In the spirit of this opportunity, I took a few moments just now to reread those essays. There is a problem. The online reading experience, I've discovered, is much different from my experience reading these essays out of a slim paperback while sitting alongside the Charles River. I could blame the specific problem on a number of minor issues - the formatting, for example, squeezed the text into the middle third of the webpage, necessitating constant action on my part to keep scrolling into unread territory. I could also blame the familiar low-grade internet anxiety that comes from being focused on one link for more than a minute or two, knowing all the while that potentially more interesting options were just a click away. But these are trivial matters - they make up the cost of doing business via the internet, where everything is free if you can stay focused. The problem I discovered has to do with the pair of images, one in each essay, which broke up the writing. In my eyes, these small interruptions diminished the essays in comparison to the versions I read from the paperback.
In the first essay, the interruption is a paragraph-sized fleuron, followed by the caption: "A fleuron, a typographic marker sometimes used as an inline paragraph break"; I guess the other times it's used as a paragraph-sized image. It strikes me that a better way to communicate the idea might have been to actually use the fleuron as an inline paragraph break, for which there are several opportunities throughout the essay, but those who've read the essay will know why this wouldn't work. Early on, Gabbert notes her obsession with "invisible transitions"; she later adds that "it’s in the essays that don’t use section signs that I appreciate the transitions most". The reason Gabbert would prefer to omit the fleuron in this particular work is evident to anyone who read the work; I'm getting the impression that maybe this image appearing in the middle of the essay wasn't the author's idea.
The image in the second essay was far less confusing - the thoughtfully edited Monopoly board ties back to the first idea in the work, which Gabbert traces through the opening paragraphs. As it relates to the idea of the image being relevant within the work, this example passes the test. The problem was the timing - at the point where the Luxury Tax image fills the screen, the essay has subtly drifted away from the initial thought about money, instead refocusing on its relationship to time ("time has become expensive"). By the time we reach the end of the essay, it's clear at best that the image is more of an improvised aside rather than part of the script; at worst it feels like an unfortunate distraction, conspiring against any reader who started the essay with the anticipation of discovery.
This problem may very well be mine and mine alone. It may be different for you, reader, as you encounter these essays for the first time. I have come to these works from a different perspective - the ancient land of books, where images stay on the cover and each fleuron is the right size, mite-sized. There are no tour guides strolling the boardwalk, distracting me with their uninvited references to cultural relics. When I read these essays, I did so with the goal of seeing the world through the writer's eyes, and participating in the process of making new connections. I discovered that a fork helps bounce ideas around a table with the same joyful spontaneity once generated by a paddle, and realized that seeing the invisible is less fun when the hidden is brought into plain sight. I feel like the lottery winner holding the big check in front of the cameras, with the jackpot yet unadjusted for those inevitable taxes - I'm still happy about this prize, these links to the essays I enjoyed from my reading, but it's not quite as good as I'd hoped.
