Leader of the Party of Disappointed People, 2015, watercolor and crayon on paper 30â X 22â I am filled with sadness at the passing of William Gass. He was a monument of American letters, a brilliant novelist and essayist, an innovator on the highest level of art. Here is a quote from his masterpiece âThe Tunnel â Sure, Adolf Hitler knew how to play the piano (badly), how to type (slowly), how to drive a car (erratically), how to draw (inadequately), how to write (drivel), How to remember (photographically), and how to bombast (beautifully). But bombast isnât bombing. He was in fact a petty little twerp. A man of such meager means he could only wish the way the weasel wishes it were a looker like the tiger and a lord like the lion. What I wonder about are all of those who werenât twerps who willed what Hitler wished, who pondered and planned and organized and sacrificed in order to establish the thousand-year Reich, who donned uniforms and fired guns and made planes and prepared food and forged those famous chains of command, who invented and connived and lied and stole and killed, because they willed what the little twerp wished; they, who idolized a loud doll, who loved the twerps truths who carried out the wishes of a murderous fool, and ignoble nobody, a failure so unimportant the failure seems a fulsome description of him. #williamgass #thetunnel #writer #americanletters #literature #art #artist #artlife #artwork #artworld #artoftheday #artistoftheday #creativity #contemporaryart #drawing #expressionism #fineart #figurative #imagination #inspiration #instagramart #instaartoftheday #modernart #nycart #NewYorkArtist #painting #neoexpressionism #kunstverk #poetry (at Columbia Street, New York)
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Elizabeth Hardwick on the essay, via NYT September 14, 1986Â
[my emphasis in bold]
What is this thunder and hail of newsprint felling the forests of the world?
...
The aggressiveness of the essay is the assumption of the authority to speak in one's own voice, and usually the authority is earned by previous performance. We see a name on the cover or inside the pages and we submit to the reading with some eagerness, which may be friendly eagerness or not. One of the assumptions of the essayist is the right to make his own mistakes, since he speaks only for himself, allowing for the philosopher's cunning observation that ''in my opinion'' actually asserts ''all reasonable men will agree.'' This claim is sometimes disputed by an elected authority, the editor, who may think too many villages have been overrun by the marauder. Since the freedom of the open spaces is the condition of the essay, too much correction and surgical intervention turns the composition into something else, perhaps an article, that fertile source of profit and sometimes pleasure in the cultural landscape.
William Gass, in what must be called an essay, a brilliant one, about Emerson, an essayist destined from the cradle, makes a distinction between the article and the essay. Having been employed by the university and having heard so many of his colleagues ''doing an article on,'' Mr. Gass has come to think of the article as ''that awful object'' because it is under the command of defensiveness in footnote, reference, coverage, and would also pretend that all must be useful and certain, even if it is ''very likely a veritable Michelin of misdirection.'' If the article has a certain sheen and professional polish, it is the polish of ''the scrubbed step''âpractical economy and neatness. The essay, in Mr. Gass's view, is a great meadow of style and personal manner, freed from the need for defense except that provided by an individual intelligence and sparkle. We consent to watch a mind at work, without agreement often, but only for pleasure. Knowledge hereby attained, great indeed, is again wanted for the pleasure of itself.
We would not want to think of the essay as the country of old men, but it is doubtful that the slithery form, wearisomely vague and as chancy as trying to catch a fish in the open hand, can be taught. Already existing knowledge is so often required. Having had mothers and fathers and the usual miserable battering of the sense of self by life may arouse the emotional pulsations of a story or a poem; but feeling is not sufficient for the essay. Comparisons roam about it, familiarity with those who have plowed the field before, shrewdness concerning the little corner or big corner that may remain for the intrusion of one's own thoughts. Tact and appropriateness play a part. How often we read a beginner's review that compares a thin thing to a fat one. ''John Smith, like Tolstoy, is very interested in the way men interact under the conditions of battle.'' Well, no. Fortunately, the essay is not a closed shop, and the pages do vibrate again and again with the appearance of a new name with no credentials admired or despised. An unknown practitioner of the peculiar animation of the prose of an essay takes up the cause. It is an occasion for happiness, since it is always astonishing that anyone will write an essay. Some write them not once but more or less regularly. To wake up in the morning under a command to animate the stones of an idea, the clods of research, the uncertainty of memory, is the punishment of the vocation. And all to be done without the aid of end rhyme and off rhyme and buried assonance; without an imagined character putting on a hat and going into the street.
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