* (restored)
—-
“I feel like part of the vanishing breed that thinks a writer should be read and not heard, let alone seen. I think this is because there seems so often today to be a tendency to put the person in the place of his or her work, to turn the creative artist into a performing one, to find what a writer says about writing somehow more valid, or more real, than the writing itself.” — from his acceptance speech for the National Book Award in Fiction for J R , April 1976
Aside from a couple interjections all of this information was copied from williamgaddis.org and themordernword.com. I just hope that publishing these summaries on The Dennis Cooper blog will hip at least one or two more people to the genius that is Gaddis. If you equate “difficult” books with pretentiousness he is definitely not the one for you, but if you enjoy a challenge that really gets those synapses firing, Gaddis is the man. — winter rates
The Recognitions – 1955
Though neglected for many years, this monumental, eclectic, and intertextually dense masterpiece is now regarded as one of the foundation stones upon which American literary postmodernism is built. With its unrelentingly mordant ironies and overt reflexiveness, The Recognitions presages both “black humour fiction” and the “self-conscious novel.” More than this, the very difficulty and abstruseness of the text, the myriad allusions and symbolism as well as the refusal to identify speakers or explicate and contextualise dialogue and plot details, ensure that the experience of reading the novel is often as maddening an ordeal as the trials which are endured by many of its characters as they too seek in vain to claim or recapture some artistic essence, the ever-elusive materia prima. Inserting himself into the novel (and his subsequent works) in various guises, both Gaddis and his reader are caught firmly within its satiric purview; acerbic, contemptuous, angry, one of the author’s primary recognitions is that his own “original” text, no matter how widely received, will reach only “a very small audience”. -Rob Jackson
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Gaddis’s first novel takes the form of a quest. In a carefully wrought and densely-woven series of plots involving upwards of fifty characters across three continents, we follow the adventures of Wyatt Gwyon, son of a clergyman who rejects the ministry in favor of the call of the artist. His quest is to make sense of contemporary reality, to find significance and some form of order in the world. Through the pursuit of art he hopes to find truth. His initial “failure” as an artist leads him not to copy but to paint in the style of the past masters, those who had found in their own time and in their own style the kind of order and beauty for which Wyatt is looking. His talent for forgery is exploited by a group of unscrupulous art critics and businessmen who hope to profit by passing his works off as original old masters. As the novel develops, these art forgeries become a profound metaphor for all kinds of other frauds, counterfeits and fakery: the aesthetic, scientific, religious, sexual and personal. Towards the end, Wyatt wrenches something authentic from what Eliot called “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” The nature of his revelation, however is highly ambiguous and is hedged about by images of madness and hallucination, which disturbs simple distinctions between real and authentic, between faiths and fakes.
(more from williamgaddis.org)
Time Magazine Review from 1955
It is almost impossible to ignore a novelist who produces 956 closely printed pages. William Gaddis, a 33-year-old New Yorker who has never published a book before, rates attention for other reasons as well. He has written this novel from that dark night of the soul where, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “it is always three o’clock in the morning.” To the small army of “beat generation” characters in The Recognitions, dawn never comes.
As Author Gaddis sees it, the 20th century U.S. is a soggy butt end of western civilization, an age of publicity and duplicity in which the phonies have inherited the earth. Pronouncing a scarcely original, but nevertheless grandiose, anathema, he finds everyone corroded through the decline of love and the absence of Christian faith. Rangy in setting ( New England, Greenwich Village, Paris, Spain, Italy, Central America), aswim in erudition, semi-Joycean in language, glacial in pace, irritatingly opaque in plot and character, The Recognitions is one of those eruptions of personal vision that will be argued about without being argued away. U.S. novel writing has a strikingly fresh talent to watch, if not to cheer.
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from Fire The Bastards! by Jack Green
william gaddis’s the recognitions was published in 1955 its a great
novel, as much the novel of our generation as ulysses was of its it
only sold a few thousand copies because the critics did a lousy job—
—2 critics boasted they didnt finish the book
—one critic made 7 boners others got wrong the number of
pages, year, price, publisher, author, & title
—& other incredible boners like mistaking a diabetic for a narcotics
addict
—one critic stole part of his review from the blurb, part from
another review
—one critic called the book “disgusting” “evil” “foul-mouthed,”
needs “to have its mouth washed out with lye soap” others
were contemptuous or condescending
—2 of 55 reviews were adequate the others were amateurish
& incompetent
failing to recognize the greatness of the book
failing to convey to the reader what the book is like, what its
essential qualities are
counterfeiting this with stereotyped preconceptions—the
standard cliches about a book that is “ambitious,” “erudite,”
“long,” “negative,” etc
counterfeiting competence with inhuman jargon
—constructive suggestion: fire the bastards!
