literature on Stephen Schenkenberg

Sun, 04 May 2025 12:49:44 -0500

At long last, I tackled and finished George Eliot’s “Middlemarch," switching between audio and paperback over the past several months. What a canvas. Such intelligence. And the prose. The 750 pages are rich with memorable phrases that get inside her characters — one’s “self-cherishing anxiety”; another’s “motiveless levity”; the “reciprocal tolerance” that two have for each other — and whole paragraphs, like this novel-closing gem, that are indestructible, rhythmic, and wise:

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 21:49:38 -0500

Excellent, visually interesting video review of William Gaddis’s “The Recognitions,” an all-time fav. Eager to reread it in the coming years.

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 22:18:17 -0500

Picked the right two weeks to start reading, and be enchanted by, “Middlemarch.” 📚

New Poems from Carl Phillips

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 20:03:46 -0500

Spent a lovely few weeks making my way, intentionally slowly, through Carl Phillips’s new book of poetry, “Scattered Snows, to the North”. A huge fan of his sensitive, fluid-with-pauses work. A few lines I was especially struck by (though reading the original in print, with line breaks, is preferred):

From “Thicket”:

It’s a quiet night—quiet / the way the animals here, east / of touch, but slightly north, / still, of penetration, live / mostly quiet. Most disappear.

From “Career”:

What if all the truth is / is an over-washed sweatshirt, sometimes on / purpose worn inside out?

From “Back Soon; Driving”:

The way the present cuts into history, / or how the future can look at first / like the past sweeping through, there / are blizzards, and there are blizzards. / Some contain us; some we carry / within us until they die, when we do.

Thu, 26 Aug 2021 21:57:00 -0500

“Theodicy,” by Nick Laird. What a phenonomal poem, with a vivid, piercing close.

Weeknotes #01

Sun, 19 Apr 2020 22:15:00 -0500

Borrowing the structure of a few other online writers whose websites I enjoy (Paul Robert Lloyd and Mark Boulton, among others), I thought I’d start weekly low-key look-backs on the week, bullet list-style. Perhaps weekly is aspirational. We’ll see.

Greatly enjoyed Emily Nussbaum’s long New Yorker profile of Fiona Apple, whose long-awaited record just hit my Spotify streaming today. After reading the piece, I’d been going back through Apple’s back catalogue, awaiting the new songs and relishing the old. That stellar start of “I Know”: “So be it / I’m your crowbar….”
Also in the New Yorker, I was moved by Alex Ross’s essay honoring his late mother, “Grieving With Brahms.” I admire Ross’s writing greatly.
Okay, one more New Yorker reference for the week: I was floored by Dan Chiasson’s review of Joyelle McSweeney’s new book of poetry that involves motherhood and tragedy.
I’ve been dabbling with Roam, which is getting a lot of indie attention as a networked-notes app. (See: #roamcult) At least for now, I’ve enjoyed reading in-depth use studies more than actually using it. Somewhat relatedly, it’s been a big few weeks for Notion, which I continue to use more as a work/life dashboard than a notes app. This general area of knowledge management is one I’m deeply interested in and will continue to be tracking.
Speaking of tech, I’m three episodes into “Devs” (Hulu) and plan on continuing. Intrigued. (I loved the look of Alex Garland’s “Ex Machina.”)
“Knives Out” was fun.
During quarantine, Pentagram’s Michael Bierut — one of my favorite voices on branding and communications — is offering a “Virtual Bookshelf Tour” on Instagram. Mouthwatering. Starts here.
On my family’s own isolation front, lack of options breeds ingenuity. Today Leo and I played driveway tennis over a rope tied between our basketball hoop and a locked stroller, followed by foam-ball lawn golf employing our Christmas tree stand as the hole. Worked surprisingly well.

Toni Morrison's Exquisite Nonfiction

Fri, 06 Mar 2020 21:51:00 -0500

I just finished Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (2019), and every few pages or so, I thought to myself: it’s rare I’m taking in prose this rhythmically perfect, this deeply intelligent.

