rip William H. Gass

The dominant rumour about Gaddis was that he was secretly a Pynchon alter ego, iirc in that essay gass is just joking around the fact that people always mixed to their names

In fact it's a Gass

Read the first part of Omensetter's Luck which was excellent. Gave up somewhere in the middle part. I will never read The Tunnel.

I read The Tunnel in college! I asked to write about it for a seminar paper. The main thing I remember about the whole thing now is (I looked this up) this sentiment from Robert Kelly' NYTBR review:

We first strike steady narrative with a splendid bravura chapter on the childhood town. We follow page after page of nostalgic detail through beautifully circumstanced streets, until slowly we realize that in all this Joycean summoning there is no one present except a plump little lonely boy, all alone in an unpeopled town. And that sets the measure of the book. This is a book about a monstrously lonely man, and how he makes himself so.

I believe I've reached the age where if an octogenarian urged me away from pop music, I would be like "too late, gramps, that ship has sailed for both of us."

Those childhood passages of the tunnel, which are beautiful, were like a life raft for me the first time I read it. I'm a huge fan of all of his work (the essays are always a pure pleasure to read) but honestly that one didn't really click with me despite being his decades-in-the-work magnum opus - UNTIL I got the audiobook read by gass. Now I love it. There's a quote from, I think, his Paris Review interview that was used as a title for a collection of his interviews: "the ear's mouth must move."

Re pop music, he definitely has some silly Old Guy quirks, such as a reflexive & snobby dislike of movies - *all* movies! I remember loaning a friend middle c, thinking I had a p good sense of where our tastes overlapped and being surprised how much he HATED it; what made him finally gave up in disgust were the egregious errors re pop music, eg the protagonist works in a record shop in the 1950s and customers come in asking for grunge lol

he's against swearing, who the fuck is against swearing

Gass, Seinfeld, that's it

that accursed copy of Middle C now lies on my bookshelf. I suppose I'd best read it now :P

Think I enjoyed the first 3 or 4 chapters - just wasn't really reading much of anything at that time

Oh it's much less of a bummer when I loan/gift someone a book and they just never get around to reading it! This is what I tend to do; I only just got around to parade's end which was a present (from that same friend who couldn't stand middle c) from two birthdays ago

So where should I start with Gass? Judging by the excerpted Paris Review essay on In The Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories near the top of my google Gass results, I'm thinking that collection might be a good gateway, but maybe there are better?

I've only read Omensetter's Luck (often great, difficult in the middle, short tho) and The World Within the Word (essays, very good). Would recommend either pretty much (he was at least as much a nonfiction as fiction writer) but yeah, seeing a lot of recommendations for Heart of the Heart and wanting to pick it up myself.

what are some good essays?

I like Habitations of the Word (particularly "And") and Heart of the Heart.

His 50 books. I like this list, it doesn't do one per author

https://medium.com/@shaunrandol/how-to-read-like-william-gass-14d6e04b67b0

Wrong to have The Magic Mountain (should be Musil instead). Death of Virgil is the best Broch.

Don't like Maddox Ford.

Latin America-wise: like that Lezama Lima's Paradiso is in. Cortazar should not.

Any list worth its salt should have A Notebook, Diary and a collection of Letters.

Not a single Italian. This is wrong.

Nah, he was otm about Mann. It's a good list!

It says these are books that influenced him, not the best books

The original temple of texts piece is really good, you read it for the blurbs. Medium dot com is weird. I love parade’s end tbh - gass’s bit on that is about talking to students at Leeds university and mentioning fmf and they all go “who dat” and he says something like “no wonder the empire is crumbling”

& he also lists a ton more Latin American authors that he could/should have included iirc

(I also could have sworn musil was in there)

President Keyes - yes, I didn't say it was his best, just that it was his 50.

He wrote a piece on Mudil when the new translation came out

good list

I will try and dig out my copy at some point (not now - I have done too much digging out already and my flat is now stressing me out) and post some of the choice blurbs

please, though i think i should just buy temple of texts

Found an extract:

https://lithub.com/william-gass-on-12-of-the-most-important-books-in-his-life/

Very good list. Should be Eupalinos btw – I wonder if the misspelling is Gass's or not.

It isn’t (I found my copy)

Re “not a single Italian” https://i.imgur.com/2rgNXvL.jpg

(He does this a couple of times, using the blurb to essentially put a whole seam of literature in one slot)

A long time ago I used go through essays by Gass (and Eliot Weinberger) just collecting the names of authors and books to check out. A lot of these were on my list.

Thanks wins - don't really consider Svevo Italian in my head because he was from Trieste (more Austria-Hungary).

Loving his writing about his reading, but that last bit was a reminder not to take even your coolest professors too much at their word, guidance-wise. Mann could deploy a lighter touch than in Gass's impression: for inst, in Man and Dog and The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man---but maybe Gass hadn't read those? Can't read 'em all, and he was a busy man.

gass was a busy man and could not read all manns incl. man and dog and confidence man

Mann bites dog

i just read omensetter's luck and was sortof shocked by how gentle it was, i read the pederson kid during a really bad patch where i couldn't sleep or leave the house and it was increadibly gruelling but i loved its wickedness. omensetters luck bared its fangs but then ultimately was far more gentle about 'life and the human spirit' than i'd hoped. amazing prose stylist though, i'm not sure about getting into middle c/the tunnel etc, i suspect i might get bored midway and i'm worried there's a lot of people talking about art in a mid-sized university humanities professor sort of way. prefer the pettiness of gaddis, but he never really lights you on fire like the best bits of the gass i've read, maybe i should be more generous.