring cosmic balance via equal criticism of both high-and-low society, pretentious and primitive alike. Unfortunately, most of the streaming community doesn’t know how to read, so they’ll never get chance to appreciate the fact. 

I think one of the big criticisms of this argument is its vagueness, and the fact that it kind of begs the question of what exactly constitutes a ‘common man’. Is it just anyone the author happens to be writing about, celebrities and the like notwithstanding? I dunno, man, maybe. I think by its very nature the qualities of art are kind of irreducible to tidy categories, and so these sorts of philosophy-of-art discussions may not end up as logically satisfying, say, an analytic philosopher’s discussion of language. It may not be quite as recognizable as ‘anti-war themes’, but I would like to think that someone with a familiarity with these sorts of essays can at least pick up on the type of pattern I’m gesturing towards. In the absence of any serious, provable conclusion, it may hopefully at least inspire onlookers to pick up the ball and run with it.