From “Peril” (2008):

How bleak, unlivable, insufferable existence becomes when we are deprived of artwork. That the life and work of writers facing peril must be protected is urgent, but along with that urgency we should remind ourselves that their absence, the choking off of a writer’s work, its cruel amputation, is of equal peril to us. The rescue we extend to them is a generosity to ourselves….
Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorry into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.

From Morrison’s 1998 Sarah Lawrence Commencement Address:

If I spend my life despising you because of your race, or class, or religion, I become your slave. If you spend yours hating me for similar reasons, it is because you are my slave. I own your energy, your fear, your intellect. I determine where you live, how you live, what your work is, your definition of excellence, and I set limits to your ability to love. I will have shaped your life. That is the gift of your hatred; you are mine….
We are already live-chosen by ourselves. Humans, and as far as we know there are no others. We are the moral inhabitants of the galaxy. Why trash that magnificent obligation after working so hard in the womb to assume it? You will be in positions that matter. Positions in which you can decide the nature and quality of other people’s lives. Your errors may be irrevocable. So when you enter those places of trust, or power, dream a little before you think, so your thoughts, your solutions, your directions, your choices about who lives and who doesn’t, about who flourishes and who doesn’t will be worth the very sacred life you have chosen to live. You are not helpless. You are not heartless. And you have time.

Lastly, here is the oft-quoted passage from Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Lecture in Literature:

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Mon, 08 Jul 2019 21:07:07 -0500

I was impressed and moved by Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Poetic, searching, deeply affecting. Highly recommended. Related reading/listening: Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker; Kat Chow in The Atlantic; and this Politics & Prose conversation with the author (genuine, exacting, deeply intelligent).

From the novel:

Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?

New Knausgaard Interview @ NewYorker.com

Mon, 12 Nov 2018 22:37:00 -0500

From a substantive new interview with Joshua Rothman:

I had felt for many, many years that the form of the novel, as I used it, created a distance from life. When I started to write about myself, that distance disappeared. If you write about your life, as it is to yourself, every mundane detail is somehow of interest—it doesn’t have to be motivated by plot or character. That was my only reason for writing about myself. It wasn’t because I found myself interesting, it wasn’t because I had experienced something I thought was important and worth sharing, it wasn’t because I couldn’t resist my narcissistic impulses. It was because it gave my writing a more direct access to the world around me. And then, at some point, I started to look at the main character—myself—as a kind of place where emotions, thoughts, and images passed through.

Four Recent Pieces on Parenthood

Sun, 17 Jun 2018 14:11:02 -0500

On this Father's Day, here are four terrific recent pieces I've been lucky to come across — two very short essays, two short poems — that capture this part of life so well:

"Mum's the Word," by Rivka Galchen
"What is Possible," by Mohsin Hamid
"To White Noise," by Carrie Fountain
"Poem Without Sleep," by Carrie Fountain

More Great Listening: Batuman & Sow

Fri, 08 Jun 2018 22:11:55 -0500

The Longform Podcast's new episode with Elif Batuman is fantastic. I've enjoyed her writing for a few years, and in this interview you can just feel her thinking deeply about literature and writing and gender and observing in cities around the world and much more. As interviewer Max Linsky tweeted when sharing the link: "Genuinely, this is the most fun I have had in a long time. It was so fun, in fact, that at one point I stopped and said 'Wow I’m just very happy to be sitting here with you! This is so fun!' And then Elif was very gracious with me and then she said a bunch more brilliant things." It's true.

I also loved Design Observer's new episode with Aminatou Sow. She was new to me, and I'm clearly late to the game. On being late, though: Really enjoyed Sow's skepticism of the tech press's focus on the young (who wants to peak at 28?), vs. her interest in longevity; she's long thought the ideal age is 63 .

