Agapē Agape

Here is the failed culmination of Gaddis lifelong work on the player piano Further player piano material is found in the compilation of Gaddis non fiction The Rush for Second Place Essays and Occasional Writings Gaddis readers will understand failed Short as this book is it would not be suggested that one begin with Gaddis here It is no introductory, accessible novel it is perhaps his most difficult and maddening book, his most curmudgeonly, just as we love him The themes presented scarcely deve [...]

wait.wait The Art that I love most is infused with an almost desperate desire to communicate something its creator feels is vital, is essential, authentically crucial Often, as we post Heideggerians that means You, dear Reader are well aware, language, or any system of signs or referents, fails at the moment of Truth The metaphor of the clearing , un enterable and un consumable, is profound and, I believe, powerfully accurate We can trace the outline of the clearing, of course, we can gesture ou [...]

Gaddis last published work of fiction Takes the form of a rambling monologue from a dying man about his life, his shattered will to live, his heirs fighting over his other will, technology, the madness of crowds and the herd mentality, the mechanization of art, disease, death, and so forth One only wonders what Gaddis would have thought of AutoTune.

erim bunla ilgili, her eyin k , anlam n, dilin, de erlerin, sanat n y k l , nereye baksan d zensizlik ve alt st olu , g r nen her eyi bo an entropi e lenceydi, teknolojiydi, d rt ya na gelen herkesin elinde bir bilgisayard s.24 Bir l kt Agape ye A t bir serzeni l me yakla rken yap lan bir i hesapla ma Y llar n pi manl klar yd Agape, y llar n zlemi, i inde kalanlar s ylemek i in i inde kalmayanlard.D n Francis Bacon n Yeni Atlantis ini bitirince i yerine g t rd m Agapeye A t a ba lad m ba lamas n [...]

N o me vai ser f cil escrever seja o que for sobre este livro mas, como diz William Gaddis se o trabalho n o me fosse dif cil a verdade que morreria de t dio E por me aborrecer com o f cil que me pus a ler gape, agonia, embora com muito medo mas, na pen ltima p gina do pref cio est um conselho que segui e que, por isso ou n o, tornou a leitura um prazer a melhor maneira de compreender e de apreciar Gaddis lendo o rapidamente e sem parar para pensar demasiado naquilo que ele n o diz Entend lo a p [...]

What is a Rant This is Gaddis s fifth and last book Even with a large font and judicious line spacing, the book doesn t quite make 100 pages A really excellent Afterword by Joseph Tabbi makes it 113 pages It s a monologue, in broken grammar and logic, by a dying man He thinks of his unfinished book on the history of the player piano, and he fights the effects of his medication and his illness The theme is the relentless mechanization of the imagination and art.I read this because it s been noted [...]

A fine closing to a tremendous career by a gifted and formidable writer Doesn t reach the peaks of The Recognitions and J R but what could For a longer review, check out Centring the Margins Essays and Reviews zero books books centr

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I read this book while in a haze of pain painkillers, after having been holed up for several days after having spilled some coffee on my legs and gotten some crazy burns I have to assume these circumstances affected my impression of it which is extreme and immediate and a little bit hysterical, much like the book itself In fact, I am pretty sure I am overidentifying in a kind of absurd way, but I have to say in my defense that the book invites it.What struck me most while reading Agape Agape was [...]

From the earliest moments of his writing career Gaddis concerned himself with the breakdown of art The Recognitions, his first novel, ends with the collapse of a chapel and J R his second, is interspersed with falling objects, whether stacks of books or leaves Agape Agape is his final word It completes a life s work dedicated to exposing forgery and the claim of entertainment as art, a world in which imitation is a lie The first word a gah pee is from the Greek and refers to a religious celebrat [...]

The ailing narrator of Agap Agape, sequestered among piles of scraps and notes for an unfinished history of the player piano, reflects, all writing worth reading comes, likes suicide, from outrage or revenge One would be forgiven for thinking that Gaddis fictions are testaments of erudite misanthropy, but this is missing the forest for the trees To the same extent that he rages against the entropic potential of technology and disingenuous, mass produced art , he offers a rallying call to work ag [...]

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I find it difficult to believe that this fragmentary rant is essentially an excerpt or the only piece of text remaining from a lifelong project on the social history of the player piano The book was published posthumously in 2004, seemingly with the aid of the growing cult of Gaddis scholars Poor Mr Gaddis Surprisingly enough, he must have felt that he had never truly made his Benjaminian point about the mechanization of the arts For such a short text it is completely full of allusions to artist [...]

