#inaugral

[danjconn]

Day 7 of our #Christmas #advent #calendar things! @skyniceland Berry lip fix for her and @quartzbrewing #Inaugral #craft #lager for me! #makeup #bestofbritishbeer https://www.instagram.com/p/BrF0yXkg2xt/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=ay92trgl4cdu

[lanreobey]

All my mom reached to support...it's forever a matriarchy thing. Feel no ways if you never reached, there's always next time.🖕#swrongwithsomepeople Salute and moor love the the ones that forward. Every single support is a personal validation from y'all. #moorishrenaissance #5principlescuisines #inaugral #veganbrunch #ohyeah #nuhbegnuhfren

[benedictmazurek]

No words can even help me portray what I feel for her. #inaugral #love #1year (at The Federal Bar)

[nkkamleshkumar]

Feeling awesome......... #Treasurer #mechanical #inaugral #session😊

[awanderrings]

Inaugral Song of the Week (Wednesday Edition - 10/10/2012)

The Falls - Girl That I Love

"Because I saw them play last Sunday and they were lovely and said they were thinking of coming back and playing at the Grace or the Reading Room." ~ Gabby

[boogying-with-stu]

The Inaugural Post

Inaugural, unless you count the Spongebob pic ... Which I apparently don't. Hey, it's my party, I can make no sense if I want to.

Graham Good's "The Observing Self: Rediscovering the essay". Maybe not what I'd recommend to next month's book club, but as a scholarly article, it wasn't terrible. Oh, unless you count the fact that it seemed to be defeating the purpose that it was trying to forward, that an essay is a legitimate piece of literature. There was none of that personal experience that he so highly touted, no "knowledge of the moment", not the faintest whisper of an "intellectual poem". No, it rather read like a scholarly article, a "systematic ambition" to exactly define what an essay is. Maybe I'm being harsh on old Graham, but I thought the job could be better done by someone who was ... well, not doing the complete opposite of it. Or maybe this was some terribly clever, paradoxical approach to "rediscovering the essay", like, "rediscover exactly what a personal essay isn't and we'll go from there!". Maybe.

It is one thing to say that an essay "is spontaneous and unsystematic, and accepts its  occasional, even accidental, nature" and another to actually do it. The "doctrine and discipline" that he is laying down for us here, his 25 page long description of what essays should be like, is, straight from the horse's mouth "inimical to the spirit of the essay". *The following paid for in part by Thesaurus.com* Inimical, antagonistic, destructive, noxious to the very thing I think he was trying to describe. How could he have succeeded, against such odds? And that is why I struggled through this article.

I struggled with the way he tried to accomplish legitimizing the essay, by doing this completely opposite thing, this thing that is the very thing that decides that essays are illegitimate in the first place. This scholarly article thing. Sometimes this whiff of negative connotation wafted up from the page to tickle and annoy my nostrils, that essays are "limited", "non-transferable", that he chose not to write one because of these very reasons, that he was trying to legitimize the form and couldn't by just actually writing one. And that rather bugged me. That was rather like copping out, if you ask me. You say so much about the essay Graham Good, and I must believe you have written them before to be so familiar, yet you cannot use the form to teach the form, to discover it, to legitimize it? 

I'm not demonizing what he tried to do, in fact there can be honor in such a suicide mission, and I can see the point in "sleeping with the enemy". I'm not debunking all the claims he made about the personal essay, which especially after today's class I find myself having to contemplate more. I'm not saying the man didn't make some good points either. My copy is indeed highly highlighted in highlighter yellow. I marked the sentences that did hit my soul of souls, like "An open mind confronts an open reality" (can anyone say, new quote under the blog name? #noshame) and I marked the sentences where that badgering whiff I mentioned earlier rose up to incessantly agitate me until I could sneeze it all out onto this blog post. And it feels so good, exactly like that warm, satisfied feeling after a sneeze, but thankfully without all the gooey, slimy stuff. Well, we'll see. Who knows what can happen when you're living in the wonderful world of essays.