William Gaddis
William Gaddis
William Thomas Gaddis, Jr.was an American novelist. The first and longest of his five novels, The Recognitions, was named one of TIME magazine's 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005 and two others, J R and A Frolic of His Own, won the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. A collection of his essays was published posthumously as The Rush for Second Place. The Letters of William Gaddis was published by Dalkey Archive Press in February 2013...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth29 December 1922
CountryUnited States of America
I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.
He was the only person caught in the collapse, and afterward, most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.
What is it they want from the man that they didn't get from the work? What do they expect? What is there left when he's done with his work, what's any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follows it around?
. . . 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 . . . that's what I have to go into before all my work is misunderstood and distorted and, and turned into a cartoon . . .
Can't you see you go public and all these people owning you want is dividends and running their stock up, you don't give them that and they sell you out, you do and some bunch of vice presidents some place you never heard of like the ones that turned this out, this wood product they call it, they spot you and launch an offer and all of a sudden you're working for them trimming and cutting and finally bringing in people to turn something out they don't care what the hell it is, there's no pride in their work because what you've got them turning out nobody could be proud of in the first place.
We're comic. We're all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.
How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible...
...mementos of this world, in which the things worth being were so easily exchanged for the things worth having.
Say a word, say a thousand to me on the telephone and I shall choose the wrong one to cling to as though you had said it after long deliberation when only I provoked it from you, I will cling to it from among a thousand, to be provoked and hurl it back with something I mean no more than you meant that, something for you to cling to and retreat clinging to.
Why do you treat me as they do, as though I were exactly what I want to be. Why do we treat people that way?
I mean why should somebody go steal and break the law to get all they can when there's always some law where you can be legal and get it all anyway!
If you want to make a million you don't have to understand money, what you have to understand is people's fears about money
If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.
That's what I can't stand. I know I'll bounce back, and that's what I can't stand.