12/01/1989: abolish the damned thing

"Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, along with [Elizabeth] Hardwick, [William] Gaddis, [James] Merrill, [Helen] Frankenthaler. The solemnity of it all in that vast, empty assembly room, especially laughable when the big discussion came up whether or not to abolish the damned thing. [Ralph] Ellison piped up, no, he believed in hierarchy."

~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, Selected and Edited by Richard M. Cook

his miserable needs

". . .but now fallen to poverty and deceit, borrowing money, betraying and cheating anyone in reach, bullying anyone less talented, that is to say everyone, in the name of the art which he still holds bitterly sacred, supplying his miserable needs with any dodge he can devise. . ."

~~ from Agapē Agape by William Gaddis

that I'm forgotten

"Fact that I'm forgotten that I'm left on the shelf with the dead white guys in the academic curriculum that my prizes are forgotten because today everybody's giving prizes for that supine herd out there waiting to be entertained, try to educate them did they buy those 'Educator' piano rolls teach them to play with their hands no, went right on discovering their unsuspecting talent with their feet here's Flaubert yes, 'The entire dream of democracy' he says, 'is to raise the proletariat to the level of bourgeois stupidity.'"

~~ from Agapē Agape by William Gaddis

a commodity in little supply these days

"I don’t want to overstate this point. These novels [of William Gaddis] demand more effort on the reader’s part than the average page-turner. Above all, they demand attention—a commodity in little supply these days. I read them both for the first time twenty years ago, in college, when I had all day to read long novels, and I have counted them among my favorites ever since. But I returned to them for this essay with some trepidation. I was in quarantine, working remotely with a newborn and a three-year-old at home. If I stopped reading mid-paragraph because a notification popped up on my phone, I would find myself lost and have to start the paragraph or the entire page over. But this problem was easily solved: I set my phone aside. I had hardly noticed how conditioned I’d become to give at best half of myself to whatever I was reading. There was something exciting about returning to books that asked something of me. And they rewarded my investment copiously. I count my second time through these novels—like my first—among the great literary experiences of my life."

~~ from "Because God Did Not Relax: The Difficult Pleasures of William Gaddis" 

      by Christopher Beha

      Harper's Magazine, November 2020

Gaddis and Cravan

Profiles of William Gaddis, in Harper's Magazine, and Arthur Cravan, in The Paris Review, caught my eye this week.

Beauchamp's Gaddis

Beauchamp on Gaddis https://t.co/dZVirBTnih #FridayReads #Gaddis #PlayerPiano #JR #awp #mfa

— Alex Kudera (@kudera) July 4, 2020