This is a Gass General, for anything and everything Gass. Excerpts, adulations, recommendations, critiques, anecdotes, funny pictures: all.
(Presently I'd especially like pictures of the "glyphs" and "images" some people mention in The Tunnel.)
My radar recently has begun pinging up an aural clutter like thrown silverware all about Mr. Gass, whom I was mostly unaware of just a month ago. "The Tunnel" previously would ring a bell, but a bell of the small front desk sort, a pale ding of recognition, as opposed to my growingly gonging bell tower sense of resonance.
It started I think with the knowledge that he introduced the NYRB Anatomy of Melancholy, my copy of which will arrive this week. I read a selection of Burton a week or two past, and loved him to, so it might partly be transference.
Then there was that Muses thread, in which I'd ginnily posted, which'd been kicked off by some lovely Gassian invocations of the Muses. If I can warosu up those excerpts, I'll post them here.
And then just about anything I read about the man compels, in both interviews and reviews. I'll post examples as I alight upon them.
1. Plato’s Timaeus 2. Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics 3. Thucydides’ The History of the Peloponnesian War 4. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan: Or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil 5. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason 6. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus 7. Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space 8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria 9. Paul Valéry’s Eupalinos, ou l’architecte 10. Sir Thomas Malory’s Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur 11. Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne Burial 12. Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman 13. Virginia Woolf’s Selected Diaries 14. Ford Maddox Ford’s Parade's End (the Tietjens tetralogy) 15. William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra 16. Ben Johnson’s The Alchemist 17. James Joyce’s Ulysses 18. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake 19. Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds 20. Beckett’s How It Is 21. Beckett’s Ping 22. José Lezama’s Paradiso 23. Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch 24. Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths 25. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain 26. Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor and Other Stories 27. Herman Broch’s The Sleepwalkers 28. Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno 29. Italo Svevo’s Zeno's Conscience (in William Weaver’s marvelous recent translation) 30. Gustave Flaubert’s Letters 31. Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet 32. Stendhal’s The Red and the Black 33. Colette’s Break of Day 34. John Donne’s Poems and Sermons 35. Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hymns 36. Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés 37. Ezra Pound’s Personae 38. William Butler Yeat’s The Tower 39. Wallace Steven’s Harmonium 40. Henry James’s The Golden Bowl 41. Henry James’s Notebooks 42. William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury 43. Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider 44. Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives 45. William Gaddis’s The Recognitions 46. John Hawkes’s The Lime Twig 47. Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge 48. Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies 49. Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus 50. Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters
Austin Gomez
>22. José Lezama’s Paradiso Unreadable masterpiece right there.
Lincoln Miller
"I think contemporary fiction is divided between those who are still writing performatively and those who are not. Writing for voice, in which you imagine a performance in the auditory sense going on, is traditional and old-fashioned and dying. The new mode is not performative and not auditory. It’s destined for the printed page, and you are really supposed to read it the way they teach you to read in speed-reading. You are supposed to crisscross the page with your eye, getting references and gists; you are supposed to see it flowing on the page, and not sound it in the head. If you do sound it, it is so bad you can hardly proceed. It can’t all have been written by Dreiser, but it sounds like it. Gravity’s Rainbow was written for print, J.R. was written by the mouth for the ear. By the mouth for the ear: that’s the way I’d like to write. ... I think that what often makes writers is a continued sense of the marvelous palpable quality of making words and sounding them. My God, how Beckett has it. I have a very strong feeling about that love of making sounds. . . . When work is going well for me—which is rarely—I have a clear metrical sense of sound and pace. This whole problem is vital. When one section is singing, it sings the rest." —from a 1976 interview with The Paris Review
"We must take our sentences seriously, which means we must understand them philosophically, and the odd thing is that the few who do, who take them with utter sober seriousness, the utter sober seriousness of right-wing parsons and political saviors, the owners of Pomeranians, are the liars who want to be believed, the novelists and poets, who know that the creatures they imagine have no other being than the sounding syllables which the reader will speak into his own weary and distracted head. There are no magic words. To say the words is magic enough." —from “The Ontology of the Sentence.”
Charles Evans
Two reviews of Gass' On Being Blue, one short, one long:
Short: Remember in Moby Dick where Melville goes on long tangents about the color white and whale anatomy? Gass is doing just that here, except with the color blue and fucking.
Long: This sort of filth has no place on a book review site which could be viewed by children. The explicit obscenities that bloat this seemingly innocuous pamphlet could have no purpose other than to corrode the virtue of readers by attempting to elevate their most base and craven lusts to the sphere of fine aesthetics.