(excerpt)
Five years or so ago my wife met a new co-worker, and in the course of her introductory conversation she mentioned I was a writer. When asked who my favorite authors were she replied “Pynchon, Joyce, and Vollmann among others.”
—“Has he read William Gaddis?” asked this sage, “he has to read The Recognitions.”
—The co-worker disappeared shortly after as if he was a messenger from the literary gods.
My wife got me a copy and I read it six months later. I can remember the camping trip I took where I read the first page and immediately knew Gaddis was a genius. When I read the last page I was stunned. This was my new favorite book. Its encyclopedic scope begs for countless rereads. I cannot wait to attack it again. – winter rates.
NYRB: ‘The Recognitions’ panel, w/ Tom McCarthy, Lydia Millet, Joshua Cohen, & Dustin Illingworth
JR – 1975
Twenty years after his first novel, and after twenty years of working for the government and big business, Gaddis produced his highly acclaimed second; the prize-winning J R, another huge book of 726 pages containing very little except dialogue. A number of critics have said that this is the novel which comes closest to catching the varieties of spoken American English, while another has called it “the greatest satirical novel in American literature”. The first line of the novel gives us its theme: “- Money…?”. J R is a satire on corporate America and tells the story of the eleven-year-old schoolboy JR Vansant who builds an enormous economic empire from his school’s public phone booth, an empire that touches everyone in the novel, just as money – the getting of it, worry about the lack of it, the desire for it – shapes a great deal of the characters’ waking and dreaming lives. Through conversations, letters and telephone calls, we come to understand what Marx called “the distorting power of money”, how all value under capitalism is transformed into economic value. The novel lays before us in immense detail, in the very grain of the human voice, the alienation that is part and parcel of a world in which our innermost feelings have been commodified and where money has become fetishized; rather than it being simply a medium of exchange, a means to an end, money has become an object of desire for its own sake, an outward sign of success and power. The novel draws on a huge range of social and economic thinkers from Marx, a phrase of whose hangs over the entrance to JR’s school, to Max Weber, George Simmel and George Bernard Shaw, whose interpretation of Wagner’s Ring as an allegory of the rise of capitalism is central to J R.
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In style, J R retains the frenetic allusiveness and self-deprecatingly ironic mood of The Recognitions, but the text is even more uncompromising in its repudiation of conventional fictional modes. Composed almost exclusively as unmediated dialogue, wherein incessant interruptions and the doltish obstinacy of the characters mean that their conversations invariably proceed at cross purposes, the novel bombards the reader at every pass with its outright refusal to conform to any expectation of what a literary narrative should be. The farcical plot, intricate in its design even so, recalls one to the fable of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” in exposing the capitalist hegemony as an unmitigatedly corrupt and pathetic sham cloaked by language itself – communication – which is revealed and exemplified simultaneously as the most corrupted and pathetic sham of all. Like Milo Minderbinder in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Wagner’s dwarf Alberich, the neglected waif-turned-business mogul J R is a personification of corrupted innocence, of the capitalist ethic run amok, an iconic representation of the routinization of greed in Western industrial society.
J R received the 1976 National Book Award. – Rob Jackson
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I read J R a couple of years ago and it was quite the challenge. 95% of the book comes in the form of unattributed dialog, as in he never bothers with “said Bob” etc.
(excerpt)
—Money . . .? in a voice that rustled.
—Paper, yes.
—And we’d never seen it. Paper money.
—We never saw paper money till we came east.
—It looked so strange the first time we saw it. Lifeless.
—You couldn’t believe it was worth a thing.
—Not after Father jingling his change.
—Those were silver dollars.
—And silver halves, yes and quarters, Julia. The ones from his pupils. I can hear him now . . .
Sunlight, pocketed in a cloud, spilled suddenly broken across the floor through the leaves of the trees outside.
—Coming up the veranda, how he jingled when he walked.
—He’d have his pupils rest the quarters that they brought him on the backs of their hands when they did their scales. He charged fifty cents a lesson, you see, Mister . . .
—Coen, without the h. Now if both you ladies . . .
—Why, it’s just like that story about Father’s dying wish to have his bust sunk in Vancouver harbor, and his ashes sprinkled on the water there, about James and Thomas out in the rowboat, and both of them hitting at the bust with their oars because it was hollow and wouldn’t go down, and the storm coming up while they were out there, blowing his ashes back into their beards.
—There was never a bust of Father, Anne. And I don’t recall his ever being in Australia.
—That’s just what I mean, about stories getting started.
