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Fellwenner posted:JR is my favorite, but Carpenters Gothic is probably the easiest to get into. It's the shortest and has a more limited cast of characters. There's a few letters where he genuinely laments that CG never reached "the man in the airport." This being a book where a woman never leaves her house and there's a major sub-plot about missing geological reports.
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Jun 30, 2014 12:01
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CestMoi posted:What/'s good by Barthelme? The stories give a good demonstration of what he was about, though buy any volume and you're almost guaranteed to be sick of that before you're through. I enjoyed The Dead Father which is definitely more concerted, and the various discursions seem more like an artistic effect rather than an attempt to filibuster through to the end of another piece to sell. dogcrash truther posted:Gaddis is great. My preference is for funny books and his books are very, very funny. You didn't mention A Frolic of His Own, but that's my favorite one. Possibly my fave too, though I've yet to reread JR. It's the one that Franzen picked on in that loving awful New Yorker article where he renounces all this, which just goes to show quite how bad he is. It's also one of the books that I want to recommend to the folks asking for unreliable narrators as what's actually going on in the story is concealed from you. My understanding of why his bogus law-suit is rewarded is copied from an essay in Hints and Guesses, a book of Gaddis criticism which also spoils such mysteries as why did she die at the end of Carpenter's Gothic Fly McCool posted:I feel compelled to ask where something like Portnoy's Complaint fits as far as genre? Jewish.
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Jul 5, 2014 00:26
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Fellwenner posted:So you're reading background material by/about Gaddis, anything else you'd recommend? I've got to read Frolic and Agape first, but Hints and Guesses looks interesting. Steven Moore has edited a volume of his letters, which is good but also exactly the sort of thing Gaddis raged against. There are even a few letters where he bitches about Moore's "high-minded brutality of good intentions." The website is pretty good too, with a fair amount of supplementary articles though it loses interest after JR a bit. Mostly I have access to a university's library, so there are a lot of good articles which I'm not sure how practical it is it get otherwise. There's an issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction dedicated to Gaddis, which has an interview and a lot of essays, especially a particularly good one one JR called The Paper Empire and Empirical Fictions of William Gaddis by Joel Dana Black. e: and Joseph Tabbi has a book of Gaddis' "Occasional Writings" which is a mixed bag. There's some stuff there that's as good as anything else, like JR Up to Date, where the young tyke has grown up and gone to Washington, a review of Butler's Erewhon, and In the Zone (I think) a fragment of autobiography. There's also a few things which are him at his worst. An entire university course compressed into 20 pages where he can only drop a name before moving on to another reference, and a short essay on the subject of mother's which somehow manages to move into talking about his bad reviews. Mr. Squishy fucked around with this message at 08:57 on Jul 5, 2014 |
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Jul 5, 2014 08:52
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Frolic really is a hodge podge, I'm sure it wont surprise you to learn that the play is incorporated extracts of an actual play that he kicked around since before JR was finished. I don't think there's anything particularly vital in it if you plan to skim read it.
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Sep 12, 2014 11:34
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It's necessary to the book, and you need to have it there exactly for it to be legally deconstructed later on, but it's not that great. Gaddis was just too drat thrifty to throw anything out.
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Sep 12, 2014 16:07
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Most names are fun to say if you have enough gusto in life.
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Sep 13, 2014 11:07
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One of the things I like about Underworld's opening is how he locates all of the film-stars.
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Dec 7, 2014 11:38
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Sure http://i.imgur.com/tJyY2Mc.jpg http://i.imgur.com/5XEXiDk.jpg
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Oct 18, 2015 09:39
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I can't think of another author less likely to have truck with unbound books, etc. I can hear him turning in his grave when I get mucky fingerprints on his books. AA isn't noticeably unfinished, it's just very short, and even more indebted to Bernhard than the previous few. I'd recommend picking up The Rush for Second Place, a small collection of his other writing. There's a few gems in there, like JR Up to Date ([url=http://www.williamgaddis.org/nonfiction/jrgoes.shtml]available online, with added punctuation thanks to the New Yorker's editors) and a biographical piece, and a great essay on Butler's Erewhon. There's also a condensation of his university course which is the densest bit of writing, and an essay on Dostoyevsky's Devils that is manages to be entirely about Gaddis' own bad reviews. And of course a lot of Player Piano stuff. There's a book of his letters too, which is good but feels utterly opposed to the spirit of the man.
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Oct 18, 2015 15:31
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My fave is The Recognitions where he was still a little interested in, uh, plot. Are you more personally interested in God or taxes? Recognitions was the only one where he was bothered with something like a soul, the next 4 religion is just a fearsome right-wing scam. Ya, The Loser is good, a guy went to school with Glen Gould then sold his piano. Concrete also gets mentioned a lot, not read it. There's also one where someone built for his sister a cone-shaped house in the middle of the woods and he keeps on saying "the cone, the cone, the cone, the cone". Correction, that's it. All of his novels are a 100-page paragraph, so read 8, why not.
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Oct 18, 2015 16:06
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Does anyone mind scanning a few pages from Tristram Shandy? My second hand copy... the guy must have splashed all kind of crazy inks on the page! Some people are so careless.
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Oct 20, 2015 15:07
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Every author just writes variations on the same book.
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May 18, 2016 10:21
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Cerventes version of Don Quixote's is not pomo, but the version of Don Quixote I'm writing where I strain real hard for the right word for me to write happens to be the same as the older text is.
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Jun 20, 2016 23:47
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Though the website's great I still attest that reading along with the guides is cheating, the books are trying very hard to throw their readers and having the references, puns, and plots pinned out for you should be left for a second read. Comfort yourself knowing that he got a lot of stuff out of an Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. And yeah, after Rec he lost his religious fervour, it's 100% about being battered by capitalism and is therefore more relatable, I guess. Also, there's a biography put out last year, part of the critics continuing movement to ignore the books. Mr. Squishy fucked around with this message at 11:23 on Jun 22, 2016 |
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Jun 22, 2016 11:21
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I feel that missing stuff because you hosed up by not paying attention to a baffling wave of information (either given in the book or assumed general knowledge) was 100% what Gaddis was going for. So much of his stuff is people talking over one another at cross purposes. I'm glad Ult found it funny though, a lot of the first critics called it dour even though it's got some of the goofiest pratfalls in literature.
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Jun 22, 2016 12:32
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You can read Pale King but not IJ?
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Mar 12, 2017 12:14
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The guy's underrated? and he's still alive?
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Mar 28, 2017 19:58
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 01:14 |
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Here's Gass reading the bit I liked from The Tunnel.
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Mar 30, 2017 21:15
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