process, practice, preparation, performance, learning, teaching ("vs.") product, status, power, the "impersonal," heaven, god
Still, it's good to make a living
the digression or tangent or
association vs. an equally subjective linear arrangment
collage, mosaic, montage, assemblage vs. treatise
Roman numeral outlines
languages of power, ideolects,
dialects, markers
indepedent labels and major labels
live vs. recorded
mistakes; hidden mistakes, corrected
mistakes
playing scales and a few bars over
and over
ideal, perfect vs. actual
the essay-as-genre, form, ontological
mode, epistemological mode ("vs.") the verdict, judgement, questions
with "yes-no" answers
Lukacs: "the essential, the
value-determining thing about the essay is not the verdict, as is the case with
the system, but the process of judging" ("On the Nature and Form of
the Essay")
Nacmanovitch essay, "The Power
of Limits"
cf. the beginning of George Steiner's
Real Presences: the primary text, the primary work as opposed to all secondary
commentary except for descriptive comments
Plato's Republic: what artistic,
literary forms we should admit into the ideal republic--poems and songs
praising virtuous role models, or the poems of Homer
"the personal" or private
as opposed to the public, the political
partial, fragmentary, as opposed to
totalizing modes of thought and philosophy (the treatise, the system)
recursivity, a-linearity vs.
linearity
form: Montaignean vs. Ciceronian
avoiding binaries, oppositions
"negative space"?
"what gets left on the cutting
room floor"
the "petit recit"
("the disproportionate power of the small") as opposed to the
"gran recit"
Van Gogh's last painting and dying in
poverty as opposed to his paintings selling a century later for millions
the primary, lived experience vs.
commentaries
in praise of the impure--cf. Primo
Levi
"In Praise of Shadows,"
Junichiro Tanizaki
inductive vs. deductive modes of
reasoning, thinking; drawing a generalization from particulars, as opposed to
proceeding from a theory to make the particulars fit the theory
theory, generalization as opposed to
that which doesn't fit the generalization
"showing and telling"
"telling rather than showing" "showing"
an adjective as opposed to specifics,
particulars
winning vs. losing;
"agon"--for every winner in every contest, competition, there has to
be a loser
Phillip Lopate: the essayist's
"circling"--cf. Montaigne, "On Some Verses of Virgil"
Medieval vs. Renaissance
temporary, ephemeral vs.
"permanent"
