Posts Tagged ‘William Gass’
New Gass at Harper’s
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Elizabeth Bishop, Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's, Harper's Magazine, José García Villa, William Gass on October 11, 2011 | 1 Comment »
Oodles of Odes to Gass
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Habitatio, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, Life Sentences, Reading Rilke, The Pedersen Kid, The Tunnel, William Gass on August 3, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
In celebration of William Gass’s birthday week I have rounded up all six odes/celebrations/appreciations I have written about Gass and his work in the last year. I’ve also included an excerpt from a forthcoming essay on Gass and influence, referring to the novella “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” Happy 87th, dear [...]
Big Other’s Birthday Tribute to William Gass
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Big Other, Birthday tribute, Daniel Green, John Madera, Luca Dipierro, Malcolm Sutton, Michael Leong, William Gass on July 30, 2011 | 23 Comments »
I would imagine that a certain amount of anxiety accompanies any attempt to write about William Gass and his work, a lifework where every sentence has been carefully tooled, poetically, no, lovingly rendered; where a distinct refusal to settle for a messy glibness, to trot around ideas like some propped up and thoroughly beaten and [...]
Reading Stanley Elkin’s Searches and Seizures: On “The Bailbondsman”
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged "The Art of Fiction", “The Bailbondsman”, Big Other, Henry James, John Madera, Searches and Seizures, Stanley Elkin, William Gass on April 4, 2011 | 15 Comments »
If you’ve been following along with us here at Big Other, you know that in January we read and discussed Tom McCarthy’s C (more here and here), followed that up with Mary Caponegro’s The Complexities of Intimacy (more here, here, and here) and Manuel Puig’s Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (more here, here, here, and here), [...]
Reader Rage, Henry James Hate
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged A Temple of Texts, Anger, Arnold Bennett, Bill, Canal Street, Charles-Adam Foster-Simard, Edith Wharton, Hate, Henry James, Henry James and the Joys of Binge Reading, How to Make Sense, Literary Taste, People who hate Henry James, Philip Larkin, Quoting Philip Larkin's poem "This be the Verse" without giving him credit, Rage, Rudolf Flesch, The Believer, The Millions, Virgina Woolf, Ward, William Faulkner, William Gass on March 31, 2011 | 17 Comments »
To start, we have two simmering, searing proclamations: In A Temple of Texts, William Gass quoted Arnold Bennett’s book, Literary Taste: …your taste has to pass before the bar of the classics. That is the point, if you differ with a classic, it is you who are wrong, and not the book. (6) In the [...]
“Is Your Villain Appropriate?”—Examining Character Construction in Different Media
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Alice Krige, character, Charlie Chaplin, City Lights, Darth Vader, Don Quixote, F.W. Murnau, Hamlet, Humbert Humbert, Inception, Jacques Tati, John Gielgud, Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot, Lolita, Lost, Mad Men, Magic: The Gathering, Mark Rosewater, Phyrexian, Richard Burton, Salman Rushdie, Samuel Beckett, Sancho Panza, Star Trek: First Contact, Star Wars, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, The Borg, The Office, The Unnamable, The Wire, Vladimir Nabokov, William Gass on March 30, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Every Monday, I read Mark Rosewater’s weekly column “Making Magic,” partly because I have a casual interest in the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering (I once played it, and some of my friends still play it), but mainly because Rosewater routinely offers great insights into aesthetics and game design. (He’s also a strong writer [...]
For Your Consideration, Part II
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Fiction and the Figures of Life, The Medium of Fiction, William Gass on March 24, 2011 | 5 Comments »
From the essay “The Medium of Fiction” The purpose of a literary work is the capture of consciousness, and the consequent creation, in you, of an imagined sensibility, so that while you read you are the patient pool or cataract of concepts which the author has constructed; and though at first it might seem as [...]
New Gass Interview
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Big Other, Elizabeth Tucker, John Madera, William Gass on January 12, 2011 | 9 Comments »
When Greg Gerke told me that there was a new interview with William Gass, I, of course, was excited, only to be dismayed by the format: brief, and often silly questions (e.g., “8. What’s your favorite color?”), with brief one- to two-line answers; but I was glad to find, unsurprisingly, that Gass still shines within [...]
