BIG OTHER

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged A Farewell to Arms, Adam Robinson, Ernest Hemingway | 3 Comments

3 Responses

1. on May 15, 2010 at 12:07 am | Reply John Madera

   After reading William Gass’s essay “And” on that almost invisible conjunction, I don’t think I can ever take it, or any other word, for that matter, for granted:

   The anonymity of ‘and,’ its very invisibility, recommends the word to the student of language, for when we really look at it, study it, listen to it, ‘and’ no longer appears to be ‘and’ at all, because ‘and’ is, as we said, invisible, one of the threads that holds our clothes together: what business has it being a pants leg or the frilly panel of a blouse? The unwatched word is meaningless—a noise in the nose—it falls on the page as it pleases, while the writer is worrying about nouns and verbs, welfare checks or a love affair; whereas the watched word has many meanings, some of them profound; it has a wide range of functions, some of them essential; it has many lessons to teach us about language, some of them surprising; and it has metaphysical significance of an even salutary sort.

   
   
2. on May 17, 2010 at 3:41 pm | Reply Michael Leong

   Definitely– also the great opening word of Pound’s _Cantos_:

   “And then went down to the ship…”

   
   
3. on November 10, 2010 at 12:52 am | Reply Sentences About a Loved Sentence « BIG OTHER

   [...] Lefer, Jen Michalski, Kyle Minor, Lance Olsen, Jeff Parker, David Peak, D. A. Powell, Dawn Raffel, Adam Robinson, Bradley Sands, Peter Selgin, Ken Sparling, Ben Spivey, Laura van den Berg, William Walsh, Derek [...]