William Gass, Rush Chairman ...

[Paul Mackin]

Dave Monroe wrote:

> ... damn glad to meet you.  Because I'm under the
> impression that William H. Gass is or at least might
> be of some interest somehow here, I'll mention that he
> writes an introduction to ...
>
> Burton, Robert.  The Anatomy of Melancholy.
>    New York: NYRB Books, 2001 [1621].
>
> ... available again and at long last both unabridged
> and in paperback.  The great, neglected Big Book (547
> pages inc. notes and index of small, cramped print
> from a 1932 Oxford UP ed.) of the English Renaissance.

A big encyclopedic some might say Pynchonian book (appreciated by
Sterne) with a longish name:

>
> The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is;
> with all the Kindes, Causes, Symptomes,
> Prognostickes and Several Cures of it: In
> Three Maine Partitions With Their
> Several Sections, Members, and
> Subsections, Philosophically,
> Medicinally, Historically Opened and
> Cut up, by Democritus Junior
>

Just happened to  have  started rereading Anthony Powell's 12-volume "A
Dance to the Music of Time" whose narrator Nick Jenkins is writing and
eventually finishes a book on Burton and alludes to and quotes from him
throughout including a long list type passage at the very end of the
final volune.  Early in the first volume the Jenkins of Jenkins' Ear is
mentioned as one of Nick's forebearers.

>From ennui to melancholy.

                P.