On Meeting & Knowing William Gass

Tue, 12 Dec 2017 01:00:00 -0500

I wrote this piece, “Words of William H. Gass touched readers around the globe," for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It was published this past Sunday. (The anecdote at the beginning — which in a way launched my relationship with Gass — almost didn’t happen. I went to that literary reading only after hemming and hawing about maybe staying home to watch “24.")

Thu, 26 Oct 2017 20:41:00 -0500

George Saunders on Monocle 24: A does-the-heart-and-mind-good interview with Georgina Godwin.

Karl Ove Knausgaard Walks Central Park

Tue, 24 Oct 2017 21:34:00 -0500

For The New Yorker Radio Hour, Joshua Rothman walks Central Park with one of my favorite living writers. I especially loved this bit, which comes after Knausgaard is asked about the differences between the way children and adults go through their days:

I have four children, and maybe when I spend a summer day with them, it is like nothing. Time is just passing. There’s nothing remarkable happening. It’s like the world is not attached to me, and I’m not attached to the world anymore. And then I remember the summers when I was a child myself — how important everything was, how attached I was to everything that happened, and how slowly those days evolved, somehow. I find it very easy to underestimate my own children. That I don’t see them — that they’re just little creatures, not realizing that they have an enormous, huge and independent inner life. Somehow, the task is apparently to be aware of that.

Lethem on Knausgaard: "My Hero"

Tue, 04 Jul 2017 12:42:25 -0500

After discovering this short appreciation in a Jonathan Lethem essay collection on bookish things, I just read it aloud to my wife, who'd been curious about why I've been so utterly taken by this series and increasingly hungry for each subsequent volume. Lethem nailed it ("Knausgaard's approach is plain and scrupulous, sometimes casual, yet he never writes down. His subject is the beauty and terror of the fact that all life coexists with itself."), and he was only one volume in.

"A Father's Final Odyssey"

Tue, 09 May 2017 21:49:31 -0500

A special piece by Daniel Mendelsohn about Homer's epic, his father and a journey they took together.

Thu, 19 Jan 2017 09:35:00 -0500

Loved this World Book Club episode, with informed and curious readers asking Karl Ove Knausgaard about one of my favorite works of literature in several years. We shouldn’t be surprised that he’s a thoughtful and candid interviewee.

The William H. Gass Symposium

Sat, 10 Dec 2016 11:43:00 -0500

In September of this year, I was honored to be part of “The William H. Gass Symposium: International Writing” at Washington University in St. Louis. I joined Lorin Cuoco, who co-founded the International Writers Center with Gass in 1990 and was its associate director until 2001, in giving some opening remarks, then discussing Gass’s work with William H. Gass Fellow Matthias Göritz and Ignacio Infante, associate professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish at the university.

I spoke about my work editing and publishing ReadingGass.org, The Ear’s Mouth Must Move: Essential Interviews of William H. Gass and Abstractions Arrive: Having Been There All the Time. To say I was in impressive company is an understatement. Don’t miss the other videos all housed here together.

(via A Virtuoso Performance: Speakers from the 2016 William H. Gass Symposium, Part III - University Libraries Washington University in St. Louis)

Knausgaard & Zadie

Sun, 23 Oct 2016 10:06:14 -0500

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

Yes, please.

Max Porter's "Grief Is the Thing with Feathers"

Sun, 10 Jul 2016 10:24:58 -0500

I loved everything about this singular, poetic, deeply moving book. Huge congrats to Max Porter on a phenomenal debut. (Here’s the review that led me to it.)

Silverblatt & Knausgaard

Sat, 06 Feb 2016 15:48:02 -0500

Having just finished book three of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (I enjoyed the first two more, though this volume’s still captivating), I was eager to listen to both part one and part two of the author’s interviews on Michael Silverblatt’s “Bookworm.”

It’s great listening. These insights from Silverblatt — which followed his comment that Knausgaard clearly knows his “great literature” — rang especially true for me:

What’s daring about My Struggle is that you’re willing to put the difficulty of the literature of the century — Joyce on — aside, to recapture the human. To make it human again, or to restore it to humanness. And in doing so, you risk being wildly misunderstood….

