Even though I should have known from The Recognitions that the world was not waiting breathlessly for my message, that it already knew, and was quite happy to live with all these false values, I’d always been intrigued by the charade of the so-called free market, so-called free enterprise system, the stock market conceived of as what was called a “people’s capitalism” where you “owned a part of the company” and so forth. All of which is true; you own shares in a company, so you literally do own part of the assets. But if you own a hundred shares out of six or sixty or six hundred million, you’re not going to influence things very much. Also, the fact that people buy securities—the very word in this context is comic—not because they are excited by the product—often you don’t know what the company makes—but simply for profit: The stock looks good and you buy it. The moment it looks bad you sell it. What had actually happened in the company is not your concern. In many ways I thought . . . the childishness of all this. Because JR himself, which is why he is eleven years old, is motivated only by good-natured greed. JR was, in other words, to be a commentary on this free enterprise system running out of control. Looking around us now with a two-trillion-dollar federal deficit and billions of private debt and the banks, the farms, basic industry all in serious trouble, it seems to have been rather prophetic.
William Gaddis, born ninety-four years ago today, in a 1986 interview. For boatloads of excerpts click the Gaddis tag.
Clearly from this and similar eloquent testimony certain members of the community have been subjected to annoyance and serious inconvenience in the pursuit of private errands of some urgency, however, recalling to mind that vain and desperate effort to prevent construction of a subway kiosk in Cambridge, Massachusetts, enshrined decades ago in the news headlines PRESIDENT LOWELL FIGHTS ERECTION IN HARVARD SQUARE, by definition the interests of the general public must not be confused with that of one or even several individuals (People v. Brooklyn & Queens Transit Corp., 258 App. Div. 753, 15 N.Y.S.2d 295, 1939, affirmed 283 N.Y. 484, 28 N.E.2d 925, 1940).
- Gaddis, Frolic of His Own
Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you're not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it's exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos...
- Gaddis, JR
I know you, I know you. You're the only serious person in the room, aren't you, the only one who understands, and you can prove it by the fact that you've never finished a single thing in your life. You're the only well-educated person, because you never went to college, and you resent education, you resent social ease, you resent good manners, you resent success, you resent any kind of success, you resent God, you resent Christ, you resent thousand-dollar bills, you resent Christmas, by God, you resent happiness, you resent happiness itself, because none of that's real. What is real, then? Nothing's real to you that isn't part of your own past, real life, a swamp of failures, of social, sexual, financial, personal...spiritual failure. Real life. You poor bastard. You don't know what real life is, you've never been near it. All you have is a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! You poor bastard.
- Gaddis, Recognitions
1)after reading the above, i found
ReplyDeletehttp://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/fire-the-bastards-the-great-defender-of-william-gaddis
2)i discovered that my local public library has only two books by gaddis - "A Frolic of his Own" and "Agapē Agape"
3)i requested the latter - admittedly, part of its appeal to me is that it is his shortest book
4)i learned from wikipedia that there's a web page with notes, reviews translated from german, etc.
http://www.williamgaddis.org/agape/index.shtml
I *strongly* recommend you not start w *Agape.* It's the last, unfinished, and least satisfying. I've got an extra *JR* or *Frolic* around here somewhere (or will grab at a used book store or buy a new one), will ship it to you. Please start with one of those two. If you like, read the other too *then* *Recognitions* *Carpenters Gothic* and *Agape* much lesser Gaddis.
Deleteok & tia
ReplyDeletei have cancelled mcpl hold on aa
i ask again - any interest in .stolzenburg 'rat island', ferry 'dylanesque'?
Thank you, no. I'm not much of a non-fiction reader, and I am not kidding when I say I don't like Dylan's music. At all. But thank you.
Deleteok
ReplyDeletei have now requested 'frolic' from mcpl - i see it too has a web page
http://www.williamgaddis.org/frolic/index.shtml
reading about "Agapē Agape" i discovered that the first word, greek for a kind of love, is pronounced differently by the brits and the yanks - self, a yank, would say "ahgahpay" - but the brits, like the greeks, say "ahgahpee"
ReplyDeletemy thought is we yanks are reasoning by incorrect analogy - were it in a different foreign language, "ay" would be right
in the same way, for years veterinarians prescribed low protein diets for cats with kidney disease because such diets had been experimentally determined to be beneficial for dogs (2008 book, "Your Cat", Elizabeth Hodgkins) - it turns out, says dr hodgkins, that the metabolisms of cats and dogs are different - hoodahthunkit?
Lowell fights the good fight. As, uh, many of us have.
ReplyDelete