—Well, it can’t help repeating them before a perfect stranger.
—I’d hardly call Mister Cohen a stranger, Julia. He knows more about our business than we do ourselves.
—Ladies, please. I haven’t come out here simply to dig into your intimate affairs but since your brother died intestate, certain matters will have to be dealt with which otherwise might never come up at all. Now to return to this question of . . .
—I’m sure we have nothing to hide. Lots of brothers don’t get on, after all.
—And do come and sit down, Mister Cohen.
—You might as well tell him the whole story, Julia.
—Well, Father was just sixteen years old. As I say, Ira Cobb owed him some money. It was for work that Father had done, probably repairing some farm machinery. Father was always good with his hands. And then this problem came up over money, instead of paying Father Ira gave him an old violin and he took it down to the barn to try to learn to play it. Well his father heard it and went right down, and broke the violin over Father’s head. We were a Quaker family, after all, where you just didn’t do things that didn’t pay.
—Of course, Miss Bast, it’s all . . . quite commendable. Now, returning to this question of property . . .
—That’s what we’re discussing, if you’ll be a little patient. Why, Uncle Dick, Father’s older brother, had walked all the way back to Indiana, every step of the way from the Andersonville prison.
—And after that business of the violin, Father left home and went to teaching school.
—The one thing he’d wanted, all his life, was to own as far as he could see in any direction. I hope we’ve cleared things up for you now.
—We might if he came back here and sat down. He won’t find anything gazing out the window.
—I had hoped, said Mister Coen from the far end of the room, where he appeared to steady himself against the window frame,—I expected Mrs Angel to be with us here today, he went on in a tone as drained of hope as the gaze he had turned out through evergreen foundation planting just gone sunless with stifling the prospect of roses run riot only to be strangled by the honeysuckle which had long since overwhelmed the grape arbor at the back, where another building was being silently devoured by rhododendron before his eyes.
—Mrs Angel?
—The daughter of the decedent.
—Oh, that’s Stella’s married name isn’t it. You remember, Julia, Father used to say . . .
—Why, Stella called earlier, you told me yourself Anne. To say she was taking a later train.
—That name was changed from Engels, somewhere along the way . . .
—I’m afraid I’ll miss her then, I have to be in court . . .
—I scarcely see the need for that, Mister Cohen. If Stella’s husband is so impatient he’s hiring lawyers and running to court . . .
—You’re losing a button here, Mister Cohen. Thomas had the same trouble when he got stout. He couldn’t keep a crease in anything either.
Gaddis first experimented with this style during some outrageous cocktail party scenes in The Recognitions. The only bits of non-dialogue occur between scene transitions. These are made of very abstract and highly poeticized prose. Once you familiarize yourself with the characters the going gets relatively easier. It is a very rewarding read and thematically I’d say it is even more relevant now than when it was published in 1976. –winter rates
Carpenter’s Gothic – 1985
Heiress Liz Booth is trapped inside an unfulfilling marriage and the few furnished rooms of a dilapidated “carpenter gothic” house in a swank but out-of-the-way New York suburb. Meek, self-deluded, and agoraphobic, she spends her days fielding barely-comprehensible messages and trying to placate the three men in her life: her husband, Paul, a Vietnam veteran and wannabe entrepreneur; her younger brother Billy, impressionable and shiftless; and McCandless, a geologist and writer who once sold out to the CIA, and the owner of the house she and Paul are renting. The more Liz tries to intervene and make sense of all the confusion and deceit which plagues their travails, revolving around a crusading Christian televangelist named the Reverend Elton Ude, a geological survey, mining lease and political upheaval in East Africa, and looming Armageddon, the more the shady dealings and destinies of the men she cares for become irredeemably entangled. – Rob Jackson
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Fakery and Stony Truths
New York Times
July 7, 1985
by Cynthia Ozick
THIS is William Gaddis’s third work of fiction in 30 years. That sounds like a sparse stream, and misrepresents absolutely. Mr. Gaddis is a deluge. The Recognitions, his first novel, published in 1955, matches in plain bulk four or five ordinary contemporary novels. His second, J R, a burlesquing supplementary footnote appearing two decades later, is easily equivalent to another three or four. For those whom tonnage has kept away, Carpenter’s Gothic – a short novel, but as mazily and mercilessly adroit as the others – should disclose Mr. Gaddis’s terrifying artfulness once and for all. Carpenter’s Gothic may be Gaddis-in-little, but it is Gaddis to the brim. With fewer publications so far than he can count on one hand, Mr. Gaddis has not been “prolific” (that spendthrift coin); instead he has been prodigious, gargantuan, exhaustive, subsuming fates and conditions under a hungry logic. His two huge early novels are great vaults or storehouses of crafty encyclopedic scandal – omniscience thrown into the hottest furnaces of metaphor. Mr. Gaddis knows almost everything: not only how the world works – the pragmatic cynical business-machine that we call worldliness – but also how myth flies into being out of the primeval clouds of art and death and money.