These works of great literature, in some way, speak to readers. And they speak from a world of genius. And I feel that in order to restore the possibility of originality, and even grandeur, you had to enter the zone of shame and the zone of ordinary life, which is banality. And you had to ask, Can great literature be made of such things? Am I willing to try to write six volumes of daily life, when all of us are feeling that our daily lives are disappointing and dissatisfying? Can the novel of Knausgaard restore our feelings of the importance of daily life?

I can’t think, personally, of anything more important. I’m very grateful when I read these books, because I feel like you’ve restored my interest in human beings. In going to the grocery. In feeding a child and making sure things are taken care of from one day to the next.

Launched: TheGassInterviews.org

Sat, 07 Jun 2014 13:33:17 -0500

I’m very pleased to announce the launch of TheGassInterviews.org.

Free to all and readable on any device, the microsite collects a dozen essential interviews that Gass gave between the late 1970s and 2011. It’s titled “The Ear’s Mouth Must Move,” a phrase of Gass’ own. The pieces feature text, related historical photography, video, and a handful of marginal notes and links that might be of interest to readers.

Hope you dig in.

Seamus Heaney: 1939 – 2013

Fri, 30 Aug 2013 12:10:00 -0500

Sad news: The great Irish poet Seamus Heaney has died at age 74.

When I was a freshman in college in the early 1990s, I was fortunate enough to take an upper-level English class with Dr. Ed Duffy, who dedicated a few months of the semester just to Heaney’s work. It was a remarkable immersion, and I felt incredibly engaged and grown-up.

We serially read Heaney’s Station Island, a quest for both the book’s narrator and the course’s students. And at some point we landed on perhaps Heaney’s most well-known poem, “Digging,” which ends this way:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

That occupational charge — This is my purpose — was powerful for this future English major, as I suspect it’s been for many others.

Since then I’ve kept up with Heaney, reading profiles of him, lectures from him, and adding a few of his books to my shelves. Unfortunately, it seems the slim Station Island paperback is no longer with me, though a few fatter collections are.

As I paged back through these this morning, more than a few striking lines still earn the squiggles and exclamation marks with which I marked them the first time through: “the black glacier / of each funeral / pushed away” (“Funeral Rites”); “Love, I shall perfect for you the child / Who diligently potters in my brain” (“Poem”); “The future was a verb in hibernation” (“Villanelle for an Anniversary”); “the whispering grass / Ran its fingers through our guessing silence” (“A Dream of Jealousy”).

To close, I’ll quote from a few longer passages I’d marked, still so vividly earthy and right. From “Death of a Naturalist”:

Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran.

And the last lines from “Personal Helicon”:

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Gass at 89

Tue, 30 Jul 2013 09:49:00 -0500

A very happy 89th birthday to the great William H. Gass, with whom I’m pictured here in 2007. I’m incredibly glad he’s still writing every day.

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 08:01:21 -0500

At McSweeney’s, Teddy Wayne’s “Feedback From James Joyce’s Submission of Ulysses to His Creative Writing Workshop.”

"William H. Gass: How I Write"

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 12:41:00 -0500

[Fun interview](https://www.thedailybeast.com/william-h-gass-how-i-write/) in The Daily Beast. Happily surprised to see my name pop up.

"The sirens had hoarse throats"

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 19:19:23 -0500

From William H. Gass’ forthcoming novel, Middle C:

Joey … rails ran across France then, rails ran through the mountain passes and through tunnels into and out of the mountains, rails ran along the Mur, through forests of fir trees, because the war was over, the sirens had hoarse throats, all the bombs they’d dropped on one another had gone plode, and so we could have traveled home together, because there were no more warplanes, no more lights fingering the sky, no more Nazis; it was, we used to say when we slunk from our underground huddle, the large lot of us, and looked to see if our rubble was still standing, we used to say that the sirens said — the sirens said, All clear.

Year in Review: 2012

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 14:45:00 -0500

This post is part of my Annual Favorites list I’ve been keeping for the past decade-plus.

