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The Age of the Essay

Posted by michael on from the 500-words-or-more dept.

bluFox writes "Paul Graham, has just published a new article on the English literature and role of Essays. It is not connected to lisp or languages or hackers for a change, but still feels like a continuation of his earlier articles."

2 of 286 comments (clear)

  1. Re:His question about Humor. by lawpoop · · Score: 2, Informative
    "Basically Heinlein was of the opinion (and I agree) that it is ONLY misfortune that we find funny."

    I disagree about the only. I think there are two parts to humor, misfortune and puns. As I paraphrase from the 2000-year-old man, "A hangnail for me is a tragedy. If you fall down a manhole, now that's comedy!" But there are also linguistic jokes that don't necessarily involve tragedy, yet people still find them funny.

    --
    Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
    -- Pablo Picasso
  2. Re:Why is this on Slashdot? by bugbear · · Score: 3, Informative
    There is a big connection to the Internet, if not to hackers per se. Roughly that blogs will lead to a renaissance in the essay.


    I went back and forth about mentioning blogs by name, because not everything people publish on their own site is really "blogging" in the strict sense. "Blog" implies "log", which implies a time quantum of less than a day. Whereas it takes me weeks to write an essay.


    Here's a footnote I commented out that made the connection to the Web more explicit:


    When I first heard about blogs, I imagined they would be a complete waste of time. Blogging sounded like a long-play version of netnews. But I was mistaken; people care more about something that stays on their site, and the Web supplies a filter that's missing in newsgroups. The best writing online is not only better than netnews, but better than most print media.