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(excerpt)
Apparently Gaddis found the all-dialog style of J Rworked for him and he uses it again in Carpenter’s Gothic. (and A Frolic of His Own as well, but I haven’t read that one yet, just flipped through it.) This time he limits his number of characters and contains all the action in one house over a short period of time. Like a play, all we have are the words his characters say. There is no narrator telling us what is going on inside their heads. But unlike a play this is ALL we have. Even a radio drama provides us with the actor’s interpretation of the dialog, and a written play tells us plainly who said what. Again, though published in 1985 the themes remain utterly relevant twenty years later. Like his first two books it is also laugh-out-loud hilarious in parts. –winter rates.
Tour of a Gothic Carpenter-Style Home
A Frolic Of His Own
Similar to J R, Gaddis’s last novel announces its theme with its first word, but then develops it in the rest of its first line: “Justice? – you get justice in the next world, in this world, you have the law.” The novel follows a series of litigations through the courts and it is the discrepancy between the ideal of justice and the reality of the law that is Gaddis’s subject. For Gaddis, the theory of justice is a beautiful, ordered system we have constructed to ward off or minimize the chaos and contingency of existence. The practice of law however, is for him “a carnival of disorder”, a self-sustaining system of legalese and a conspiracy against the people run for the benefit of a self-serving legal profession. The law is finally “about itself.” As one character puts it, “Words, words, words. That’s what it’s all about.” On the one hand, the law is an attempt to establish a constant principle in the face of social differences, the principle of justice. On the other hand, the operation of the law can be used by the rich and powerful to subvert these very principles.
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Oscar Crease, yet another of Gaddis’s fictional alter egos, is a former community college history teacher and failed playwright who lives alone and ostracized amongst the clutter and gradual collapse of the family mansion on Long Island. Incapacitated in a bizarre mishap with his car and only just released from hospital, he is tended to by his step-sister, Christina, brother-in-law Harry, and Lily, his much younger mistress. Despite their solicitations and advice Oscar embarks on a spree of outrageous litigations, eventually suing himself for injuries sustained in the accident while also lodging a claim and injunction against a major Hollywood movie director for plagiarizing from his unproduced Civil War melodrama. Meanwhile, Oscar’s father, a Federal judge and eminent nonagenarian, is presiding over a series of increasingly ridiculous court cases in the Deep South concerning an enormous steel sculpture, a dead dog, a drowned boy, and Judge Crease’s attempts “to rescue the language,” all of which erupts into a national cause célèbre and steals Oscar’s limelight yet again.
Incorporating several long excerpts from the script of Gaddis’ own unpublished play “Once at Antietam,” along with wickedly-accurate travesties of legal judgments and depositions and his trademark dialogue, allusiveness, and sense of the absurd, justice is a travesty in this scathing indictment of the culture of litigiousness, the third and final installment in Gaddis’ satire of modern-day America.
A Frolic of His Own received the National Book Award in 1995. –Rob Jackson
(excerpt)
Agapē Agape
The book is an extraordinary work of fiction by any standards: it is particularly fascinating to anyone with a serious interest in player and reproducing pianos for the way in which it puts them at the heart of debates about modern culture. Gaddis was clearly extremely well-informed about many aspects of these instruments, particularly the technical, so it is a great pity that he entirely failed to understand the potential of the Pianola as a musical instrument of considerable subtlety. Of course he was right that it is quite possible to ‘just keep pumping’ but anyone who knows what the instrument is capable of will feel that his arguments, scintillating as they are, are undermined by the real potential of the instrument he so maligned. – Claire L’Enfant
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Bedridden and dying writer meditates on the significance of his life and his life’s work as he tries vainly to draw together his thoughts and papers into some ultimate coherency. Composed as a dramatic monologue, many of the themes and concerns from Gaddis’s major works are reprised in this posthumously-published novella. –Rob Jackson
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(excerpt)
