February 2013Book I Bought In 2007 And Hadn't Read Yet (As Of January 2013) #1: The Public Burning by Robert Coover"Those who have cast their lot with me shall come to dominion! Those who have cast it with the Phantom shall get their ass stacked!"-Uncle Sam Mine eyes have seen the glory!1953, J...
This book has me in its grip.Reading The Recognitions is like wandering in a labyrinth, and around each corner there's a new revelation. One feels a little lost at times, but there are familiar sights. Can we trust our guide? Gaddis gives you the sense he knows the way...until he lets go of you...
more Gass. What can I say? For a while the only thing I could think of when I heard Rilke was Igby saying "Every year some asshole gives me a copy of Rilke's Letter To A Young Poet, telling me how it will change my life" or whatever. As independent and unaffected as I like to pretend I am, that l...
James Wood, critic and finger-drummer extraordinaire, nails the problem with Gass’s style in this quartet of novellas from 1998 (reprinted by Dalkey in 2009)—Gass stretches the credulity of his characters’ interior narration by bestowing them with the same stylish gifts as Gass the narrator. It d...
On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry by William H. Gass is, well, a very innovative and enlightening piece of work. Mr. Gass redefines Philosophical Inquiry and in the process shames his equivalents. Actually, it is not a mere Philosophical Inquiry, it's also with a touch of Linguistic Analysis...
Ben Flesh is one of the men "who made America look like America, whomade America famous." He collects franchises, traveling from state tostate, acquiring the brand-name establishments that shape the Americanlandscape. But both the nation and Ben are running out of energy. Asblackouts roll through...
IN THIS SUITE of five short pieces -- one of the unqualified literary masterpieces of the American 1960s -- William Gass finds five beautiful forms in which to explore the signature theme of his fiction: the solitary soul’s poignant, conflicted, and doomed pursuit of love and community. In their ...
It is true he had no instrument available to him now or place to play, though he exercised his fingers daily and caught every radio concert he could. Moreover he had learned to sing a scale built from each of the twelve tones, observing the pattern: whole whole half, whole whole whole half, hummi...
He was loud, rude, undisciplined, and entirely too intelligent for his parents, whom he ruled with incontinence and screaming. I remember the time when, at dinner, he spat in the mashed potatoes, and how my father sat in silent smiling fury through the whole affair, since it was the little snot’s...
G O D I N E - B O S T O N I BLUE pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the ...
M. Cornford, Bruno Snell, and E. R. Dodds, among others, and one which Gaston Bachelard cited as the first stage in his theory of Western scientific and philosophical development. How many have made the early Greeks say what they wished them to, because what they have said to us is mainly in bits...
This is what Rilke knew to the inner marrow of his bones. The paper, the ink, the fingers, moving as in Fitzgerald’s sappy Persian poem. Having writ, they move on to other writing. Knowing that his words cannot be canceled. Because, I believe, Rilke felt himself to be a failure and a fraud except...