I love this book. I love the idea of the familiar essay. I love the lightness with which it's written. And I love the things it's about. I dog-eared a lot of pages, just because I wanted to re-read them, I can't blog them all or I'd copying out the whole book. So here are the bits about which I thought I had something to share.
How's this for an explanation of the Familiar Essay? from the preface:
"Familiar essay" isn't a term one hears often these days. The genre's heyday was the early nineteenth century, when Charles Lamb was dreaming up The Essays Of Elia under the influence of brandy and tobacco and William Hazlitt was dashing off Table-Talk under the influence of strong tea. The familiar essayist didn’t speak to the millions, he spoke to one reader, as if the two of them were sitting side by side in front of a crackling fire with their cravats loosened, their favorite stimulants in hand, and a long evening of conversation stretching before them. His viewpoint was subjective, his frame of reference concrete, his style digressive, his eccentricities conspicuous, and his laughter usually at his own expense. And though he wrote about himself, he also wrote about a subject, something with which he was so familiar, and about which he was often so enthusiastic, that his words were suffused with a lover’s intimacy.
That sounds like exactly the stuff I'd like to write. Enthusiastic, conversational, discursive, about something in the real world. It's also a description of the blogs I like best. And the writing seems so natural and smooth. I'm enjoying just copying out. Maybe if I keep doing it I'll learn something, in the same way that Hunter S. Thompson thought he'd learn something about rhythm and style from typing out every word of 'The Great Gatsby' and 'A Farewell To Arms'.
Page 38:
For thirty-three years, Lamb sat on a high stool, identical to those occupied by thirty other clerks, dipped his goose quill into two inkwells, one containing black ink and the other red (he called the latter Clerk’s Blood); and recorded the prices of tea, indigo and piece goods.
It is worth remembering that while he was adding up figures in the East India House’s stygian offices at Nos 12-21 Leadenhall Street (what name could be more appropriate?), his friends – Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Godwin, De Quincy – were rambling in the Lake Country, experimenting with mind-altering drugs, siring illegitimate children, and planning a utopian community in America (@We shall…criticise poetry when hunting a buffalo,” wrote Southey).
I love the way she does this. Those tiny interjections of telling detail (clerk's blood, leadenhall, the Southey quote) are perfect. They give you the colour you need to take something in, without slowing you down. Brilliant. I
Page 72:
During the day, I pop out of my chair a dozen times an hour. The phone rings, the fax beeps, the mailbox needs to be checked, the coffee needs to be brewed, the letter needs to be filed, the Post-its need to be rearranged – and possibly colour-coded – right this instant. How can the writer’s distractive sirens be resisted? John McPhee used to tie himself to his chair with his bathrobe sash. Schiller heightened his powers of concentration by inhaling the fumes from a cache of rotten apples he kept in a drawer.
Have rotting apples popped up in 43 Folders yet? I suffer from all these distractions and all the 2.0 ones too. If I have to write something properly I do it in writeroom but it still doesn't stop me rushing to google stuff every five minutes. I keep thinking that I'll fire up my Mac Classic and write everything on there. The only problem will be getting it off.
Page 112
“One of my unfailing minor pleasures may seem dull to more energetic souls: opening the mail….Living in an advanced industrial civilization is a kind of near-conquest over the unexpected…Such efficiency is of course admirable. It does not, however, by its very nature afford scope to that perverse human trait, still not quite eliminated, which is pleased by the accidental. Thus to many tame citizens like me the morning mail functions as the voice of the unpredictable and keeps alive for a few minutes a day the keen sense of the unplanned and the unplannable."
That's the author quoting her father. Great stuff. I don't find the mail delivers the pleasingly accidental to our house, it's mostly desperately predictable. But the web does. RSS does. Radio still does. I like that.
Page 186
By the most conservative estimates, London had five hundred coffeehouses at the turn of the eighteenth century. (If New York City were similarly equipped today, it would have nearly eight thousand.) These weren’t merely places to drink the muddy liquid that one critic likened to “syrup of soot or essence of old shoes.” In the days when public libraries were none existent and journalism was in its embryonic stages, they were a vital center of news, gossip and education – “penny universities” whose main business, in the words of a 1657 newspaper ad, was PUBLICK INTERCOURSE.
London had a coffeehouse for everyone (as long as you were male). If you were a gambler, you went to White’s. If you were a physician, you went to Garraway’s or Child’s. If you were a businessman you went to Lloyd’s, which later evolved into the great insurance house. If you were a scientist, you went to the Grecian, where Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, and Hans Sloane once staged a public dissection of a dolphin that had been caught in the Thames. If you were a journalist, you went to to Burton’s where Joseph Addison had set up a ‘Reader’s Letter-box' shaped liked a lion’s head: you would post submissions to The Guardian in its mouth.
As you can probably tell by now, I don't actually have that much to add about these excerpts. They're so useful and complete in themselves. But if you get the chance to get hold of At Large And At Small I encourage you to do so. It's particularly good on the pleasures and perils of collecting, and on coffee and on ice-cream.