No but you see I’ve got to explain all this because I don’t, we don’t know how much time there is left and I have to work on the, to finish this work of mine while I, why I’ve brought in this whole pile of books notes pages clippings and God knows what, get it all sorted and organized when I get this property divided up and the business and worries that go with it while they keep me here to be cut up and scraped and stapled and cut up again my damn leg look at it, layered with staples like that old suit of Japanese armour in the dining hall feel like I’m being dismantled piece by piece, houses, cottages, stables orchards and all the damn decisions and distractions I’ve got the papers land surveys deeds and all of it right in this heap somewhere, get it cleared up and settled before everything collapses and it’s all swallowed up by lawyers and taxes like everything else because that’s what it’s about, that’s what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight, entertainment and technology and every four year old with a computer, everybody his own artist where the whole thing came from, the binary system and the computer where technology came from in the first place, you see? I can’t even go into it, you see that’s what I have to go into before all my work is misunderstood and distorted and, and turned into a cartoon because it is a cartoon, whole stupefied mob out there waiting to be entertained, turning the creative artist into a performer, into a celebrity like Byron, the man in the place of his work when probability came in and threw that whole safe predictable Newtonian world into chaos, into disorder wherever you turn, discontinuity, disparity, difference, discord, contradiction, what they’re calling aporia they took from the Greeks, the academics took the word from the Greeks for this swamp of ambiguity, paradox, perversity, opacity, obscurity, anarchy the clock without the clockmaker and the desperate comedy of Kierkegaard’s insane Knight of Belief and even Pascal’s famous wager in a world where everyone is “so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness” where the artist is today, the artist the real artist Plato warned us about, the threat to society and the, read Huizinga on Plato and music and the artist as dangerous and art as dangerous and music in this mode and that mode, the Phrygian mode to quiet you down and the tenor and bass Lydian to make you sad and the soft and drinking harmonies, the Lydian and the Ionian where the art the, the artist having trouble breathing here I, coming out of the anaesthesia down in the recovery room tried to raise my leg and it suddenly jumped up by itself like a, like the pain avoiding pain that’s what all this is about isn’t it? Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, beyond the pleasure principle? My golden Sigi his mother always called him, if Emerson was right and we are what our mothers made us? “Pleasure and pain I maintain to be the first perceptions of children,” the first forms virtue and vice take for them, not my golden Sigi no, he lifted it from Plato’s Laws Book II, talking about his own high ethical standards. “I subscribe to a high ideal,” he tells Reverend Oskar Pfister “from which most of the human beings I have come across depart most lamentably.” And then just to make clear what little he’s found that’s good about these human beings, he tells Reverend Oskar Pfister “In my experience most of them are trash,” probably lost sight of their purposes never had any in the first place but pleasure and along comes Bentham with “Pushpin is as good as poetry if the quantity of pleasure given is the same” see that word quantity? The quantity of pleasure not the quality the whole point of it and these digital machines come in, the all-or-none machine Norbert Wiener called it, machine that counts brings in the binary system and the computer with it, so Wiener tells us about a brilliant American engineer who’s gone out and bought an expensive player piano. Pushpin or Pushkin, doesn’t care a damn for the music but he’s fascinated by the complicated mechanism that produces it that’s what America was all about, what mechanization was all about, what democracy was all about and the deification of democracy a hundred years ago all this technology at the service of entertaining Sigi’s stupefied pleasure seeking trash out there playing the piano with its feet where it all came from isn’t it? That all-or-none paper roll with holes in it, 40,000 player pianos built in 1909, almost 200,000 ten years later if ever the daughters of music were brought low I mean that’s what I’m trying to explain, dividing the properties three ways one for each daughter all settled ahead of time before the lawyers and taxes swallow it up in dislocation and disorder getting it organized the only way to defend it against this tide of entropy that’s spread everywhere since the year the player piano came into being from some Civil War battlefield like Christ, its American inventor said, and its own received it not since Willard Gibbs showed us the tendency for entropy to increase, nature’s tendency to degrade the organized and destroy the meaningful when he pulled the rug out from under Newton’s compact tightly organized universe with his papers on statistical physics in 1876, laid the way for this contingent universe where order is the least probable and chaos the most introducing probability and chance convinced Wiener it was not Einstein or Planck or Heisenberg but Willard Gibbs who brought on the first great revolution in twentieth century physics but that’s not what I’m talking about is it, that’s not what I’m trying to explain, no. No where did the, in a folder in this heap somewhere on the theory of wait wait wait, good God the whole pile spilling never get it together again I’d be, I’d be