Intro and William Gass

This is for my enjoyment more than anything. The reason I'm making this blog public is because I'm poor and I was lying on my mat in the corner of my friend's living room where i currently live, dreaming of being rich without having to change my lifestyle, and I thought to myself what if i started a blog and i sent it to a few friends and they sent it to their friends and they to their's and all of a sudden everyone was reading it and someone from a publishing house saw it and really liked it and wanted to pay me to write it... wouldn't that be sick.

So here are some excerpts from books, poems, essays, and stories - little nuggets from bonafide, real-life published shit, transcribed here (by yours truly) for your and my edification and enjoyment. If I feel the urge, maybe I'll throw in my two cents worth, but mostly it's about the passages. I have a longstanding personal interest in literary trends and the evolution of writing from modernism to postmodernism to the as yet undefined next step, but like I said it's mostly about the passages. Read them and take them at face value. Ignore my commentary if it doesn't agree with you. More than anything, I hope you find something you like - maybe a style of writing, maybe a theme, maybe the way certain words roll off the tongue.

I'll leave you with an excerpt from a William Gass essay on Three Lives, by Gertrude Stein. I've never read Three Lives and I didn't immediately take to the passage Gass quotes here, but I was rocked to the core by what he had to say about it and the elegance with which he said it. His description of what distinguishes literature from the writing you read in blogs, magazines, and newspapers, is something I often come back to.

from "Three Lives" in A Temple of Texts, by William Gass

Although I had certainly heard the usual things about Gertrude Stein, and had encountered samples that made me think she might indeed be the fake that others had advertised, I did not read Three Lives until I was in graduate school at Cornell in - perhaps - 1948. I remember the room, the chair, the failing light in which I began the book, going straight through from Anna to Lena and then rereading "Melanctha" immediately after; reading right on through the night, in an actual sweat of wonder and revelation I would experience with this work and no other. My stomach held the text in its coils as if i had swallowed the pages. I am sure I would have taken it as an omen had I known that Three Lives had been published on my birthday, July 30. I never slept. First I paced as well as I could, for my room was very small, and then I went out in the foggy early morning to walk, carrying the library's copy with one finger squeezed between its pages and at the lines I'd return to again and again - to listen, verify, reassure - a paragraph I've commented on in another essay, and whose words are Rose Johnson's:

"I don't see Melanctha why you should talk like you would kill yourself just because you're blue. I'd never kill myself Melanctha just 'cause I was blue. I'd maybe kill somebody else Melanctha 'cause I was blue, but I'd never kill myself. If i ever killed myself Melanctha it'd be by accident, and if I ever killed myself by accident Melanctha, I'd be awful sorry."

In my stunned, sickish, and sleepless state, I didn't notice right away that Rose Johnson, when she is speaking about Melanctha's melancholy, says "just because you're blue" (in iambs), but when she is speaking about her own unlikely suicide, she says "just 'cause I was blue" (in spondees). "Because" and "'cause," "'cause" and "because." I felt a lot like Jeff Campbell, too. I felt slow and confused. Because: Why hadn't I known long before reading Stein - was I such a dunce? - that the art was in the music - it was Joyce's music, it was James's music, it was Faulkner's music; without the music, words fell to the earth in prosy pieces; without the music, there was only comprehension, and comprehension may have been analysis, may have been interpretation, may have been philosophy, but it wasn't art; art was the mind carried to conclusions ahead of any understanding by the music - the order, release, and sounding of the meaning. Not just because of a little alliteration, the pitter-patter of metrical feet, a repetition like a chant, or rhyme concealed the way Poe's letter was - in plain view - but because of complex conceptual relations made audible.