Turn Scraps Into Gems

by Grace Byron

A syllabus in footnotes on the possibilities of the essay. 

A good book of essays is best accompanied by a black coffee and a good walk. The bookstore is always your first stop after filling a maroon-colored paper cup at the corner store. Reeling from some disappointment, familial or romantic, you are looking for words to make up for absence. Often you take a woman author’s oeuvre in your hand, like a babe with colic. Let it cry in your ear about hurt that stretches across history. 

Your computer has crashed. You are going to this bookstore to remember that the articles you’ve bookmarked online are not the only portals to new worlds. The essay is not only a hyperlink. The essay is a garden. You can harvest praxis, divinity, and psychic intrigue. Dash across the forest floor like a poet, scribbling about the geese squawking in anger.1 Collect lists and analyze the contents of a steely woman’s suitcase.2 Analyze the writer’s routine while on holiday.3 Turn scraps into gems.  

The bookstore cat sniffs your coffee, prodding the dark liquid with her whiskers. If she disappears you would have an existential fit. You would write about her.4 Sometimes when you think of cats, you think of the woman who went to Puget Sound to be a martyr. Dismissed, like all good essays, as “diaristic,” her slim volume was an ax that split open the terror of God. In her cannon, animals aren’t familiars or friends.5 They are the beauty of brutality incarnate. But just the same you like cats. Nearly every modern writer does. 

Hands caress the water-damaged pages of a tiny little collection of books by the saint who loved forest fires and eschatology.6 Every good critic brings together disparate ideology to plague our optimistic fantasies with rumination. Some of the best do this through music, carrying a tune that ponders the nuclear family’s instability across blue nights.7 They may dramatize the essay as a stage play: a battleground of selves.8 Family is always in the back of your mind.9 The ultimate attempt is the attempt of a family. Or so we’re taught. What better essay subject than the failed attempt? 

You remember talking on the phone to your mother recently.10 As she spoke about the heatwaves, you thought about the author whose mother’s death drove her to Antarctica.11 How far can you vanish into the blank page? Your mother did not tell you the history of your state. You had to unlearn the myth of progress outside the family unit. She didn’t talk about the Gold Rush or the Donner Party. Nor any party for that matter. The romance of the Great Wide World was just another blank myth. So you wrote that down too.12 Disillusionment is the greatest weapon of the essayist. Discernment her artillery. 

As your mom began slipping away, you shaved her face. When you saw a fellow transsexual at the Communist Party, the “bluish tinge” of her face made you think of your mother.13 You think about that as you walk out of the bookstore holding another book on memory. Every essay deals with loss one way or another. Something’s always slipping away. But loss too can be pleasurable, finding the slippage of bliss, boredom, and lullaby: “I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.”14 

Your phone beeps, someone is yelling on the internet again. This time you pay attention because it is about you, the one who reads and writes essays. “Arts criticism is dying!” There is no longer a singular way to become a critic cause célèbre.15 No publication or byline can elevate you to the level of the Intellectual. Some say the critic has lost her hold on the popular imagination. Will we ever have our next Susan Sontag? Perhaps you have to be content with what you have, a slim amount of bylines while privately bemoaning, like Sontag, that “it’s not as good as Walter Benjamin, is it?”16

After a few blocks you finish your hazelnut coffee and dump it in the nearest trash can. The leaves are crinkling under foot. It’s fall. It’s always fall. The book about memory in your hand reminds you of your ex. The one who turned you onto the author in the first place. All good literature is about cruising.17 The endless amount of exes can drive you crazy. Sometimes you go down to Coney Island in the gray fog just to escape it all. Doesn’t matter how cold, you just want to stare at the waves and recall each of their beds.18 The bric-a-brac on their side tables always stays with you. One of your exes was obsessed with Nabokov. He always wanted to modernize him, to bring out all the chessboards and the lepidopterist ephemera to write something about borders and the American obsession with diners.19 Every essayist is plagued by a frustrated essayist, someone else they are competing with in order to Say Something. You both end up eating a lot of moths in the process of chasing butterflies. 