finished, lungs are gone and what’s happening down below is nobody’s business, metastasized into the bone why I haven’t a day to waste, get the properties settled on all three of them with all the headaches that go with it and I’ll stay with them by turns, four months with each daughter working on this project because I’ve got to get a contract and some advance money so I can finish it before I, before the, you see what I mean, before what it’s about, before it all turns into what it’s about. Where is it, this swamp of ambiguity, paradox, anarchy they’re calling aporia his book right here somewhere probably at the bottom of the pile it was a game they played, the Greeks, a game you couldn’t win, nobody could win, a parlour game proposing questions there was no clear answer to so winning wasn’t the point of it no, no that’s ours isn’t it, right on the money because that’s what the game is, the only game in town because that’s what America’s wait, little card there falling on the, there! You see? Whole stack of papers here organizing my research here it is, what I was looking for exactly what I’m talking about, 1927, getting the whole chronology in order 1876 to 1929 when the player piano world and everything else collapsed, the first public demonstration of television the image of the dollar sign was projected for sixty seconds by Philo T Farnsworth in 1927, see how I’ve got everything organized here put my finger right on it? Coming events cast their shadows and all the rest of it for Sigi’s stupefied trash out there gaping at television dollar sign’s all they see where we are today aren’t we? Waiting to be entertained because that’s where it started and that’s where it ends up, avoiding pain and seeking pleasure play the piano with your feet, play cards, play pool play pushpin here it is, here’s Huizinga talking about music and play he quotes Plato yes, here. “That which has neither utility nor truth nor likeness nor yet, in its effects, is harmful, can best be judged by the criterion of the charm that is in it, and by the pleasure it affords. Such pleasure, entailing as it does no appreciable good or ill, is play,” goes on about little children and animals can’t keep still, always moving making noise playing skipping leaping making a racket ends up where it started with toys, toys, toys, every four year old with a computer. Press buttons it lights up different colours he’s supposed to be learning what, how to spell? No, it corrects his spelling doesn’t need to know how to spell, how to multiply divide get the square root of God knows what don’t have to read music know a cleft from a G string just keep pumping because that’s where it came from like Wiener’s engineer, not the music but how it’s made, tubes bellows hammers the whole digital machine, whole binary system that all-or-none paper roll with the holes in it running over the tracker bar that’s where all of it came from, toys and entertainment where technology comes from going back, back, back to Vaucanson’s duck that ruffled its feathers and quacked waddled and shat, back a thousand, two thousand years with the penny-in-the-slot machines and water organs Hero of Alexandria made to entertain the locals and the living statues on the island of Rhodes Pindar talks about, the artificial trees and singing birds made for the Emperor of Byzantium a thousand years ago nothing but toys and games wherever you went, Charles V’s armed puppets playing trumpets and drums and a lifesize singing canary made for Marie Antoinette made it pretty clear who this frivolous entertainment was for, artificial birds singing real birdsongs to teach birds how to sing? Mozart writing music for fluteplaying clocks and Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory written for Maelzel’s panharmonicon while those rococo Swiss watchmakers were still busy making princely gifts of musical snuff boxes and pastorals featuring tiny figures doing farm chores and the French libeled as usual for smutty versions available across the way where Vaucanson’s foul duck and his shepherd boy played twenty songs on a pipe with one hand and beat a drum with the other and his flutist, good God Vaucanson’s flutist! actually played the flute? Because that’s where it came from, where the technology came from right down to that paper roll with the holes in it where the computer came from, you see? Just take a minute to explain all this computer madness besotted by science besotted by technology by this explosion of progress and the information revolution what we’re really besotted by is people making millions, making billions from computer chips computer circuitry computer programs one man making thirty billion dollars in a year because that’s what we’ve always been besotted by, Philo T Farnsworth had it right seventy years ago didn’t he? What America’s all about, what it’s always been about that thirty billion dollars? What the computer’s all about what all of it’s all about, movie stars, ball players, what science is all about, try to pin it on some humble genius so Pascal shows up age nineteen with his digital adding machine, Leibniz with one that multiplies and divides and finally Babbage and his Difference Engine, Babbage and his Analytical Engine with its punched cards Babbage the grandfather of the modern computer so it’s Babbage Babbage Babbage but