Star Trek Notebook
Title
Star Trek Notebook
Description
An illustrated Star Trek themed notebook containing Lorna's handwritten notes on the character and future of 'the essay'.
***
'Star Trek was among the very select popular TV series that Lorna used to like to watch. This notebook was a not very serious Christmas present, and in a moment when she must have had no paper to hand, Lorna used it to write this wonderfully succinct account of the essay. Somehow the juxtaposition produces something representative of her humorous, wry tone.'
[STS]
***
'Star Trek was among the very select popular TV series that Lorna used to like to watch. This notebook was a not very serious Christmas present, and in a moment when she must have had no paper to hand, Lorna used it to write this wonderfully succinct account of the essay. Somehow the juxtaposition produces something representative of her humorous, wry tone.'
[STS]
Creator
Lorna Sage
Source
Sharon Tolaini-Sage Private Collection
Publisher
University of East Anglia Archives
Date
199-?
Rights
Sharon Tolaini-Sage Private Collection. All rights reserved.
Format
jpeg image file
Type
Text
Text
The ideal essay - the Platonic ideal of the essay - is empty almost: in fact Plato wouldn't have liked it as a form, it would have struck him as much too equivocal, irresponsible, shifty pseudo-philosophical. But then, so did drama & epic. Basically: the essay is a ‘think-piece’ that wears its learning (deceptively) lightly (lightness was one of the memos Calvino left for this millennium); that seems informal, a spontaneous performance, but is most likely the result of real work, not to mention a long love-affair with language, & wide reading. It's tempting to say that the essayist, the good essayist, is a man (or woman) of letters, but it doesn't help because that too is an elusive & possibly extinct character.
Essays take an overview without belabouring you with all the evidence. They’re sometimes aphoristic. They invest in the notion that if you succeed in saying whatever it is well, if you get the right words on your side, then there must be something in what you’re saying. Essays have affinities, with journalism & reviewing, but it's not the same thing. Only a few, a very few of your ‘pieces’ are essays, it turns out.
I think we are talking here, now, about the essay partly out of nostalgia; it's about to be extinct, or it's a threatened species, dying out of living memory like the last W[orld]-war. But also because, being a kind of fugitive genre or 'kind'; it beckons as a possible ‘home’ to many writers, from Grub Street to academe, from poets to cooks, who are eager to evade labels & definitions. This is probably connected with a feeling that the identities [of] novelist, poet, dramatist, biographer, travel writer, & so on don't work; that genre boundaries are breaking down, that it's all “writing”, textuality, or (even) performance on the page. The essay in this sense has a promise of the new?
Essays take an overview without belabouring you with all the evidence. They’re sometimes aphoristic. They invest in the notion that if you succeed in saying whatever it is well, if you get the right words on your side, then there must be something in what you’re saying. Essays have affinities, with journalism & reviewing, but it's not the same thing. Only a few, a very few of your ‘pieces’ are essays, it turns out.
I think we are talking here, now, about the essay partly out of nostalgia; it's about to be extinct, or it's a threatened species, dying out of living memory like the last W[orld]-war. But also because, being a kind of fugitive genre or 'kind'; it beckons as a possible ‘home’ to many writers, from Grub Street to academe, from poets to cooks, who are eager to evade labels & definitions. This is probably connected with a feeling that the identities [of] novelist, poet, dramatist, biographer, travel writer, & so on don't work; that genre boundaries are breaking down, that it's all “writing”, textuality, or (even) performance on the page. The essay in this sense has a promise of the new?
Original Format
paper
Collection
Tags
Citation
Lorna Sage, “Star Trek Notebook,” HOME, accessed March 28, 2024, https://lornasagearchives.omeka.net/items/show/18.