William H. Gass is an unctuous smut-peddler whose greasy grammar all but slithers across the page and up the skirts of innocent texts in his attempt to befoul all that is right and pure.
The coarsening of our culture continues unabated but Mr. Gass is unsatisfied with confining this pernicious infection to television, music, movies, magazines, and 90% of the internet; no, he must also besmirch poetry, history, a whole color, and the once-glorious rhetorical figure antanaclasis: Contrary to those romantic myths which glorify the speech of mountain men and working people, Irish elves and Phoenician sailors, the words which in our language are worst off are the ones which the worst-off use. On top of its casual slander of people without his sophisticated appetite for crassness, this lump of corrupted wisdom is used as an excuse to propose we expand our litany of expletives! Mr. Gass actually expresses his disappointment at there being only one [F-word! (hide spoiler)], implying that our terms for sexual acts should outnumber even all Creation's avian wonders: "After all, how many kinds of birds do we distinguish?" Not content to drag Creation to his gutter, he goes for the Creator: We have a name for the Second Coming but none for a second coming. Apparently spattering The Deity with x-rated excreta is what passes for philosophical musings these days; thank you liberal media!
But like any Onanist with a tattered ideal in (the other) hand, Gass remains disappointed by the slack power of his beloved four-lettered friends, and makes the most perverse claim on their behalf: it is because we don't love them enough! No, they are not well-enough loved, and the wise writer watches himself, for with so much hate inside them--in 'bang,' in 'screw,' in 'prick,' in 'piece,' in 'hump'--how can he be sure he has not been infected--by 'slit,' by 'gash'--and his skills, supreme while he's discreet, will not fail him? How, indeed.
In this book Gass elsewhere extrudes bulkier paragraphs that make it easier to imagine the soured sweat accumulating in crescents of shine on his fevered forehead and fingers with the labor spent on pushing his perversities into the splashy packaging of effortful prose, but I abstain from quoting them for the potential impact they could have upon more impressionable readers.
(cut short to fit; you get the idea: they rated it 5 stars)
>Shipping Weight: 2.85 pounds >Book length: 928 Wow, heftier than I'd expected. For some reason I was worried about sparseness but since that's clearly not the case it looks to be the ideal departure. I look forward to it. Thank you for your patient posting, user. So is experimental formatting primarily what people mean when they speak of glyph/images? And is it the norm throughout the book, or occasional? These are familiar, although I'd forgotten them in my OP. Thank you, user, for your contribution to the seeding of my mind with Gassian belles-lettres. How did you come across Gass, and how long-lived has your fascination been?
Been chewing on his essays because I'm too much of a brainlet to penetrate his fiction. He seems like a very kind mentor taking his time to explain even the most smallest, inconsequential things in great detail. His prose is simple and concise yet feels rich with substance. I especially love his essays on sentences and language (very helpful for an ESL like me). The way he seems to talk about the musicality of sentences and poetry in prose feels magical. I wish I had prettier words to use to nourish my praises.
Christopher Stewart
jfc i cannot stand this nigga and his autistic horrible nabokov-derivative prose and his fucking potbelly that he proudly shows off in all the photos...
Jordan Collins
Waste of trips
Xavier Lee
I read On Being Blue earlier this year and it was a revelation to me. With both Gass and Ashbery dead, the USA has lost its two last true giants (or at least the last true giants of the last generation). Pynchon might still be alive and, supposedly, producing, but Gass is on a different league altogether (and I enjoy Pynchon immensely too).
Sebastian Perry
Gass was forgotten while he was alive. Pynchon just had a Hollywood movie made by one of the few good directors ever to direct anything.
Always took Gass for effete and posturing and these snippets don't really change my mind. What is the context of these? It just makes me think of really degenerate modernism, like he already knew he wanted to "be an author" before he had anything to say, and the main goal of "being an author" for him was that everyone would listen to him pontificate about how complex his inner life is.
Recently read about Northrop Frye which had a similar tone but the nice thing about it was someone else was writing it instead of Frye himself. Again this feels self-indulgent. This feels like a genuinely smart guy doing the same thing as some random Yea Forums guy when he daydreams about being interviewed and rambling to show off how smart he is. A genuinely smart guy version of that, but still that. Maybe I'm being unfair.
>some random Yea Forums guy when he daydreams about being interviewed and rambling to show off how smart he is Sounds like a decent frame
Jeremiah Campbell
If you're complaining about the (lovely) booklist commentary excerpting, bear in mind that he was also a philosophy professor, and was late career in his writing at the point of the list. If anyone's earned gushing over books they liked, it's someone like that.
