Word: hoaglands
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Idioms and details, though are hardly enough of a foundation on which to construct a personal essay. Rather, as Hoagland points out in a short piece in the book specifically on the form of the essay, the critical ingredient is the quality of mind the essayist impresses on the work. Of course, this is no different from any form of literary expression Yet, the personal essay differs from the short story in the way it communicates its truth a difference which roughly mirrors that between plain speech and storytelling. Even the most inept can usually keep from bludgeoning beyond recognition...
...DOES HOAGLAND have that elusive bent of mind. The answer which rises out of The Tugman's Passage is a very qualified yes. Hoagland has a small measure of that extraordinarily rare common sense... the kind which seems so utterly obvious once we have encountered it and cannot image the ignorance we bore earlier--which one senses in Thoreau, Orwell, and occasionally, E B White Hence. Hoagland's best stuff in The Tugman's Passage, the two essays "The Ridge-Slope Fox and the Knife Thrower" and "Women and Men," sparkle...
...Women and Men." Hoagland sets about the uneasy task of trying to assess the changing character of sex roles today. Typically, a Hoagland essay is not an argument but a ramble over the terrain, and this essay's apparent meandering belies its thoughtfulness. Jumping adroitly from a concern that old male heroes may soon lapse from memory to a thankfulness that barriers to equal treatment under the law are falling to a meditation on the wondrous attraction of the sexes. Hoagland appears an artful stone-stepper in the twins streams of technology and women's liberation. He muses. "Technology...
...sets of interlocking parts is unpleasant at best. And the concomitant question of how members of both sense may be increasingly becoming sexual objects instead of people--a development growing ironically out of re-called liberating forces of birth control and sexual freedom--leaves one unsettled. Hoagland deals with both delicately and undogmatically, indeed, with an honest degree of personal uncertainty...
...Ridge-Slope Fox and the Knife Thrower" in both the book's best and most freewheeling essay. In it Hoagland seems more than anything else to meditate simply and carefully on the complexity of life. Again leaping from one topic to the next, he exults in his sightings of animals while wondering if he will catch a glimpse of the fox and then considers what an ordeal solitude actually is, despite its perverse and mostly pseudo-intellectual glamour. Then he considers the differences of life in the city and the country (it is not exactly that life is slow...