![]() ![]() ![]() Essayism (2017) leads with a list of topics of famous essays (without identifying it as such): ‘On the death of a moth, humiliation, the Hoover Dam and how to write an inventory of objects on the author’s desk, and an account of wearing spectacles…’. ![]() Consider the openings of his last three books. His books often begin with a flourish that plants the reader a touch mystified in medias res, a dramatic overture that inducts you to his theme by instantiating it. A meticulous, vigilant, in many ways immaculate stylist, he copies out stylish passages, sentences and phrases he comes across in his reading, and keeps a list of ‘words to be looked up, words to be used, words merely to be admired’.ĭillon is fond, too, of the outgoing and disorientating opener. Dillon also likes lists themselves, and is always making lists of things he likes. ![]() That is a list, more or less verbatim, of some of the unlikely – or not so unlikely – qualities and features that the Irish-born critic and essayist Brian Dillon prizes in writing, or as he often prefers to say, ‘loves’ in or ‘wants from’ it. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |