I esSAY THERE -- The ring of it sounds more like stuff from a previous era than what Goggle is wont to take you to.

Quite so.  For I esSAY THERE is a pun built from P.G. Wodehouse.  He was a writer popular in the first part of the 20th century, who wrote with the ring of late 19th century Edwardian Jeevesian England, as unlikely as, but less mystical than, Harry Potterian England.  Even into the 1940s Wodehouse was often featured in the long-gone “Saturday Evening Post,” which, as a kid, I read as eagerly as anything, with Jeeves and Bertie Wooster saying things like “I say there, old boy (man, chap).”

So a pun on Wodehouse gave me my site’s name, but the tone and style, certainly the autocratic mood, are from O. W. Holmes, especially from his book, The Autocrat of The Breakfast Table, written before I was born.  The Autocrat is still in my library whose shelves take up more space than our entertainment center.

My outlook and perspective and philosophy are also 19th century, but rooted more in E.G. White than O.W. Holmes, and immune to the other late 19th century trendsetters such as Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud, although, as comes through loud and clear in these essays and certainly in this introduction, my style is pure Freudean “free association.”  But the flippancy and jerkiness of style, which would leave Holmes and White panting, that’s pure 21st century.

That’s no doubt because I was born and raised in North Hollywood, just a mile or so down the road from Universal Studios, then a real movie studio, not a theme park.  From our house we would see, just over the Hollywood Hills, the mighty carbon-arc floodlights splitting the night sky to herald another Premier featuring Clark Gable or Greta Garbo.  Like Plato's divine Form, Hollywood emanates itself, powerfully, more powerfully than the swinging floodlights.  Curly haired blond toddlers cuter than Jackie Coogan at the time, I and my brother even took a screen test, for parts in, surely, The Little Rascals.  We flunked.  Romans 8:28. Amen

Now dragooned into the 21st century, which has updated and spun the 20th and given the finger to the 19th, I feel stretched over 3 centuries in time and a millennium in culture, quite a stretch.  And thanks to computer technology I never dreamed of when, at age 14, I took a class in typing to learn to use a keyboard, and banged hard at an old Royal Standard upright, it all comes together right here at -- bookmark this -- www.iessaythere.com.

An “about me” (jobs, education, profession, certifications, honors, philosophy, biases) is due.  But you can read all that in my obit, soon to be playing in my Alumni Journal or a church bulletin near you. Right now suffice it to say that, of the list (jobs, education, profession, honors, etc.,…biases), all apply (I’m a retired MD, pathologist, professor prone to ramble but granted a couple of “Best Teacher” plaques anyway, and so forth), especially the biases, unabashedly old ones.

I’m not selling anything you’d need Paypal for. What I’m selling are essays (my wife calls them "Wessays.")  No novels.  I do not see the novel as the most glorious literary output known to man, and it's not simply because I have a short attention span.  I’ve come to regard a diet of total fiction devoid of all natural ingredients as unhealthy for your brain.  But I’ll acknowledge that my line between creativity and fiction becomes blurred.  Some of these pieces, nominally essays, do break over to a greater or lesser degree into fiction and surrealism. But this is my style, the only style I have, whereby to get my point across.  Although some were written just for the joy of writing and the figures of speech burgeon and take over, most of my essays are for making a point. But they aren’t for selling my concepts or opinions or logic or politics or religion, just to ventilate them, whimsically and wheezily.  Without interruption for discussion.

"Discussion," Oh, the rhapsodic praises of "discussion."  It's what the world needs even more than love-love-love.  In fact the two are too often mutually exclusive.   Believing Christians who succumb to the  invitation to discuss, like the Satanic Snake issued to Eve in the Garden, wind up doubters as Eve did.  Me, I virtually never comment on anybody's essays, and in response to mine invite none.  And Tweets, especially if #MeToo or from the Tweeter in Chief at 3:00 A.m., do indeed shake the world, but I'm not out to rock the boat much less the world.  If it's tweet- or blog-toned hot quickies you go to while skipping the essays, check my Short Shrifts.  In fact I'm renaming the section SHORT SHRIFTS/TWEETS, as of today, November 19, 2017.

But I also offer art -- paintings and drawings, that I have done.  But of course essays are attached.  At this point a curious  dichotomy emerges: as an artist, I eschew surrealism and allegory.  I'm as literal a portraitist as they get, barring a hint of Sargentoid subliminal impressionism.  But in writing, the opposite.  A sort of surrealism is what I naturally come up with, surrealism composed of hyperbole and no end of synecdoche.

Anyway, I’m now pushing the far end of my crotchety Octogenariancy and about ready to check into the strange land of nonagenariancy.  I don’t try to hide it.  Old age is my gimmick, like hyperbole and synecdoches.   An 8-year-old wants the world to know how young and vulnerable and wise she is, doesn’t she?  In her every letter to Santa Clause, or in memes on facebook, or to the NYT editor the first sentence is “I’m an 8-year old girl.  And then the message (“I’m dying of terminal cancer, and homophobia and hemophilia and intolerance and economic and marriage inequality make me sick and if I don't save the planet who will?”).  MeToo!  I seize the opportunity, the second to be offered a person in a lifetime, to flaunt old age.  Hear me roar (deaf people speak too loud): I’m as good as 90 years old.  Please see my hearing aids, crotchetiness and dated perspective, if not (yet) terminal cancer.