he got his idea from Jacquard’s loom so that’s all you ever hear, Jacquard’s loom Jacquard’s loom Jacquard’s loom hits you square in the belly no where did I, can’t believe it I just saw it here Flaubert, Flaubert must have been alphabetic with Farnsworth everything organized here it is yes here it is, letter from Flaubert 1868 asks about the silk weavers in Lyons, work in low-ceilinged rooms? in their homes? children work too? “The weaver working at a Jacquard loom” he says he’s heard “is continually struck in the stomach by the shaft of the roller on which the cloth is being wound, it is the roller itself that strikes him?” There, you see? That was the factory Vaucanson had set up near Lyons that fell into disrepair and Jacquard shows up later, picks up the pieces of Vaucanson’s mechanical loom for figured silks, glues the pieces together and we’ve got Jacquard’s loom but that’s not what I’m talking about, no, no it’s the principle of the thing, eighty years before Babbage, it’s the same principle Vaucanson used for his flutist, this drum pierced with holes and levers controlling its fingers and lip and tongue movements the air supply driven through the lips against the edge of the holes in the flute it was actually playing the notes selected by the holes in the drum, the notes selected by the holes in that roll of paper because the piano was the epidemic, it was the plague spreading across America a hundred years ago with its punched paper roll at the heart of the whole thing, of the frenzy of invention and mechanization and democracy and how to have art without the artist and automation, cybernetics you can see where the, damn! Where the tissues, just get cold water on it stop the bleeding, you see? Scrape my wrist against this drawer corner tears the skin open blood all over the place it doesn’t hurt no, skin’s like parchment that’s the prednisone, turns the skin into dry old parchment tear it open with a feather that’s the prednisone, reach for a book reach for anything tear myself to pieces reaching for this book listen, you’ll see what I mean, opening page you’ll see what I mean, “From March to December” he says, “while I was having to take large quantities of prednisolone,” same thing as prednisone, “I assembled every possible book and article written by” you see what I mean? “and visited every possible and impossible library” this whole pile of books and papers here? “preparing myself with the most passionate seriousness for the ta sk, which I had been dreading throughout the preceding winter, of writing” where am I here, yes, “a major work of impeccable scholarship. It had been my intention to devote the most careful study to all these books and articles and only then, having studied them with all the thoroughness the subject deserved, to begin writing my work, which I believed would leave far behind it and far beneath it everything else, both published and unpublished” you see what this is all about? “I had been planning it for ten years and had repeatedly failed to bring it to fruition,” but of course you don’t no, no that’s the whole point of it! It’s my opening page, he’s plagiarized my work right here in front of me before I’ve even written it! That’s not the only one. That’s not the only one either, he’s done it before, or after, word for word right in this heap somewhere you could call plagiary a kind of entropy in there corrupting the creation it’s right in here somewhere I can never find anything in this mess never get it sorted out, never get it in any kind of order but that’s what it’s all about in the first place isn’t it? Get things in order that’s half the battle in fact it is the battle, organize what’s essential and throw out the rest of it that’s the, Phidias? For me an image slumbers in the stone who’s that, Nietzsche? Probability, chance, disorder and breakdown here’s that punched paper roll holding the the, damn! Getting blood all over these pages of ads for what I just said didn’t I? Whole thing turns into a cartoon? an animated cartoon? Chance and disorder sweeping in and this binary system digital machine with its all-or-none paper roll holding the fort yes it was the fort, whole point of it to order and organize to eliminate chance, to eliminate failure because we’ve always hated failure in America like some great character flaw what technology’s all about, music entertainment counting, counting, seventy years ago one great pianist cutting a roll coordinating his hands and pedaling within a fiftieth of a second 1926 one company cut and sold ten million rolls whole thing turns into a cartoon, mob out there crash bang storming the gates seeking pleasure democracy scaling the walls terrifying the elite who’ve had a corner on high class entertainment back to Marie Antoinette storming the Bastille with here yes, here’s one yes, here’s a German ad 1926 holding the line for the class act against here they come, here they come, “a still larger class of people who cannot successfully operate the usual type of player, because they lack a true sense of musical values. They have no ‘ear for music,’ and for that reason they play atrociously upon pianos equipped even with high grade player actions” talking about the class act? about defending these elitist music lovers? Not here no, talking about what we’re always talking about. Sales!
