The Gaddis Annotations is, like, the source
Biblioklept reviews J R (part 1)
Biblioklept reviews J R (part 2)
“Trickle-Up Economics: JR Goes to Washington” (1987 sequel to J R)
“Fire the Bastards!”: Jack Green’s wonderful rant against the critics who panned The Recognitions
Biblioklept reviews The Recognitions
William Gaddis fiction-to-music entelechy transducer
Gaddis’s interview with The Paris Review
Julian Schnabel’s Gaddis portrait:
Gaddis interview at The Dalkey Archive
Biblioklept reviews Agapē Agape
“A well-meaning, sincere hypocrite” : Gaddis on his title character, JR (and capitalism)
“Authenticity’s wiped out” — A passage from Agapē Agape
“Recognizing Gaddis” (1987 NYT article)
William Gaddis’s self-portrait:
William Gaddis on the Pulitzer Prize: “The Ultimate Seal of Mediocrity”
“Mr. Difficult” (Jonathan Franzen whines about Gaddis)
The Guardian review of Agapē Agape
Cynthia Ozick’s review of Carpenter’s Gothic
From Tom McCarthy’s essay “Transmission and the Individual Remix”:
All writing is conceptual; it’s just that it’s usually founded on bad concepts. When an author tells you that they’re not beholden to any theory, what they usually mean is that their thinking and their work defaults, without even realizing it, to a narrow liberal humanism and its underlying—and always reactionary—notions of the (always) “natural” and preexisting, rather than constructed self, that self’s command of language, language as vehicle for “expression,” and a whole host of fallacies so admirably debunked almost fifty years ago by the novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet.
A passage from Tom McCarthy’s essay “Transmission and the Individual Remix”:
This is what all good writers are doing, and always have been. Here I’d part company even with Robbe-Grillet: there is nothing “new” about this. Shakespeare was remixing Ovid, Plutarch, Holinshed, not to mention the authors of the King Leirs and Hamlets already in circulation when he penned his versions. Cervantes was remixing Montalvo, Ariosto, Apuleius, and any number of picaresque authors—and doing this with such delirious selfconcsiousness that at one point he even makes the characters of Don Quixote pause to take stock of the library, the engine room behind their mad associate’s reenactments, perusing it as though it were some kind of source code—which it is. Pound was remixing Villon, Daniel, and Sordello; De Mailla, Marco Polo, and Malatesta; Jefferson, Adams, and Jackson, merging all these feed together as he wound them through his typewriter, splicing them in with fragments of newsprint, shards of radio transmissions—merging them yet in a manner that made no attempt to mask their fragmentary, collated character, to “naturalise” them. With the Cantos, he kept up this furious enterprise for five whole decades, ramping its intensity up and up until the overload destroyed him, blew his mind to pieces, leaving him to murmur, right toward the end: “I cannot make it cohere.”
Book shelves series #26, twenty-sixth Sunday of 2012: Some old art books.
This little shelf sits next to a solitary couch in a den/fireplace room that abuts the eat-in kitchen. The shelf is mostly to hold the occasional drink if feet are propped on the coffee table. There are old art books in here, dating back to high school and college, when my wife and I (separately, of course, in those days) still bought lots and lots of art books, before the internet made accessibility to images so ubiquitous. As such, the shelf holds books that reflected our tastes of fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years ago: Lots of Pre-Raphaelite and Romantic stuff (hers) and lots of surrealist/modernist/cubist stuff (mine). Anyway. These rarely get dug out these days. If I want to check out Burne-Jones I usually visit an online gallery.
The portrait of Joan Miro and his daughter in the upper right corner is by the painter who called himself Balthus. I love the painting. It’s deeply creepy but also tender.
Biblioklept 