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November 7, 2026
from Recenses/Recencies: Essays
by Patrick Madden
“I’m just riffing for a moment with the typewriter...”
—Patrick Madden
Patrick Madden’s newest collection of personal essays is a reason for celebration, and anyone who loves the genre should go out and buy it immediately! I try to capture a bit of it here, but, really, you need to read the whole book: the compendium of an essayist’s mind animated in the end by love of the world in all of its complexity.
The Paragraph of the Week
I’m just riffing for a moment with the typewriter, borrowing a small son and dragooning him into burbling over this way and banging with one finger. We get ffff and rrrrr and bmbmbm, which immediately sound jazzy to me, and send me off thinking about the gleaming glimmering horns in the velvet dark of the jazz club in New York that my sister took me into when I was a teenager, and thinking about the jazzy phonemes my kids started off language with when they were little and spent a lot of time humming consonantal bursts and vowelacious arias, and thinking about how maybe typewriters remember what you type with them, maybe they actually steer you in certain directions for their own devious entertainment, and this sets me thinking about my dad teaching me to type with two furious fingers on his old, tall, black, steel typewriter, and the sheaves of love poems he typed to my mom in blazing dripping afternoons in Manila just before he was sure he was about to die in the invasion of Japan. So here, in the space of two minutes, we have leapt from jazz to jazzy infants to intelligent typewriters to a lanky young sergeant hammering words onto infinitesimally thin sheets of onion-skin paper as parakeets and bulbuls yammered outside in the dense heat, words he thought for sure would be his last, words he desperately wanted to get down before he never saw the girl with the hair to her waist and that irresistible overbite ever again. There, in two minutes, are a whole bunch of essay starts. Is there any other form that can go so fast and piercingly and honestly and nattily, cutting holes in your heart along the way? Nah.
—Patrick Madden
Commentary
What is essaying? Well, it is The Paragraph of the Week taken from Patrick Madden”s new book Recenses/Recencies. In fact it is the whole book which commits one act of essaying after another each beginning with the phrase “I have just” which keeps them all in the recent now of Madden’s mind at whimsical work. “I’m just riffing” he writes “for the moment.” Like the same drumbeat in different songs, these verbal riffs are “all subjective,” he writes, “all dependent on context, all coming from somewhere and participating in the milieu.” They are a “tightly controlled weaving,” a “spinning” of “wheels,” an obsession with the “small accidental...details” of his own sentences, and like his mentor Brian Doyle, he is “ravenous of sentences.” He steers clear of political diatribes about the “con man bankrupter caligulous ruin of a person” who is our leader (though he slips in that little zinger) because there is “no me in such essays,” but focuses instead on the personal essayist’s most important job: “to corral bits of raw experience into meaning without inventing scenarios and uncanny coincidences,” creating a verbal brew that, with a little stirring, is “all happening sporadically forever in spite of the inevitable.” Madden’s book both exemplifies and describes the essaying mind that playfully resists, but ultimately succumbs to and earns, profound emotions. So I concur. “Is there any other form that can go so fast and piercingly and honestly and nattily, cutting holes in your heart along the way? Nah.”
—THE
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Announcements
The Beloved Republic Recognized
by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
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Closes Book Publication Arm
The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
All of the press's publications are still available. You can find them here. The Humble Essayist will still carry on and continue to feature the Paragraph of the Week.