Samuel Walker
You are breathtaking, user
Gavin Carter
So you know nothing of the author or his writings, don't care to read them nor do you find them interesting, and yet you have an opinion of his works, of something you don't know nor care to know about? Seems like the one posturing is you.
William Gray
Some of these opinions are really facile, and seem especially self-indulgent given how little he's saying. Like he's used to showing off for a captive audience that sucks him off, and he doesn't realize that he's become a big fish who can't survive outside his small pond. Nobody gives a fuck about Gass. His pontificating and self-consciousness of his own celebrity is unearned.
Harold Bloom is kind of a windbag too, but Bloom is just Bloom. Gass is posturing. I swear I wouldn't be surprised if he wrote his own Wikipedia entry. Also, being a philosophy professor is a meaningless credential by itself, and in any event, you can tell he's not familiar with scholarship on the Tractatus despite pretending to understand it here What he's relating is his undergraduate, so, literally sophomoric first impression of the Tractatus as it was taught in the '40s and '50s by lingering logical positivists who are now notorious for not understanding it. If he wrote that in the '50s, he could maybe be forgiven for taking his teachers' famously bad misinterpretations of the early Wittgenstein on faith, because he was young and full of naive wonder or whatever, but he's writing this 40+ years later, and he's a professor.
What this means is that he hasn't advanced his understanding of such an enchanting text with such a huge influence on him despite nearly half a decade of probably (if this passage is any indication) blabbing about it and jacking himself off over how much of an IMPACT it had on him, to anyone who would listen. The fact that he puts it in the same class as the Principia shows exactly what his influences are, which again wouldn't be a problem if he were saying "in those days, I was enchanted by logicism!" but he's flatly giving a false interpretation of the Tractatus here, and that's despite "studying briefly with Wittgenstein" while writing his dissertation (as he writes in his Wikipedia article).
He also studied with Max Black, one of the major early analytic writers on metaphor, referenced a lot by Ricoeur in Rule and Metaphor. I'd be curious to see what he wrote in his dissertation under Black because I bet it's shit. I just spent 30 minutes trying to find anything philosophical by Gass, at all, and reading any '50s-'70s articles I could find by him on philosophy, but he never writes any real philosophy in any of them. Black himself had a slightly impoverished conception of metaphor but I would not be surprised at all if Gass was essentially pushed through his PhD program at Cornell. The first 11 pages (free online) of the dissertation aren't promising.
Now I have to read his fucking horrible dissertation and see for myself if he really BS'ed his way to a PhD because Black just shrugged and let him pass. I'm going to order it through the library tomorrow.
Asher Campbell
It's funny, really. You read it as self-indulgent, but it's actually enthusiastic. Gass says "very little" because it was written for a panflet for an exhibition of sorts, if I'm not mistaken. Gass is basically telling us why these 50 works are important to him in just one paragraph. You don't understand Gass, don't want to, don't think he is worth understanding, and are thinking under assumptions and prejudice against him. Why do you even keep posting in this thread is beyond me. Go read something you actually like instead.
Lucas Collins
No, I hate this pompous fuck and I want to deepen my hate by substantiating it.
Evan Thompson
>macfag dropped
Ryan Jackson
Seething
Gavin Wilson
This is nauseating. To think I used to respect that novel as a late teen. I'd rather be rereading Queneau desu.
Joseph Stewart
>so this is the power of The Tunnel >it’s literally just vapid, posturing kitsch >Gass is basically Rupi Kaur if she were a effete, pseud male who wrote prose for other effete pseuds BWAAAAHAAAHAAAHAAA*wheeze*HAHAHAAHAAA You shallow nerds told me this guy was exit-level tier!!! LMFAO
that's what i thought to myself flinging my eyes zigzag. was going to purchase his rodent inspired gnawnovel but i must take a pause of reason now and ruminate.
Ryder Torres
Based vacuous retards spouting ire and calumny to stir up controversy and maintain an even bumprate. You are the anti-heroes opponent to the true villain:—narrow zoomer attention spans;—you are truly the Batmen of calling people cucks.
