William Gaddis, c/d?

agree with the above. the early part of the novel is primarily narrative, but once it hits the party scenes there's definitely no lack of dialogue.

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/much-god-damned-entropy/

this is great, really opened up J.R..

I need to read this now.

bro would you just kick back with an agatha christie for once

Maybe when I retire.

lol

william gaddis' literature of failure @ bard college 1979

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CtoU6mtVIAAh3En.jpg

I just started JR, and obviously the narrative syntax is difficult. Any strategies for fixing, for example, the time or POV for any given passage, or is the ambiguity the entire point?

Annotations: http://williamgaddis.org/jr/index.shtml

I found after a while I had a pretty good handle on who was talking, Gaddis gives each character a pretty strong voice - but then characters will imitate other characters' tics and catchphrases, just to add to the cacophony

With setting (when not provided by the brief snippets of omniscient narration) you just have to figure it out from the dialogue

I'm quite enjoying JR (120ish pages left), though a lot of scenes remain opaque -- namely, all the ones that deal with financial jargon. I have to assume that's the case with most readers?

The bit where Edward lights Mrs. Joubert's cracker made me laugh really hard, aloud, in a quiet office.

Took me a while to disentagle this scene with the one between Bast and Rhoda rendered through euphemism.

I'll level one critique against how he characterizes a lot of his women. Either harridans (Eigen's wife, Ann D.) or meek pushovers (Joubert, though Bast is one too). Rhoda's great though.

I'm definitely considering The Recognitions next.

have been dipping into the rush for second place - a selection of his occasional writings and essays. enjoyable but too early for me to form any sense of time or shape to emerge from the general (perfectly understandable) incoherence.

also - a bit of an oddity - william gaddis crops up in the ios game/ultima rip lowerlander II, in a gaddis-themed village where you can buy a copy of JR.

Damn just stayed up well past my bedtime reading the scene around page 635+ is totally engrossing.

I'm well into reading The Recognitions now, but the Wyatt scenes (especially with Valentine) are impenetrable. The hyper-allusiveness is so dense that it crowds out the narrative (something I have trouble with Stephen's chapters in Ulysses, too) -- anyone have suggestions on extracting meaning from it?

Otherwise, there are some hilarious scenes outside of those episodes.

For me the biggest hump was the sections with the priest - which, to be honest, I got over by skimming - and after that I got into its groove. At some point I’d like to reread it and bother googling the art and mythical references I don’t get, but I’ll probably read some other Gaddis before I do so

Which priest? John Huss or Rev. Gwyon?

I'm referencing Gaddis Annotations a lot but I find that the author gives away a lot of plot details, which I object to from a misplaced literary rockism.

Rev gwyon, the mad rural priest with the bull - I don’t even remember who huss is

I don't think I would've known who Huss was if not for the online annotations; he appears only a handful of times, and when he does, I wasn't even able to tell what other characters were present.

J R was great, I’m less enchanted with The R and maybe it suffers from having less formal constraint than J R but there’s plenty to like about it anyway

i like carpenters gothic the most or a frolic of his own. i liked how carpenter's gothic was told from the point of view of the house. sometimes i wish he would just write -said susan idk once in a while

"She lives just outside Paris, in a place called Banlieu."

"Mi playa!"

Loved the Recognitions and only kinda liked Frolic.

Oddly I don't have a single memory of Carpenter's Gothic. I guess it is possible that I never read it. Doesn't seem like me not to have ever tried - back in my 20s it was exactly the sort of thing I would have been into. But I really don't remember. Weird.

frolic is the funniest one

Cranky old guy writes cranky old guy, film at eleven

Where do I sign up?

I'm listening to the audiobook of J R now and it's quite a performance by Nick Sullivan.

Here’s a 2020 article on how it was done if anyone’s interested. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/17/i-cried-actor-120-characters-to-life-jr-william-gaddis-nick-sullivan-audiobook