Thread by @dean_frey

Reading Brian Dillon's Essayism: On Form, Feeling, And Nonfiction
amzn.to/2Wz9IdS
I love the cover: Helen Martin's Scalloped scum and tender shoots, 2016. A perfect choice for Dillon's themes.

Brian Dillon's essay On Fragments begins with a Friedrich Schlegel quote:
"Many of the works of the ancients have become fragments. Many modern works are fragments as soon as they are written."
& a reference to Henry Fuseli, The Artist Overwhelmed by the Grandeur of Ancient Ruins

"The fragment stands alone but speaks, or must be made to speak by a reader, to the fragments that surround it. The essay is often itself a fragment, or it may be made of fragments."
- Brian Dillon
📷 Stuart Franklin
Fragments in the Campidoglio museum, Rome, 2002

"I like the idea of the essay as a kind of *conglomerate*: an aggregate either of diverse materials or disparate ways of saying the same or similar things."
- Brian Dillon
📷 Herbert List, Parthenon column fragments, 1937

Brian Dillon's essay On Fragments sent me to Friedrich Schlegel's Athenaeum Fragments & Critical Fragments. Schlegel would have killed on Twitter!
"It's indelicate to be astonished when something is beautiful or great; as if it could really be any different."
🎨Stefano Bianchetti

"People always talk about how an analysis of the beauty of a work of art supposedly disturbs the pleasure of the art lover. Well, the real lover just won't let himself be disturbed!"
Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments
📷 John Rawlings, Mother & daughter at MOMA, Vogue, 1948

"A dialogue is a chain or garland of fragments. An exchange of letters is a dialogue on a larger scale, and memoirs constitute a system of fragments..."
- Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments

📷 Constantine Manos
Venice Beach, California, 1997

"But as yet no genre exists that is fragmentary both in form & content, simultaneously completely subjective and individual, & completely objective & like a necessary part in a system of all the sciences."
- Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments
Saul Steinberg, @NewYorker, 1978

"Up to now everyone has managed to find in the ancients what he needed or wished for: especially himself."
- Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments
📷 Herbert List
Greek Sphinx at the Villa San Michele, Capri, 1932

"German parties are serious; their comedies and satires are serious; their criticism is serious; all of their belles lettres are serious. Must anything amusing in this nation always be either unconscious or involuntary?"
- Friedrich Schlegel
📷Matt Stuart
Dusseldorf Airport, 2017

Back to Brian Dillon's Essayism. "On the Detail" includes a most enthusiastic review of Maeve Brennan, especially her @NewYorker pieces as "The Long-Winded Lady." What a fascinating writer! And she looks exactly as I imagined her, in this 1945 photo from a Nina Leen Life feature.

Maeve Brennan by Nina Leen for Life Magazine, 1945
Dillon calls her fiction "quiet & spare & precisely imagined. But it is her essays I love..."

Angela Bourke, in her biography Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the New Yorker, speculates that Brennan was the inspiration for Truman Capote's Holly Golightly.
According to New Yorker editor William Maxwell, "To be around Brennan was to see style invented."
amzn.to/2WwMOUE

Maeve Brennan about 1948, photographed by Karl Bissinger in the New York apartment of the theatre critic Thomas Quinn Curtiss. That's also the source of the photo on the cover of Bourke's biography.