What if someone told you there was a new continent, a new biome? I sense you anticipate the interesting routes to The Tunnel that's initiatory for its readers. I'm an odd un-literary case, but I've been trying to read and write as much as life allows and I kept coming across references to Gass and The Tunnel in different book reviews, interviews and an unique flavor of hype here. It was only in 2019 I did any research, discovering from its Wikipedia article that it took the author >26 years to write and earned him the American Book Award of 1996. It was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award But the real lure was dropped here: >The Tunnel's 652 pages are divided into twelve main sections. In a 1995 radio interview at KRCW with Michael Silverblatt, Gass stated that the difficulty of the novel's early sections, which are introduced by a quote from Anaxagoras ("The descent to hell is the same from every place"), serve as both a false beginning to The Tunnel and as a test for the reader: "I think this is a standard modernist thing, but what it is is to make sure that the person who gets into the book is ready and deserves to be there. It's a kind of a test of competency [...] It's also, I think, essential, to, fairly early, establish the kind of range of reference, of demand, that the book is going to make of the reader. I think that's just fair." I was intrigued but expected to find 'what was really going on' and discover the hype machine had snookered me again. Which lead to the Silverblatt interviews: >youtube.com/watch?v=RLlYVszUMpM Gas reading at Washington University in St. Louis, 2013: >youtube.com/watch?v=_Y6iZpu9T9E to the LARB interview: >lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-stupidity-of-mankind-its-misuse-of-reason-an-interview-with-william-h-gass/ In preparation for reading, I purchased the audio CD and read this document meant to accompany The Tunnel, also written by Gass and published by the same group as the CD: >dalkeyarchive.com/designing-the-tunnel/ Conjunctions: >conjunctions.com/print/article/william-h-gass-c4 Paris Review: >theparisreview.org/interviews/3576/william-gass-the-art-of-fiction-no-65-william-gass I'd started listening to the CD to get a feel for his language and to hear the author's own voice. But this interview reinforced to me how important the printed text was: >quarterlyconversation.com/william-h-gass-the-tunnel-review Every instance of research deepened the mystery and added another aspect to the author's calculation. As this user explained , he's as masterly a user of the English language as we've had. He has a poet's sensitivity, a tenured academic's wit, philosopher's depth, studying so many masters that he seems peerless. Reading his essays and The Tunnel are my primary recreation of late. Shutting out all the world and hearing only his considerate voice, it's wonderful.
>If someone asks me, “Why do you write?” I can reply by pointing out that it is a very dumb question. Nevertheless, there is an answer. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard. And if someone asks me the inevitable next dumb question, “Why do you write the way you do?” I must answer that I wish to make my hatred acceptable because my hatred is much of me, if not the best part. Writing is a way of making the writer acceptable to the world—every cheap, dumb, nasty thought, every despicable desire, every noble sentiment, every expensive taste.
>I was turned down for ten years. I couldn’t get a thing in print. My writing went nowhere. I guess you have to be persistent. Talent is just one element of the writing business. You also have to have a stubborn nature. That’s rarer even than the talent, I think. You have to be grimly determined. I certainly was disappointed; I got upset. But you have to go back to the desk again, to the mailbox once more, and await your next refusal. Love this: >Getting even is one great reason for writing. The precise statement of the motive is tricky, but the clearest expression of my unwholesome nature and my mean motives (apart from trying to write well) appears in a line I like in “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” The character says, “I want to rise so high that when I shit I won’t miss anybody.” . . . I also take considerable pleasure in giving obnoxious ideas the best expression I can. But getting even isn’t necessarily vicious. There are two ways of getting even: one is destructive and the other is restorative. It depends on how the scales are weighted. Justice, I think, is the word I want.
>I think contemporary fiction is divided between those who are still writing performatively and those who are not. Writing for voice, in which you imagine a performance in the auditory sense going on, is traditional and old-fashioned and dying. The new mode is not performative and not auditory. It’s destined for the printed page, and you are really supposed to read it the way they teach you to read in speed-reading. You are supposed to crisscross the page with your eye, getting references and gists; you are supposed to see it flowing on the page, and not sound it in the head. If you do sound it, it is so bad you can hardly proceed. It can’t all have been written by Dreiser, but it sounds like it. Gravity’s Rainbow was written for print, J.R. was written by the mouth for the ear. By the mouth for the ear: that’s the way I’d like to write.
>It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word.
Cooper Walker
Thank you: I've watched chunks of the interview and the reading, and read the LARB interview and designing The Tunnel, and am halfway through the Conjunctions interview. I'm going to contunue on through the materials in your post, but I don't think I'm going to start my Gass journey with The Tunnel. Rather, I think I'll start with the Reader: I'm interested especially in his essayistic side, being essayistic myself, and although his novels are essayistic, I'd like to save them for later, for dessert. The experimentalness tempts me, though. The Tunnel sounds a lot like what House of Leaves is supposed to be, but isn't.