I don t think Gaddis is really my author, but he probably comes closest to being as such here, despite imminent, then immanent, death I think I might actually read Carpenter s Gothic, um, eventually.

William Gaddis was one of the most groundbreaking of post war American novelists a stylistic precursor to Pynchon and Delillo, a towering master behind such youngsters as Franzen His first two massive novels Recognitions and JR grappled with huge themes of artistic authenticity and the culture of capitalism He wrote two relatively accessible novels, and then this, his fifth and last.I read Agape Agape 96 pages while taking a break from reading his first novel, The Recognitions, 956 pages The ea [...]

Devastated.

100 pages of Gaddis rambling about things in Bernhards style is very cool

La valoraci n es por culpa de la mediocridad del lector frente al escritor Volver a intentarlo con otra obra suya.

I wanted to read Gaddis after the Recognitions but wasn t up for another massive time investment into his work at least yet I ll try out Frolic or JR soon , so I picked up this short little volume about the length of a chapter from The Recognitions , and while there were some excellent parts his excoriation of the Pulitzer Prize , there were also certain sections where the curmudgeonly pessimism of the narrator felt a bit clich.I mean this rant about Hollywood is just diree herd numbed and sile [...]

I first read Gaddis on a dare from an editor friend She had just finished working on a re issue of Mr Gaddis earlier books Recognitions and JR At a party she told me that nobody in her office had read Gaddis and she thought that those who claimed to have were liars Gaddis work is dense and thick and a tough read I told her that I could get through one The next time I saw her she handed me a copy of JR.JR was written in the 70 s and is an examination of youth culture, high finance and just about [...]

No but you see I ve got to explain why all this, why all this, good God before I, before I, I ve got to warn you that this rambling mess, that these notes all of this in here and no, don t trust the Bernhard comparisons, Bernhard is not just breathless rambling mistaking form for soul, certainly, annoyed but never annoying and this is just a chaotic Luddite, this is just snobbish bemoaning of technology and mass mechanized culture and player pianos and how art is affected, and this trash heap an [...]

Gaddis final work, a deathbed monologue with very few sentence breaks about how technology ultimately destroys art, how commerce destroys everything see J.R any other Gaddis book ever , and how the artist ultimately destroys himself in the context of a history of the player piano You can read this in one sitting and still feel like your brain was just sodomized by that hadron particle collider in Switzerland Totally amazing, sublimating of concepts and emotions in a way that poetry as a medium c [...]

maybe it s the initial shock, but i can t stop thinking about this book i m inclined to say this is the greatest piece of literature i ve ever read i feel enlightened, vindicated, and a little less alone powerful stuff.

4.5

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I ve finally read all of William Gaddis s fiction Agape Agape, published posthumously, and apparently vastly scaled down from the history of the player piano that Gaddis worked on throughout his entire life, is his weakest book, but that s a relative term when applied to one of the towering writers of the twentieth century The book is a decent coda for the big ideas that ran throughout his four novels The Recognitions, J.R Carpenter s Gothic and A Frolic of His Own a continued, unrelenting attac [...]

I had an occasion recently to peck away on someone else s manual typewriter it was at a party a poet was having and a poem was sitting there reeled up on his little desk being ruined by his guests, so I joined in and I added a line and then suddenly couldn t remember how to do a carriage return I grew up with the things so I knew but technological adoption had pushed this minor skill to a box in the attic I knew there was a bell when you got to the end and the speed by which you get to that bell [...]

There s a line on the second page that pangs me with a guilty conscience, entropy drowning everything in sight, entertainment and technology and every four year old with a computer, everybody his own artist Gaddis finished this book about ten years ago and rather presciently diagnosed what was to come in the art world It does seem like anyone with a word processor and a computer can suddenly call themselves an artist I say this from experience, since I just self published a book online As Gaddis [...]

Highly confused rant about the mechanization of the arts delivered by a dying writer, subdued on sustaining drugs and dehumanised by the loss of both motor and cognitive abilities, a half hour stream of consciousness riff with one central symbol, a player piano which simulates Mozart I know that Gaddis has written huge tablets of stone in the past, but this is a microphone job, a vocal discourse in script form I liked it though, it had a repetitive cadence like an avant garde pop song, something [...]

Right there with Bernhard and Markson s respective Wittgenstein s as seeming stream of conscious short works that read quickly and in the pure mind prose that exposes thought process and, thus, individual logic and decision conclusion making Not only that, but I must say that the stark difference in style between this and Recognitions really solidifies Gaddis as a formidable writer with great energy and that Madonna type of rebirthing that so few understand or undertake willingly It s funny, too [...]