I recently had the pleasure of interviewing the writer Eula Biss in a sauna. (I bought a sauna for reasons I’ll explain in another post.) As one of the most insightful and rigorous essayists practicing in the US, Eula has given many interviews over the years in which she talks deeply about race, vaccination, inequality, and capitalism. This interview is a little different, besides being hotter and sweatier. Some of the questions it takes up:
Why did it take Eula Biss months to write a single sentence?
Why might lyrical language be considered a liability in nonfiction writing?
What got lost when The New Yorker asked Eula to cut 10,000 words?
Why is the moment we’re living in now SO TERRIBLE?
Will I ever let Eula adjust the temperature?
You can listen to the full conversation above. Here’s the paragraph we end up discussing from her essay “The Theft of the Commons.”
On the train to Laxton I was facing backward, heading south from Scotland, with the fields of England rushing away from me. I searched their dark creases and their uneven hedges for something I didn’t know how to see, something I wasn’t even certain was visible. I was trying to locate the origins of private property, a preposterous pursuit. There in those hedges, I was looking for a living record of enclosure, the centuries-long process by which land once collectively worked by the landless was claimed by the landed. That land already belonged to the landed, in the old sense of ownership, but it had always been used by the landless, who belonged to the land. The nature of ownership changed within the newly set hedges of an enclosed field, where the landowner now had the exclusive right to dictate how the land was used, and no one else belonged there.
If you’re alone right now, and disinhibited, read that paragraph aloud. It’s pretty amazing.
I highly recommend Eula’s books Having and Being Had, On Immunity, and Notes from No Man’s Land. And if you’re like, “Sara, I don’t got time to read three new books; I’m trying to save democracy,” check out her recent piece, “Love and Murder in South Africa.”
That’s all for this week, but please let me know: is it helpful to hear about other writers’ sentence trouble? How much heat do I need to bring to Delusions of Grammar? Should I invite all my interview subjects to get naked?
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