From “The Review of Contemporary Fiction,” Fall 1991, Vol. 11.3
>ARTHUR M. SALTZMAN: I want to begin by asking you about Salman Rushdie. I am specifically interested in how his plight may correlate to some of the things you say in essays like “The Artist and Society,” in which you contend that the artist’s true impact upon society is that he helps to engineer a revolution of consciousness. How does the “reception” of “The Satanic Verses” coincide with, or possibly undermine, that contention?
>WILLIAM H. GASS: Well, I hadn’t thought of it in those terms, but I have written a few things about the controversy. Not about taking sides with or against the Ayatollah, of course, but about the response of people in our own society to the action—in particular, the very lukewarm (pusillanimous, really) response of the churches, the absence of any sustained outrage by commercial writers or other media, the confinement of the situation to a few, and the kind of excuses and apologies in its wake. I think these things do impinge upon what I was talking about in that essay, as I remember it, because the self-imposed restrictions of the bookstores indicate a sympathy not for the Ayatollah’s extremism but for the anger and affront felt by the Islamic communities here and abroad. The issue is raised all over again that we can’t in this society go to the extreme of killing him off, but really we would like to shut him up. Rushdie’s situation is an extreme version of the artist’s position in general. The Ayatollah represents a fixed, fanatical point of view which runs through all cultures and which is inimical to artistic characterization. I was addressing how this instance is a reiteration of this constant problem and what shape it would take were it to have occurred in America. Rushdie’s ridicule of religious value . . . even though the Christians don’t like Islam, religion’s religion, and the question has to do with orthodoxies of all sorts. Particularly the old tradition of being uncontaminated. They are in the position of condemning something they have not and cannot read. Our own cardinal here said of course it is a terrible thing to have put a hit out on Rushdie, but neither should Catholics read that terrible book. The Chinese have demonstrated the same sad ethics that jeopardize all of the people we met over there who were so enthusiastic over the new world that is opening up. It’s really sad.
Bentley Hughes
>AMS: Do you think that there is anything inherently more enabling about so-called antirealistic fiction in that it disrupts these normalizing efforts?
>WHG: I think that’s part of it. Part of my objection to narrative and history in general, to the novel being given to a historian, is that history does not abide by traditional narrative explanations. It isn’t that narrative explanation doesn’t have its place—it is a great instrument—but uncritically examined, its assumptions about the world are, well, unlikely. Within a specific human realm, when we are busy giving meaning to human events selecting, choosing, arranging a story at a dinner party—we may be so taken with the result that we forget that another arrangement could have yielded something quite different. I am not suggesting what some have seen as an inevitable consequence of this particular mode that everything is relative; it’s much more that there are modes of explanation equally satisfactory within their own prescribed realms of discourse. The image I think of when discussing this phenomenon with my students is that when you are throwing a football back and forth, the laws that govern the trajectory of the ball and those that govern the behavior of the air inside the football are different laws. Not inhospitable, but different. Actually, I’m just now reading up on some marvelous new stuff on the geometry and mathematics of irregularities. Coming to grips with fundamentally irregular surfaces that fall outside Euclidean boundaries doesn’t mean that because when you try to deal with these things in Euclidean fashion you falsify them, that Euclid is useless; certain circumstances are still conducive to Euclid, of course. Again, we can say that Newton works within certain frames. I don’t share the popular, and I think basically sophistical, point of view that “it’s all just relative.” I’m very suspicious and skeptical of that. I believe in numerous points of view, but I’m not a relativist in the traditional sense.
>AMS: Are you suggesting that philosophy, or even fiction, has this fundamental bedrock which is trustworthy and absolute?
>WHG: No, it’s not absolute. Its aims have some degree of reliability. That’s the business, that’s the game, of philosophy, anyway. It may not be possible to get it. We may, by arguing philosophically, arrive at a conclusion, but the philosophical enterprise is itself impossible.
Zachary Foster
(bump)
Isaiah Murphy
My Anatomy of Melancholy finally came in today: I'll post Gass' introduction to it (written 2001) in a few.
Maybe it's that I've read a selection of Burton already, and several scholarly introductions and brief commentaries; I'm knee-deep already, so Gass' account seems all superficial obviousnesses.
Consider that it's an introduction to a hipsterish edition, and that Gass often considers mostly the the style in which a work was written. If you are already familiar with the text and its scholarship, such a whimsical introduction might seem dull. Plus, as you said, he might have written it on comission for some quick cash.
Cooper Cooper
As far as I know it's the only good complete edition since the 1932 Everyman, although I could see how it could look hipsterish.