Favorite Books (Goodreads profile)

The German Genius, by Peter Watson (choice passages)
Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918 (choice passages)
Life Sentences, by William H. Gass
Nox, by Anne Carson
A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers
Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective
Donald Judd
Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, by D.T. Max
The Long Goodbye, by Megan O’Rourke
Gerhard Richter: Panorama
Where Good Ideas Come From, by Steven Johnson
The Lifespan of a Fact, by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal
Chip Kidd: Book One: Work, 1986-2006
The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin
The Obamas, Jodi Kantor
Some of My Lives, by Rosamond Bernier
The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach
Berlin Stories, by Robert Walser
The Address Book, by Sophie Calle
The Englishman who Posted Himself and Other Curious Objects, by John Tingey
Art and Activism: Projects of John and Dominique de Menil
The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes
The Bridge on the Drina, by Ivo Andrić
Shards, by Ismet Prcić
The Promise: President Obama, Year One, by Jonathan Alter
Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee
How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne, by Sarah Bakewell
Death in Spring, by Mercè Rodoreda
The Art of Intelligence, by Henry A. Crumpton
Zoe Strauss: 10 Years
Mortality, by Christopher Hitchens
Karaoke Culture, by Dubravka Ugrešić
The Fate of Greenland, by Philip W. Conkling
Redheaded Peckerwood, by Christian Patterson

Happy to have read Karen McGrane’s Content Strategy for Mobile, Frank Chimero’s The Shape of Design, and Mike Monteiro’s Design Is a Job, but would keep them off the ranked list. Same with “Mark Owen”‘s No Easy Day.

Favorite Movies: 2012 (Letterboxd profile)

Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present
Gerhard Richter Painting
Moonrise Kingdom
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
Lincoln
The Master
The Queen of Versailles
Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap
Arbitrage
Skyfall
The Dark Knight Rises

Didn’t connect with: Headhunters, We Have a Pope, The Bourne Legacy.

Favorite Movies: Pre-2012

A Separation
Bill Cunningham New York
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Certified Copy
Margin Call
Notorious
A Dangerous Method
Bridesmaids
Young Adult
Moneyball
Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop
J. Edgar
Too Big to Fail
Hopscotch
Haywire

Music

I continue to be a huge fan of Rdio, which I pay $10 a month to be able to stream music on a desktop, iPad, or iPhone. (This includes, say, streaming the new Nas via my home’s wi-fi as I mow my suburban lawn.) There will always be rituals and a closeness to the music I miss from my CD days, but the advantages of Rdio — especially the ability to discover and immediately listen to new music, particularly hip-hop and classical — are significant. I don’t have a ranked list here, but my listening history is an open book.

Favorite Articles, Essays & Blog Posts (categorized, not ranked)

Affairs

“Newtown and the Madness of Guns,” by Adam Gopnik
“The Voter-Fraud Myth,” by Jane Mayer
“I Didn’t Come Back to Jerusalem To Be in a War,” by Dahlia Lithwick
“The Implosion,” by Jon Lee Anderson
“Of Babies and Beans: Paul Ryan on Abortion,” by Adam Gopnik
“It Matters,” by Josh Marshall
“A Victory for Obama and for Obama’s America,” by John Cassidy
“The Choice,” by The New Yorker Editors
“2,700 Hundred Pages for Anton Scalia,” by Amy Davidson
“Money Unlimited,” by Jeffrey Toobin
“Obama, Explained,” by James Fallows
“One More Massacre,” by Adam Gopnik
“Colbert v. the Court,” by Dahlia Lithwick
“Pussy Riot Closing Statements,” by Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich
“Something Wicked This Way Comes,” by Atul Gawande
“How Obama’s Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics,” by Andrew Sullivan
“The Obama Memos,” by Ryan Lizza

