Occasional desire
Subtitle: essays
By: David Lazar
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 218
ISBN-13: 9780803246386
Subjects: Essay; American essays
Work titles: Essays
Description: In his new collection of essays, Occasional Desire, David Lazar meditates on random violence and vanished phone booths, on the excessive relationship to jewelry that links Kobe Bryant and Elizabeth Taylor, on Hitchcock, Francis Bacon, and M. F. K. Fisher. He explores, in his concentrically self-aware, amused, and ironic voice, what it means to be occasionally aware that we are surviving by our wits, and that our desires, ulterior or obvious, are what keep us alive. Lazar also turns his attention on the essay itself, affording us a three-dimensional look at the craft and the art of reading and writing a literary form that maps the world as it charts the peregrinations of the mind.
Table of contents: title: Calling for his past; title: Manhattan cab; title: Across the river; title: The city always speaks: London, New York, San Francisco; title: The coat; title: Occasional desire: on the essay and the memoir; title: Queering the essay; title: Reading "New Year's eve"; title: Playing ourselves: pseudodocumentary and persona; title: The useable past of M.F.K. Fisher: an essay on projects; title: On mentors; title: On dating; title: Death, death, death, death, death; title: On gifts; title: Self-portrait: Francis Bacon's deformity; title: On the art of survival: North by northwest.