Prize-Winning Author-Critic William Gass Dead at 93

[Mark Kohut]

Didja all know---or care?--that* Willie Master's Lonesome Wife *was first
exclusively
available as an extra that one got with one of the copies of Tri-Quarterly
magazine
the year it was published--if you had a subscription?

Could be very valuable for me now were I a collector and not a careless
reader.

As gone as gas.

On Sat, Dec 9, 2017 at 8:07 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Two further two-bit reflections on the obits: This
> "Influenced by Wittgenstein, Gass was taken by the aesthetics of language,
> how a word looked and sounded as opposed to what it meant."
>
> Wittgenstein spent his WHOLE LIFE on what a word meant, so to speak and
> emphasize, ....he might be said to have been in search of
> aesthetics......but the "aesthetics of language", NO. His favorite writers
> were those with plain-speaking moral meaning--like the later Tolstoy
> and analogously, Westerns (as movies) because good guys and bad guys were
> as clear as a gunshot.
>
> One must say, it would seem, that Gass's art was willfully against the
> "art of Witt's tastes" however much he used Wittgenstein in his writing and
> thinking---esp in the essays.
>
> And, I just read a great line from that Robert Kelley quoted in the Times'
> obit. Poet, yes, but also a short story-and maybe even a novel- writer,
> dunno.  ....Paraphrase: Every line in a great book, read right, is
> infinite. THAT is a Gassian remark, if not just Gass.
>
> On Sat, Dec 9, 2017 at 7:45 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Dee goes way back in "understanding" and commenting on Gass. There is an
>> Isabelle Dee Wedemeyer who is or was
>> a literary agent, but not Gass's in his later years from what I can
>> superficially determine.
>>
>> As we know, obituaries of such famous people get written years, sometimes
>> decades before the end--esp when you live to 93.
>>
>> My guess, out of my semi-experienced ass, is that Ms Wedemeyer was at one
>> time his agent (doubtful though) and/or a writer on literary writers and
>> topics
>> at the NYTimes in 1999 at least. A- and was asked to write this sometime
>> after, not long after--with revisions always happening before the end.
>>
>> In 1999 William woudda been 75.....check out Bellow's fine bit of writing
>> about getting called by the Times re HIS obituary.
>> So, Gass hisself probably sold you on retrying The Tunnel, which I could
>> never even enter in my tunnelized life then. And untried since.
>>
>> http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/13/books/still-at-war-new-fic
>> tion-still-has-a-champion.html
>>
>> On Fri, Dec 8, 2017 at 4:53 PM, Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Who the heck is Dee Wedemeyer? She just singlehandednly got me to break
>>> out The Tunnel again.
>>>
>>> J
>>>
>>> On Fri, Dec 8, 2017 at 3:27 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/07/obituaries/william-h-gass
>>>> -acclaimed-postmodern-author-dies-at-93.html?rref=collection
>>>> %2Fsectioncollection%2Fobituaries&action=click&contentCollec
>>>> tion=obituaries&region=rank&module=package&version=highlight
>>>> s&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=1
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 12:24 PM, etb <eburns at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/missouri/articles/20
>>>>> 17-12-07/prize-winning-author-critic-william-gass-dead-at-93
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
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