Peel me a Book
Let's Peel
Essayism
Perfect if you want to drift in the haze between thinking and feeling.
Synopsis
“The essay... is the shape that thought makes when it is trying to see things clearly and the effort is both doomed and beautiful.”
Essayism isn’t just a meditation on essays—it’s a eulogy to beauty, to language, to the minds that have tried to think clearly and failed exquisitely. Dillon doesn’t offer structure so much as a shimmer: sentences unfurl, loop, retreat, then reach again. You follow him through portraits of Sontag, Barthes, Woolf, Cioran—not to understand them, but to understand how they haunt him. There’s a quiet grief beneath every aesthetic impulse, a vulnerability that makes every idea feel like a bruise you press just to know it’s there.
This is a book for those who write margins in margins. For those who know that thinking is a bodily act. For those who understand that style isn’t surface—it’s a wound that speaks in pattern.
Mood:
reflective · abstract · delicate · grieving
Tone:
lyrical · precise · melancholic · spiralling
It Feels Like
Body:
A hollow warmth in the chest, the kind left behind by longing thoughts
Tempo:
Meandering steps in an old museum with no map
Texture:
Like opening a drawer of neatly folded, forgotten letters—fragrant with dust and something you can’t name
A Little Taste
“Unity is the shallowest, the cheapest deception of all composition. In nothing is the banality of the intelligence more clearly manifested. … I have no clue how to write about the essay as a stable entity or established class… I cannot give myself to an elegant tale about the essay, neither to a pointed defence, rhetorical apology, psyched manifesto. (I find myself allergic to polemics…) I will have to write, can only write, in fits and starts… there are many passages … that will sanction a failure or refusal to cohere.”
The Aftertaste
Feels like being inside someone’s head—but not just anyone.
Quiet grief, shaped like admiration, like memory, like ritual.
There’s no conclusion. Only the slow bloom of thought. And then the fade.
Peel With a Drink
To Be Read With a glass of chilled dry sherry—pale, saline, gently oxidised—sipped in the hour between melancholy and dinner.
Tastes like language that never lands, but circles back to whisper something closer to the truth.
Peel With a Reel
The Souvenir (2019, dir. Joanna Hogg) A young filmmaker constructs her voice while unravelling through love and grief—quiet, elliptical, and deeply essayistic in rhythm.
Summer Hours (2008, dir. Olivier Assayas) Three siblings grapple with inheritance, art, and memory in the quiet dissolution of a family home. A film about what we keep, what we sell, and what beauty means when time keeps moving
Peel with a Beat
Peel me a Book
Or Try:
Natalia Ginzburg
where Dillon thinks through fragments, she writes through the smallest truths. His essays look inward; hers open the window and let real life in. Both believe that clarity can devastate.
Let's Peel
Essayism
Perfect if you want to drift in the haze between thinking and feeling.
Synopsis
“The essay... is the shape that thought makes when it is trying to see things clearly and the effort is both doomed and beautiful.”
Essayism isn’t just a meditation on essays—it’s a eulogy to beauty, to language, to the minds that have tried to think clearly and failed exquisitely. Dillon doesn’t offer structure so much as a shimmer: sentences unfurl, loop, retreat, then reach again. You follow him through portraits of Sontag, Barthes, Woolf, Cioran—not to understand them, but to understand how they haunt him. There’s a quiet grief beneath every aesthetic impulse, a vulnerability that makes every idea feel like a bruise you press just to know it’s there.
This is a book for those who write margins in margins. For those who know that thinking is a bodily act. For those who understand that style isn’t surface—it’s a wound that speaks in pattern.
Mood:
reflective · abstract · delicate · grieving
Tone:
lyrical · precise · melancholic · spiralling
It Feels Like
Body:
A hollow warmth in the chest, the kind left behind by longing thoughts
Tempo:
Meandering steps in an old museum with no map
Texture:
Like opening a drawer of neatly folded, forgotten letters—fragrant with dust and something you can’t name
A Little Taste
“Unity is the shallowest, the cheapest deception of all composition. In nothing is the banality of the intelligence more clearly manifested. … I have no clue how to write about the essay as a stable entity or established class… I cannot give myself to an elegant tale about the essay, neither to a pointed defence, rhetorical apology, psyched manifesto. (I find myself allergic to polemics…) I will have to write, can only write, in fits and starts… there are many passages … that will sanction a failure or refusal to cohere.”
The Aftertaste
Feels like being inside someone’s head—but not just anyone.
Quiet grief, shaped like admiration, like memory, like ritual.
There’s no conclusion. Only the slow bloom of thought. And then the fade.
Peel With a Drink
To Be Read With a glass of chilled dry sherry—pale, saline, gently oxidised—sipped in the hour between melancholy and dinner.
Tastes like language that never lands, but circles back to whisper something closer to the truth.
Peel With a Reel
The Souvenir (2019, dir. Joanna Hogg) A young filmmaker constructs her voice while unravelling through love and grief—quiet, elliptical, and deeply essayistic in rhythm.
Summer Hours (2008, dir. Olivier Assayas) Three siblings grapple with inheritance, art, and memory in the quiet dissolution of a family home. A film about what we keep, what we sell, and what beauty means when time keeps moving