Gaddis goes on current & recent activity Suggestions for this page are welcome: please send to postoffice at inwriting.org |
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A joke of some sort, or maybe they just haven't read it: J R is listed as one of "6 Works of Classic Literature That Make You Better in Business" at a slightly baffling web site called Literary Manhattan. At least they think it's a classic. The other five: Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, Joseph Heller's Something Happened, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, and Kurt Anderson's Turn of the Century. |
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D minor: the saddest chord... |
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Mauricio Ancalmo Dualing Pianos: Agapé Agape in D Minor 2011 Mixed media. Installation © Courtesy of the Artist and Eli Ridgway Gallery |
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WILLIAM GADDIS RESPONDS TO CALL FOR EXTRAS for the film Ganja & Hess (1973) directed and produced by friends. A NY Times review is here. Images are taken from clips available here and here. Steven Moore & Keith McMullen |
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New editions: |
Dalkey Archive Press is reissuing both The Recognitions and J R, scheduled for January 2012. In addition, a paperback edition of Jack Green's Fire the Bastards . will appear around the same time. And in Mexico, the publisher Sexto Piso has a Spanish edition of Agape Agape. | |
These are the times that try men's souls, what with the world ending May 21, 2011. We've heard this before, however, and so did William Gaddis, as seen in Carpenter's Gothic. WG's first choice for the cover of that novel was the image below, which was reprinted on postcards he had a good supply of and routinely used for short communications. On the back the image is thus described::
Between the message and address areas is written:
Possibly Atlanta was the model for Anderson's painting: Gaddis reader and radio host Ed Martin (see below) writes: "I've always been convinced that downtown Atlanta, viewed from the South Expressway, is the background scene for this card. If you took out the state capitol and the old Atlanta-Fulton County stadium, everything else is the same, from the freeway curve to individual buildings." We're on the look-out for a postcard view of Atlanta to support the theory. An example of WG's use of the postcard Frank Moorman has kindly postedhere. A larger version is below; further enlargeable by clicking on it. |
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AT LAST
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Steven Moore, noted literary critic and author as well as primary Gaddis scholar, will edit
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REQUEST FOR LETTERS AND RELATED MATERIAL |
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William Gaddis biography underway Gaddis scholar Joseph Tabbi is working on a biography to be titled William Gaddis: A Literary Life, expected to be ready in 2013. It was commissioned by. Northwestern University Press. The author will give a lecture on Gaddis held by the English department of the State University of NY at Fredonia on February 8th; details here. |
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| -- in a Christmas eve inerview at radio station KDVS (University of California Davis) on the show Speaking in Tongues, Steven Moore talked with Ed Martin about William Gaddis's novels and what seems to be their near-eerie prescience, perhaps most especially J R's portrayal of financial shenanigans and chutzpah, but also the activities of the religious right in Carpenter's Gothic and the endless litigation of A Frolic of His Own. You can listen to it (mp3 format) from this site by clicking HERE. -- Victoria Harding | ||
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The Recognitions and J R out on audio books Available from Audible, with samples available on their site, the recording of J R has gotten a wonderful review from The Neglected Books Page blog should quell the doubts of those, like me, who didn't think this could be done right. At left, actor Nick Sullivan.. -- Victoria Harding. |
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| From NEW YORK— Muriel Oxenberg Murphy , the co-founder of the American painting and sculpture department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, died two weeks ago of cancer, Artnet reports. Murphy, 82, joined the Met in 1949 and helped establish the department under the guidance of Robert Hale. In the 1970s, she became known for her New York salon, which brought together many important literary and art world figures. She edited the collected writings of the novelist William Gaddis, who was her companion for more than 20 years starting in the '70s, and a collected volume of her writing, Excerpts: from the Unpublished Files of Muriel Oxenberg Murphy , was published in July. -- Victoria Harding |
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The Argentinian-born novelist Rodrigo Fresán has been selected to introduce the Spanish-language edition of Agape Agape, translated by Miguel Martinez-Lage, who has also translated J.M. Coetzee, and to be published by Sexto Piso. Fresán's most recent novel to be translated into English is Kensington Gardens. | |
| Good news for all who gave up! Gregory Cowles reports in the NY Times Book Review's Paper Cuts blog that he has at last read Carpenter's Gothic, and finds that "Gaddis is not in fact all that difficult." The blog was written just before he was named editor at the Times Book Review, so there may be a causal effect there, and one can only hope he reads the other four novels; his life may change again thereafter... | ||
The publisher of many "illustrious writers," including Gaddis, Robert Giroux is dead at age 94: the NY Times obituary is here, with a link to their page on Gaddis, which in turn has links to extensive materials from their archives, including contemporary reviews of Gaddis's books and other articles, and to Gaddis material on other sites. . |
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| 79 Horatio Street, the building where Gaddis lived in his Village days, on the street where Wyatt Gwyon had his studio, has been sold: read more about the sale, and the building's rather colorful history, here. --Peter Dempsey View Larger Map |
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Ninth Letter, a beautifully produced literary and arts magazine published semi-annually by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has published the Gaddis story, "In Dreams I Kiss Your Hand, Madam" in its Fall-Winter 2007 issue, and it has been reprinted in Harper's Magazine in its Readings section in August 2008. It's available on line here |
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| A collection of essays on Gaddis's work, Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System, edited by Joseph Tabbi and Rone Shavers, has been described (at www.findarticles.com) as "a collection of papers and other materials takes up the gap in scholarship on Gaddis's approach to aesthetics, systems, media and capital and includes two biographical pieces as well. They include an interview with Gaddis from about 1980, Gaddis's intellectual relationship with Kierkegaard, his approach to the encyclopedic novel, and to dialogue, his aesthetics of cybernetics (to the first and second order), his place n the autopoiesis of American literature, cognitive gothic relevance theory and its iteration and style, Gaddis's transition to postmodernism, his cognitive map, the debates around him, and the remarkable commentary on the media in such works as Agape Agape. This makes Gaddis more famous, but just as delightfully difficult." Full information, including a list of essays, here. |  |
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Torschlusspanik, the German broadcast version of Agape Agape, translated by Marcus Ingendaay, directed by Klaus Buhlert, and performed by Ignaz Kirchner, originally broadcast in 1999, was re-broadcasted on 19th November 2005 on Deutschlandfunk. During the summer of 1997, when he visited the German-American
Festival for Literature, "Crossings," in Cologne, Gaddis was persuaded
by Elisabeth Pankin to write a play for DeutschlandRadio, where she
was director of radio plays. Gaddis was surprised because, as he rmarked,
"radio
is something you listen to in cars." Pankin was expecting
a collage for many voices, something coming close to
party scenes in The
Recognitions , but got instead a monologue. Her disappointment
passed during production, and in the end all involved
knew that they had taken part
in something great and important. |
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| 50th
anniversary of The Recognitions |
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Penguin reissues The
Recognitions and J R with surprising cover art. |
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