Existing on the planet for so long has provided lots of time to enjoy and be influenced by other writers and essayists (not novelists, sorry),  necessarily of a certain style and orientation, whom I now duly acknowledge,  starting with SDA authors, notably  E.G. White.  A 19th century author, her style is hardly pop, and anyway is rather more devotional than analytic, but somehow  to me charming, subtly but relentlessly growing on me.  I could never write like her.  I believe she was inspired; I'm not. But I never tire of reading her (as I never tire of Isaiah), always finding startlingly simple sentences, not lurid ways of proclaiming a truth I'd never caught before, crucial truths.   But one thing she isn't is a philosopher.  To that species I'm immune, certainly to Derrida if not quite to Plato, but at the mercy of one of the 20th century's greatest if least recognized, Charles Schulz speaking through Charlie Brown and Snoopy, just as Samuel Beckett spoke through Vladimir and Estragon, or Plato through Socrates.

Now then, for style per se and sometimes even content, I admire certain essayists: E.B. White and E.G. White (what a difference one initial makes! ); The older I get the more I admire C.S. Lewis’s essays.  Buckley, wasn't he the one with the flammivomous vocabulary?

A cutely crabby curmudgeon I am.  A cursing curmudgeon, not quite.  Crotchety I may be but not venomous.   Crankier I may have grown in old age, but mellower.  I sing the Song of the Long-of-tooth, not the screech of the saber tooth.  I’m not quite edentulous but quite toothless.   While many of my essays herein are justified jeremiads against cosmic offense, getting worse by the day, I’d like to think they are sweet toots rather than Trump tweets.  If to your ears they sound downright grumpy, I missed the boat and am down there wallowing in the whale.

The early 20th century curmudgeony style I cut my teeth on was flowery and unhurried.   Nowadays opinions have gone minimalist – subsisting on a diet of 4-letter words.  Four-letter words sound so wickedly powerful.  Actually they are wimpy, the easy out, not formally minimalist but pathetically bony and impoverished, piddly and paltry.  A rationed, starvation diet.  Why settle for a diet of Spam?  Long words, those you might have to look up, open a cornucopia of syllables and nuances, empowering the precise meaning you want.  I go for long words.

I aim for smirks at the extreme, not belly laughs.  I couldn't crack you up or lay you in the isles banging the floor if I wanted to.  I tend to admire the combination, achieved only by virtuosos (of which I am not chief), of evenness and even-handedness and wit, of which the pun, even the rhymed pun, was once prime.  Which makes me think of Dorothy Parker’s “Men seldom make passes/at girls who wear glasses.”  Nowadays girls wear contacts.  For eye contact?  Nowadays even-handedness is out of style  So are girls wearing glasses  And we have postmodernism which has replaced wit with whimsy, which in postmodernists’ hands is ham-handedness.

Being a physician, I feel a fanciful kinship with physician-essayists, which is one reason I cherish O.W. Holmes, MD, Dean of Harvard Medical School, and Lewis Thomas,  MD, Dean of Yale Medical School and resident essayist for the New England Journal of Medicine, to which I subscribed for maybe 50 years and read as avidly as the New Yorker.  Charles Krauthammer is another word-processing MD, a trained psychiatrist.  Certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and the American Board of Columnists (why not?), Krauthammer is a practicing columnist subspecializing in politics.  Essays and columns are different but widely overlapping things; psychiatry and politics are essentially congruent.

Now then, I write from my spleen, sometimes even brain, mostly from funny bone with tongue in cheek (I’m anatomically oriented, being an old doc).  I write from my heart, my soul, my bowels, my kidneys (being KJV-Biblically and age-oriented).

I’m hellbent on perfecting a sentence, a trope, a pun, not a concept or, as a PhD would say, conceit, although I don’t mind toying with one or two now and again.  I’m more interested in having the sentence fall trippingly from the tongue than tripping you up; in turning a phrase, not opinions.

And sometimes a kind of rhythm and rhyme sets in, alliteration takes over, and the sentences sprout phrases upon clauses, piggy-back and marsupialized, mutated and ramified, trailing off into the fog, all it took to qualify as poetry in the 19th century, as I learned in Miss Speh’s English Lit class 70 years ago.

Alas and alack, my essays come out somewhere between rant and romp.  I cross my fingers and hope my non sequiturs will be at least cohesive.

Fine, but what about the title of this piece, "readMe?"  Being  shamefully whimsical I’ve adopted README to title this start-here page and all my chapter prefaces.   ReadMe, that's nerd-talk from way back when computers were just starting, back in the days of DOS, necessarily telegraphically abbreviated and brusque.  In those no-nonsense days ReadMe meant you’d better read this or your computer will crash.    And another notice would pop into your face: ILLEGAL ACTION!  That was then.  Now in this technologically advanced and inexplicably sensitive era your screen will inform you so delicately that a Hallmark card would blush that "We apologize profusely if this is offensive to you but we are required by law to tell you that what you have just done is so far from the norm that you're breaking your dear motherboard's heart."    ReadMe's, like any kind of reading, especially essays, are history. So out of style is the dear old readMe that it's an attention grabber.  And I sure want your attention.

And for those vanishingly few unique people who still delight in essays, and apologies to those who are ignorant of, or despise them, I offer I esSAY THERE.

 

 

Wesley Kime

2012, 2013, 2016, 2017; rewritten 2018