On Sentimentality and Silence

Untitled (Sentimentality Delays the Removal…), from Inflammatory Essays Jenny Holzer

I lie in bed to go down to sleep, but first I pull from the shelf Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey. It is a book I’ve moved towards many time without ever making much headway. I believe I purchased it on the strength of a single quote I found in another piece of writing. Madness being the beginning of it’s title, such a strong and overpowering word, may have also had something to do with it. As I was digging into it’s chapter On Sentimentality I found myself drifting away from the lecture (it being a book of lectures) over and over. Thinking back to the critiques I ran this past week. Did I handle it right? Did students learn anything? Were my comments constructive and working? I found myself thinking along the conceit of the essay. How one approaches sentimentality in the work, a kind of causeless emotion, the definition she pulls from the American novelist John Gardner. An excess of emotion wou…