Loving Lowell
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Christine Schutt, Emily Dickinson, In Defense of the Book, Robert Lowell, William Gass on October 7, 2010 | 13 Comments »
Having just finished reading Lord Weary’s Castle, Robert Lowell’s second book of poetry, a collection consisting mainly of revisions of his first book (apparently Lowell, like Walt Whitman, constantly whittled away at all of his work all of the time), I came across these lines from “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket”: The bones cry for [...]
Gass-X
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Rainer Maria Rilke, Reading Rilke, Shakespeare, Sonnet 116, William Gass on August 24, 2010 | 4 Comments »
On a sunny day I would argue that the first 46 pages of William Gass’s Reading Rilke: Reflections of the Problems of Translation, which outlines the major themes of Rilke’s art and gives a nice summation of his life, as well as a number of poems by the master, is as essential as reading Rilke [...]
Heart of Gass
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, William Gass on June 22, 2010 | 10 Comments »
On William H. Gass’s “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” I have a strange little love affair with this story. When I was at the University of Oregon I would sit in my teacher’s office and he would read me snippets of literature. James Salter, John Berger and this story by Mr. [...]
On Amy Hempel’s “Greed”
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Amy Hempel, Greed, Mrs. Mean, William Gass on May 21, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
I sat in the library today writing and reading. A rank odor would intermittently hit me, and I didn’t know the source until I had observed a man raise and lower one and the other and then both of his armpits. This was certainly not conducive to uninterrupted work. In spite of this, I did [...]
Thinking About Poets Writing Fiction
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Charles Baxter, Eugene Lim, Fugitive Pieces, Michael Hulse, Michael Ondaatje, Miners Pond, Renee Gladman, Rikki Ducornet, Robert Creeley, Skin Divers, The Island, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, The Weight of Oranges, The Winter Vault, Thomas Hardy, Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gass on February 16, 2010 | 35 Comments »
I finished reading Michael Hulse’s new translation of Rilke’s anguished novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge this past Valentine’s Day. (This is the fourth translation I’ve read of the novel.) Written in seventy-one luminous fragments, the novel coheres into a brilliantly lacquered mosaic. As expected from this meditant of meaning, of memory, the novel [...]
William Gass & Radiohead
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Radiohead, William Gass on January 19, 2010 | 2 Comments »
Below are examples of incomparable artists eviscerating, in an eerily similar way, our consumerist society, or, as bell hooks put it in Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism, this “white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy” in which we live. First, William Gass from “Even if, by All the Oxen in the World” (Fiction and the Figures of Life, [...]
William Gass at The Millions
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Dana Goodyear, David Shields, Nick Flynn, Reif Larsen, Rosecrans Baldwin, Stephen Elliott, The Millions, Victor LaValle, William Gass on December 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
William Gass is included in the “A Year in Reading” feature at The Millions. He writes about Rose Macaulay’s Pleasure of Ruins. An excerpt: Macaulay does everything well, but scarcely does one of her pages pass than she has quoted from another and let those words fall into her own concoction like just the right [...]
An Essay on William Gass’s “The Pedersen Kid”
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Let Me Make a Snowman: John Gardner, Nick Ripatrazone, The Pedersen Kid, William Gass on December 9, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Check out “Let Me Make a Snowman: John Gardner, William Gass, and “The Pedersen Kid,’” an essay by Nick Ripatrazone that gives Gass’s famed novella a highly-scrutinized treatment and incorporates Gass and Gardner’s differing approaches to the understanding and writing of fiction. An excerpt: “The Pedersen Kid” is the genesis of William H. Gass’s canon. Composed [...]
The Page 99 Test
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Ford Maddox Ford, The Page 99 Test, William Gass on December 4, 2009 | 11 Comments »
I first learned about the page 99 test from William Gass (I’ve forgotten where) who I think got it from Ford Madox Ford: “Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” Sounds like a fractal approach to literary theory to me. So, from Gass’s [...]
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