#michael gorra

[thebluesthour]

Say it. Go ahead, stand before the mirror, look at your mouth, and say it. Blue. See how you pucker up, your lips opening with the consonants into a kiss, and then that final exhalation of vowels? Blue. The word looks like what it is, a syllable blown out into the air, and with the sound and the sight of saying it as one.

Michael Gorra, from the Introduction to On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry by William H. Gass

[theblackestofsuns]

Seth’s illustration of William Faulkner for Casey Cep’s review of Michael Gorra’s The Saddest Words in this week’s New Yorker magazine.

[biblioklept]

DeLillo has since stayed small

DeLillo has since stayed small

Michael Gorra has a thoughtful essay on Don DeLillo’s late style in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books. Ostensibly a review of DeLillo’s latest, The Silence, Gorra’s essay considers DeLillo’s body of work against some of his peers and literary forebears, arguing that DeLillo’s finest novels were composed and published in his “full middle age”:

The core of DeLillo’s oeuvre is the…

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[aether--or]

Nevertheless, the marriage lasted, with help from both Alcoholics Anonymous and what their letters suggest was the enduring power of sexual love.

[bigtickhk]

Review | Faulkner couldn’t overcome racism, but he never ignored it

That’s why the privileged White novelist’s work is still worth reading, Michael Gorra argues.

The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War by Michael Gorra

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[bigtickhk]

The Trauma of the Civil War Lives On in Faulkner’s Fiction

“The Saddest Words,” by the scholar Michael Gorra, argues that America’s troubled racial past is the central, if often unspoken, theme at the heart of Faulkner’s work.

The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War by Michael Gorra 

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[dk-thrive]

It goes back and starts over, as if history itself was stuttering

Conrad didn’t just spot the dawn, he also invented a way of telling, and his sense of narrative structure remains utterly inseparable from what he has to say. “Nostromo” breaks chronology and switches wildly from one point of view to another. It skips forward and then stops, repeats itself, offers a second version, it goes back and starts over, as if history itself were stuttering. I want more on such things...

~ Michael Gorra, Review: Following in Joseph Conrad’s Wake With ‘The Dawn Watch’ by Maya Jasanoff (wsj.com, November 10, 2017)

[dk-thrive]

For Gass has an ear like a Pantone chart, exquisitely alert to the semitones of sound and sense

That’s not a point William Gass makes. He doesn’t need to. But it’s something you can learn from reading him, from letting yourself drown in On Being Blue. For Gass has an ear like a Pantone chart, exquisitely alert to the semitones of sound and sense, fifty red words here and a hundred greenies over there. His blues themselves are enough to swallow you down, and if you weren’t going to read it in just a few minutes I would quote the entirety of this book’s page-long first sentence, with its rattletrap inventory of some few of the things that particular color can be, the “Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings . . . beards, coats, collars, chips and cheese . . . watered twilight, sour sea.” Russian cats are blue, and oysters, the Social Register too, and it is also, he says, the color of “everything that’s empty,” which makes me remember the high windows that Philip Larkin opens onto “the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”

~ Michael Gorra, in his Introduction to "On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (New York Review Books Classics)" by William H. Gass (NYRB Classics; Reprint edition, March 18, 2014)