Culture

“Too Big To Succeed,” by Lee Kponstantinou
“Spotify and Its Discontents,” by Mike Spies
“Big Other’s Birthday Tribute to William H. Gass, 2012”
“When Art Makes Us Cry,” by Francine Prose
“Much God Damned Entropy,” by Gabriel Blackwell and Greg Gerke
“The First Church of Marilynne Robinson,” by Mark O’Connell
“We Are Alive,”by David Remnick
“Viewer Discretion,” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus
“The House That Hova Built,” by Zadie Smith
“Peace, Adam,” by Sasha Frere-Jones
“American Mozart,” by David Samuels
“Diary of an Aesthete,” by Alex Ross
“Maxim Interrogates the Makers of The Wire”
“Till the Knowing Ends,” by Joanna Scott
“Radiohead’s Runaway Guitarist,” by Alex Pappademas
“The Meet and Greet Museum,” by Steven C. Dubin

Tech & Media

“Your Anti-Social Media Rant Reveals Too Much About Your Friends,” by Alexis C. Madrigal
“Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out,” by Paul Ford
“29th Street Publishing and the Next Wave of Digital Publishing,” by Jim Ray
“The Way We Read Now,” by Dwight Garner
“BuzzFeed’s Strategy,” by Jonah Peretti
Craig Mod: “The Digital-Physical”; “Hack the Cover,”; “Subcompact Publishing”
“Deploy,” by Mandy Brown
“E-books Can’t Burn,” by Tim Parks
“Small Presses & Self-Publishers: Enemies? Or Half-Siblings?” by Sean Bishop
“Out of Touch,” by Andrew Piper
“I’ma Set It Straight, This Watergate,” by John Gruber
“The Death of the Cyberflâneur,” by Evgeny Morozov
“Good Things About Twitter,” by Sasha Frere-Jones
“Does Time Magazine Think Americans Are Stupid?” by L. V. Anderson

Essays

“National Subjects,” by Aleksandar Hemon
“War Dogs,” by Aleksandar Hemon
“The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent,” by Chrystia Freehand
“A Boy to Be Sacrificed,” by Abdellah Tao
“Tony Judt: A Final Victory,” by Jennifer Homans

Misc. Reporting, Articles & Posts

“The Yankee Comandante,” by David Grann
“Boss Rail,” by Evan Osnos
“All Due Respect,” by Peter Hessler
“Cocaine Incorporated,” by Patrick Radden Keefe
“The Story of a Suicide,” by Ian Parker
“Big Med,” by Atul Gawande
“What Brand Is Your Therapist?” by Lori Gottlie
“Artisanal Baby Naming,” by Bob Powers
“Resilient Redbirds Refuse to Lose,” by Bernie Miklasz
“Lionel Messi Never Dives,” by Jason Kottke
“Fals Nine vs. Real Nine,” by Dushko Petrovich
“The Caging of America,” by Adam Gopnik
“Study Reveals Dolphins Lack Capacity to Mock Celebrity Culture,” by The Onion
“The World’s First and Only Completely Honest Résumé of a Graphic Designer,” by Marco Kaye
“How Many Stephen Colberts Are There?” by Charles McGrath

Most-Used iPhone & iPad Apps

I start every morning with the NYTimes’ iPad app. I listen to podcasts, NPR, and music via Instacast, Public Radio Player, and Rdio. I journal using Day One, which is synched using Dropbox on all devices. The new 1Password 4 is a slick companion to the essential desktop app. I organize a lot of my work and personal life using Evernote, and keep up with tasks using Things. Other apps I use often: Reeder (every night, to catch up with the day’s articles), Goodreads, Fantastical, Tweetbot (iphone) and Twitter (iPad), Instagram, Facebook, Checkmark, Instapaper, Pinboard, Netflix, PBS for iPad, Simple, and iBooks (largely for work PDFs).