There are loads and loads of great links to interviews, essays, etc. at the Gaddis Annotations Site
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p.s. Hey. ** T. J., Hi, T. J. Thanks a lot. Fascinating list. I’ve copied/pasted it (as I did with all of the lists actually). Interesting that Ferreri was the first director that came to your mind. I don’t know that work very well, but I’ll go ahead and do a blog Day on him since that’s the ultimate way to get to know someone’s work for me. Yeah, great list. Inarguable. And the weird thing is I’ve seen all but two of your listed films. History mind meld. Thanks! ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you! Copied/pasted for later study and investigation. I don’t know that Polonsky film, but I will. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. ‘Daisies’ was on quite a number of lists. Deservedly, of course. Interesting. And, also, of course, thank you for the therapeutic joy! I was walking in the Tuileries as it unfolded, so I had to control my body parts lest the gendarmerie eyeball me unflatteringly. ** fervorxo, Hi, fervorxo! Welcome! Ryan’s stuff goes out through the art world, meaning it gets shown pretty exclusively in galleries and museums, which sucks for us punters because they’re for sale like artworks. But he does have a Vimeo channel where there are some full length videos and a lot of excerpts from most of his videos, so I would head over there. Thank you the list. I don’t know the Klimov and Frias films at all, so I’ll go find them. Great! Obviously, come back here any old time. ** Bill, Hi, B. Thank you for the list. The Leon/Cocina is news to me, so I’ll hunt it. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Oh, good, I’m glad your weekend wasn’t weak in the blog area. Ha ha, good question about Dick. I suppose Wikipedia or somewhere would explain, but I fear the explanation is disappointing. But still. Love selling you Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ for 1 euro, G. ** Marilyn Roxie, Hi, Marilyn. How lovely to see you! How are you? What’s going on? Thank you for your exciting list and not just exciting because ‘LCTG’ is on there, but that’s pretty exciting. Love, me. ** l@rst, Hi, big l. So there’s your old thing up there today. Thank you for the list, man. It’s true you are very American! God love you! ** JS, Hi, JS! Thanks a bunch. There are a few things I’m going to jump all over, not knowing them. That crazily named Farmer film for one. Wild. And I … don’t think I know Rankin’s films either. Yeah, cool. How are you? ** Steve Erickson, Yeah, when I looked back at my fave films just from last time, I was shocked by what wasn’t on it, and hence my revised foist. I don’t know that Sohrab Shahid Saless, and I’ll seek it. Right, I spaced on the Gehr film. That could’ve been on mine too. I don’t know re: the S&S poll. I’ve never been invited to it. Late in the year, no? Glad your dad got through his spill okay. ** Mattia, Hi, Mattia. Welcome to the insides of this place. Excellent list. I’m noting those I don’t know. Yes, ‘Zama’ was amazing. That might well have been on mine if I hadn’t spaced re: it. Yes, thank you very much! I look forward to learning things from you. ** Juan, Hi, Juan. Good to meet you. Oh, sure, yes, you can use my text. I’m honored! Wow, thank you! I’ll go listen to the track as soon as I finish up here. Excited. Yeah, really, thank you very much for thinking my text could help your music. Take care! ** Toniok, Hugs and fist bumps, Tonio! Great list. I too am very fond of ‘Batman Returns’, for one. I just put together a Tarkovsky Day. Swell! You good, man? I hope so. ** Jeff J, Hey, Jeff. Thanks, pal. Your list is pretty fucking ultra-impressive. The Prina film is another ‘art world’ thing, so hard to see. He’s/it’s great. Morgan Fisher’s films are wonderful. There’s some evidence of them online. Here’s Steina and Woody Vasulka Day and Aldo Tambellini Day if they’re helpful. That Weissman is great. Unlike many of his most recent films, which I find to be kind of bloated, that one is super precise and fantastic and among his very best, I think. Connor didn’t destroy the prints, no. His estate was very hard-assed about his work being seen online. The first time I did a Connor Day they wrote to me within 24 hours telling me to take it down. But I did a second one with imbeds and stuff and I heard nothing. So maybe they’ve accepted the inevitable. Fantastic list! A number of things that could easily have been on my list too had I scrunched may brain more. Yeah, killer list. One of my goals is to try to come around to liking Tarkovsky ‘cos he just doesn’t do it for me, and I made a Day about him upcoming, and that did sway me slightly. I hope everything is rockin’ with you! ** Florian-Ayala Fauna, Hi! I’ve heard of ‘Threads’, but I’ve never actually seen it. I will, for sure. Thank you. You know, I’ve hardly seen any of the recent horror films for some reason. Not sure why. Not in that headspace or something? Are there films you can recommend for me to dig into the genre through? Take care. ** Misanthrope, I love that you have ‘Freddy Got Fingered’ on your list. Me too, re: candy. My stomach has become much more snooty about food over time. Which sucks since I still like candy. Ah, fuck the wealthy, man. Well, I shouldn’t say that since Zac and I currently need wealthy people to kindly help fund our film, so never mind. ** Rafe, Hi! Me too, I now have a giant list of new films to start finding and getting under my mind’s belt. Including some of yours that I don’t know: Vack and Esterhazy, for example. Roy Andersson! He should’ve had something on my list. Damn. Quiet wth cool dreams sounds kind of like my weekend except without the cool dreams. I had cool daydreams, if that counts. ** Bernard, Ponied up, did you? I can’t argue with a single film on your list except maybe the Verhoeven, but I know I’m an outlier on him. Thank you, sir/friend. I hope you’re packing your bags! Love, me. ** Okay. Today you lovely people get a restored post from way back in … hold on … 2007(!) by the honorable l@rst concerning the works of the honorable William Gaddis. Imperial stuff galore! Do it! See you tomorrow.
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