Some people just always seem to know how to say something, you think as you light a cigarette. Their cool cynicism pervades all else. Sometimes you walk out of a movie theater and instantly have an idea. After all, a good essay is multi-hyphenated. It doesn’t just water the seedlings found in other books, it connects books to films, childhood memories, wounds of mothers and fathers, pop songs, or illuminates some political context. “Hot take? Nah. Cool, give,” your friend says.20 A good take on the world lets cherry blossoms bloom, not rot. Putting ice on the frost of nihilism never helped anyone learn something new.21

Women are often the author and the subject of the essay. Women liking women,22 women hating women, women hating men,23 men denigrating women, women fucking men,24 women considering the death of the moth.25 26 These are sometimes incredibly lengthy and beautiful ways to say I am hurt. Essays, like theory, are about how we live together. Sometimes the embodiment of our loneliness can be expelled by prose. Sometimes it leaps up and into our lives, chasing us to the bookstore to buy up everything such an author can write. You have had this happen many times. A woman’s thoughts on women and men27 have slapped you awake and made you reconsider your body and the pharmaceutical industry.28 Longing like dormant geysers. 

You throw the cigarette on the sidewalk and stamp it out. A cherry tree’s petals are flooding your block, burying a sedan in pale pink. You wind back to your apartment, consider grabbing a second coffee but decide against it, and try to find your keys at the bottom of your bag. As you’re rummaging around a stray cat mews as if in pain. You reach down to pet her and think she looks an awful lot like the cat from the bookstore. You bring her inside and she doesn’t seem feral. Quickly she speeds across the room, crashing around plants and tripping your roommate. (You can’t afford your own place on a freelancer’s salary.)29 After a few minutes of circus chaos, you take her to your room and examine her. She’s a black cat with a few white spots. Her green eyes tenderly peer at you. She’s terrified. You name her Pard, like a leopard, and she starts clacking the keys on your laptop. She would like to write an essay. So you start one for her.30

After you close your laptop an hour later, you sit down in your mint green floral armchair and open up the book on memory you bought at the bookstore. The essay you read feels warm like the reverie of an apricot enveloping you. It is about someone who goes to a bookstore and thinks about essays.31 In the end she goes to the kitchen and eats an apricot. So, you too go to the kitchen and eat an apricot, slurping the flesh from the pit and considering why everyday cannot begin and end in such a way.

  1. On Being with Krista Tippett, Mary Oliver, 2015. ↩︎
  2. Essayism, Brian Dillon. ↩︎
  3. “The Writer on Holiday,” Roland Barthes, 1957. ↩︎
  4. “Ersatz Panda,” Lucy Ives, Granta, 2018.  ↩︎
  5. Holy The Firm, Annie Dillard. ↩︎
  6. “—-,” Dillard. ↩︎
  7. Blue Nights, Joan Didion. ↩︎
  8. Constructing a Nervous System, Margo Jefferson. ↩︎
  9. “Composite Case,” Hannah Zeavin, Parapraxis, 2022. ↩︎
  10. Mothers, Jacqueline Rose. ↩︎
  11. Skating to Antarctica, Jenny Diski. ↩︎
  12. Where I Was From, Joan Didion. ↩︎
  13. “I Remain in Darkness,” Annie Ernaux. ↩︎
  14. The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes. ↩︎
  15. “The Aesthetics of Silence,” Susan Sontag. ↩︎
  16. “On the Concept of History,” Walter Benjamin. ↩︎
  17. “—–,” Barthes. ↩︎
  18. Zami, Audre Lorde. ↩︎
  19. “Eat butterflies with me?,” Patricia Lockwood, London Review of Books, 2020. ↩︎
  20. Tweet by Joselia Hughes, “hot take? nah. cool, give!,” April 28, 2021. ↩︎
  21. “Cool Cynicism,” bell hooks, Artforum, 1995. ↩︎
  22. “On Liking Women,” Andrea Long Chu, N+1, 2018. ↩︎
  23. Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin. ↩︎
  24. “Fucking Like a Housewife,” Jamie Hood, The New Inquiry, 2020. ↩︎
  25. “The Death of the Moth,” Virginia Woolf, 1942. ↩︎
  26. “——-,” Dillard. ↩︎
  27. “On Heteropessimism,” Asa Seresin, The New Inquiry, 2019. ↩︎
  28. trans girl suicide museum, Hannah Baer. ↩︎
  29. “The Work You Do, the Person You Are,” Toni Morrison, The New Yorker, 2017. ↩︎
  30. No Time to Spare, Ursula K. LeGuin, see specifically the essays on Pard. ↩︎
  31. “The Worlds of Italo Calvino,” Merve Emre, The New Yorker, 2023. ↩︎

Turn Scraps Into Gems references Hannah Zeavin, another Syllabus contributor.