/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.21251920]

My name is William Howard Gass. I am from Warren, Ohio. I am severely overweight. And I’m the greatest prose stylist the English language has ever seen. This is my story.

[Anonymous No.21252024]

>>21251920
Who?

[Anonymous No.21252048]

>>21252024
If you actually read then give his short story The Pederson Kid a read, should be a good introduction. Ignore OP, he can't meme.

[Anonymous No.21252360]

>>21251920
>greatest prose stylist the English language has ever seen
He's close but Nabokov's best prose has a sheer effortlessness that Gass' doesn't; Its exhausting reading Gass

[Anonymous No.21252391]

>>21252360
You might want to read something other than The Tunnel, which is supposed to be exhausting to read. He was very capable of writing prose which reads effortlessly, he just liked to exploit the writing to manipulate the reader more directly.

[Anonymous No.21252399]

>>21252391
I've read a good portion of his essays in addition to The Tunnel but I've only read a few of his short stories. Other than the Pederson Kid, which ones do you recommend?

[Anonymous No.21252720]

>>21252399
not the anon you quoted but check out "Order of Insects" and "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country"

[Anonymous No.21253181]

Gass's writing has no soul. I read Middle C a few years ago. Yes, that writing was enjoyable, but I couldn't tell you a damned thing about the book, whereas other books I've read long before Middle C left an impression on me and I could tell you lots of things about those books. All I remember about Middle C is it's about some closeted faggot Music teacher who stole records from a record shop he worked at as a kid.

[Anonymous No.21253182]

>>21251920
>And I’m the greatest prose stylist the English language has ever seen.
LMAO

[Anonymous No.21253194]

>>21252399
So far I am not impressed by his short stories, only read In the Heart of the Heart of the Country so far and The Pederson Kid was the only one that really impressed me. I don't think the short form works well for him, at least for fiction. But that collection is made up of fairly early works so I will hold out judgement until I get around to reading the handful of later short stories.

Effortless is the first thing which comes to mind when I think of his essays, especially his ones dealing with broader topics where it feels like he is just free associating from idea to idea despite it being obviously carefully planed out.

[Anonymous No.21253355]

>>21253194
>>21252399
Gass' fiction isn't really that great. He doesn't have a universally recognized "great" work under his belt, no matter how much the cult of The Tunnel wants to say it so. Same for his short stories which are honestly worse than his novels. It's very weird actually, his prose is great and he seems intellectually competent but his work is lacking in all the intangible qualities that makes you feel that you are reading a major writer.
His non-fiction is 1st rate however. He was the 2nd best essayist in America post-war. After Davenport.

[Anonymous No.21253361]

>>21251920
>Warren, Ohio
wait that's near me

[Anonymous No.21253374]

>>21253355
>He was the 2nd best essayist in America post-war. After Davenport.
There are at least 5 others who are better.

[Anonymous No.21253394]

I have an interest in prose stylists. Gibbon, John Henry Newman, Nabokov, Walter Pater, John Updike, Bertrand Russell, Evelyn Waugh, Annie Dillard, etc.
If someone has a reputation for being a great prose stylist -- even a rumor of being an accomplished stylist -- I have read him! Now, in my humble opinion, the greatest prose stylist of all time is clear. I almost hate to admit this because he's such a smug, arrogant bastard, but... David Bentley Hart. No question.
His prose style isn't just lovely and flowing, but his thought is profound and deep. He is incredibly well read and works in his learning without facile and vapid namedropping to sound smart, but he actually uses his wide reading to make relevant points.

[Anonymous No.21253404]

>>21251920
is gass dark stuff or can i skip him?

[Anonymous No.21253415]

>>21253394
>>21251920
You fucking niggers need to read sit Thomas Browne and Francis Bacon. They BTFO all these modern American frauds.

[Anonymous No.21253436]

>>21253355
No one but the trolling OP claimed him to be some great. He has his moments in fiction but his tendency to use idea as character tends to put too much onto the idea and not enough on the characters which leaves much of his fiction reading more like non-fiction, character becomes almost as functional as sentence or paragraph. Despite this he has some great moments in his fiction writing, but he is far more likely to be remembered for his non--fiction than his fiction.

[Anonymous No.21253447]

>>21251920
>look, Mom, I overused alliteration again! aren't I the greatest prose stylist?

[Anonymous No.21253470]

>>21253374
Name?

[Anonymous No.21253480]

>>21253415
Thomas Browne is one of my favorites already.

[Anonymous No.21253488]

>>21253415
Fine. I deleted him. I hope you're happy now.

[Anonymous No.21253495]

>>21253194
>In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
The most homosexual title ever conceived.

[Anonymous No.21255062]

>>21252048
Do you have a link? Google isn't giving me anything

[Anonymous No.21255109]

>>21255062
It is in "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" which NYRB has in print along with On Being Blue which is quite interesting but I am on the fence about.

>So sentences are copied, constructed, or created; they are uttered, mentioned, or used; each says, means, implies, reveals, connects; each titillates, invites, conceals, suggests; and each is eventually either consumed or conserved; nevertheless, the lines in Stevens or the sentences of Joyce and James, pressed by one another into being as though the words before and the words after were those reverent hands both Rilke and Rodin have celebrated, clay calling to clay like mating birds, concept responding to concept the way passionate flesh congests, every note a nipple on the breast, at once a triumphant pinnacle and perfect conclusion, like pelted water, I think I said, yet at the same time only another anonymous cell, and selfless in its service to the shaping skin as lost forgotten matter is in all walls; these lines, these sentences, are not quite uttered, not quite mentioned, peculiarly employed, strangely listed, oddly used, as though a shadow were the leaves, limbs, trunk of a new tree, and the shade itself were thrust like a dark torch into the grassy air in the same slow and forceful way as its own roots, entering the earth, roughen the darkness there till all its freshly shattered facets shine against themselves as teeth do in the clenched jaw; for Rabelias was wrong, blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit, nervous and white, till suddenly--there! climbing down clauses and passing through 'and' as it opens,--there--there--we're here!...in time for tea and tantrums; such are the sentences we should like to love--the ones which love us and themselves as well--incestuous sentences--sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind of orality transmogrified: not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue, word-wet to part-wet, public mouth to private, seed to speech, and speech...ah! after exclamations, groans, with order gone, disorder on the way, we subside through sentences like these, the risk of senselessness like this, to float like leaves on the restful surface of that world of words to come, and there, in peace, patiently to dream of the sensuous, imagined, and mindful Sublime.