Last August, I took part in one of Electronic Book Review’s “Gaddis Centenary” roundtables. Our discussion was on “Para-Academic Venues for Discussing Gaddis,” and that conversation is live on EBR now.
I really enjoyed talking with the other invitees, although I felt a bit out of my league. The roundtable included Victoria Harding, who managed the Gaddis listserv, as well as WilliamGaddis.org; novelist and critic Jeff Bursey; book vlogger Chris Via of Leaf by Leaf; Chad Post, host of the Two Month Review podcast and founder of Open Letter Books; and moderator Ali Chetwynd.
I think we talked for a little over an hour, and while William Gaddis, his novels, and how we share ideas about him online (and elsewhere) was the focus, the conversation went to many other places: William Vollmann, Antoine Volodine, a fuck you to Jonathan Franzen, and the revelation of Evan Dara’s true identity (okay not really that last one).
There was also an underlying sense with most of the roundtable that the internet of yore as a means of deep conversation is slipping away; Chad summed it up neatly at one point, stating that “One of the disadvantages I see with everything right now, with the blog, podcasts, and so on, is being able to reach people, because the standard mechanisms have been screwed with for so long: it used to be that Google Reader and RSS feeds were a way to keeping aware of what was coming out. You could put something up and you’d have as much space as you wanted to, you could do whatever you wanted…”
There are also lots of new pieces up at the Gaddis Centenary page beyond our fun little roundtable, including a write-up by Mark Madigan of Gaddis’s 1979 lecture “On the Theme of Failure in Contemporary Literature” at St. Michael’s College in Vermont. Madigan’s piece shares John Puleio’s photograph of Gaddis and links to Vermont Public Radio’s audio recording of the lecture., which I enjoyed listening to this afternoon as I pulled weeds from my garden.
Biblioklept 