Final Notes

One unusual memory I have from 2012 is spending several weekday evenings in March walking through my neighborhood for an hour or so, listening to the day’s oral arguments for and against the healthcare act. (My greatest moment of exasperation was hearing Justice Scalia mock-ask whether he was seriously supposed to get through so many pages of material.) In April, I published Abstractions Arrive: Having Been There All the Time, an iPad-only e-book pairing an essay by William H. Gass with photographs by Michael Eastman; New York Times coverage was a cherry on top. May’s Confab conference was one of the best I’ve attended. In August, Tamara and I enjoyed a few highly cultural days in Miami. Surpassing all that, though — we’re expecting a baby in late May of 2013. I expect this should be my best year yet.

“The Gass Sentences: A Top 50”

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 07:13:19 -0500

Today is William Gass’ 88th birthday. For the Big Other website, John Madera asked some writers, readers, and publishers to name their own “literary pillars,” as a tribute to Gass and his “50 Literary Pillars” project from the early 1990s. After being invited to contribute, I went in a slightly different direction.

Discussing "J R"

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 08:39:59 -0500

At Open Letters Monthly, Greg Gerke and Gabriel Blackwell have a long and interesting discussion about William Gaddis’ masterful novel.

Len Gutkin on "J R"

Sat, 09 Jun 2012 13:42:17 -0500

I love seeing meaty new pieces on William Gaddis’ “J R,” which has just been released by Dalkey and remains one of the best novels I’ve ever read. Describing the book in one paragraph is tough, but Gutkin, writing for Book Forum, does pretty well:

J R follows the rise and fall of JR Vansant, an eleven-year-old sixth-grader in Long Island who builds a massive financial operation by telephone. Gaddis assembles an enormous cast of characters around JR, all of whose lives come to intersect in some way with the sixth-grader’s paper empire. There’s his teacher Amy Joubert, who unwittingly introduces JR to the power of finance when she takes her students on a field trip to Wall Street, where her uncle runs the powerful Diamond Cable corporation. There’s Jack Gibbs, the manic, drunken physics teacher, in love with Amy and his own thwarted ambition. There’s Edward Bast, an aspiring composer hired with an arts-foundation grant to teach at JR’s school, where, hilariously, he is expected to direct a sixth-grade production of Das Rheingold (JR, of course, in the role of Alberich). Naïve and easily bullied, Bast finds himself coerced into acting as the JR Corp.’s public face, and throughout the novel he remains the only character aware that the new corporate mastermind is just a kid. The book’s comic invention is huge, complete with such vivid secondary characters as Crawley, a hunting-obsessed stockbroker who commissions Bast to write “zebra music” for the soundtrack to a film lobbying Congress to transport African big game to US national parklands, or Mr. Whiteback, the middle school principal who also runs the local bank from his office. Gaddis excels at serious farce, like Nathanael West on a massive canvas.

Building a Mind Created in Words

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:43:00 -0500

Two passages, among many, that struck me in William H. Gass’ wonderful new essay collection Life Sentences: Literary Judgements and Accounts:

From “The Literary Miracle”:

Emerson’s essays build the mind that thinks them. It is that mind that is the miracle that interests me. Did he think the thinker who then thinks his thoughts? “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.” I don’t believe he began by having “the eye is the first circle” arrive in his own inward office like a parishioner with a problem, and that, subsequently, he copied this thought down exactly the way it appeared when it knocked, and as he would have been required to had the words come from Allah or from God. He wrote them down so he could think their thought. And when he thought, “the eye is the first circle,” I’ll bet he didn’t know what the second circle was. But writing notions down means building them up; it means to set forth on a word, only to turn back, erasing and replacing, choosing and refusing alternatives, listening to the language, and watching the idea take shape like solidifying fog.“

From "Spit in the Mitt,” about baseball and his father:

We listened to ticker re-creations together—always the Indians, always blowing a lead. You could hear the click of the wireless sometimes as the announcer turned the tape’s dry and sullen information—F8—into a long drive which Earl Averill pulled down against the wall after a mighty run. Later, I would realize that those radio matches were more interesting than games seen on TV or from a poor seat in some vast modern stadium, because they were conveyed in symbols, created in words, and served to the field of the imagination.