RIP Gilbert Sorrentino.

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A Word for Paul Goodman

Blue bells in the memory
a wash of blue lights a wash
over white artifacts

unlike the visage of Ozymandias
all are rubble. In America
the past lives in the mind.

It is not the beautiful
one wants to save but save it all.
Great grey glacier of my city.

Let all the nouns be testament.
Let them stand clear, reverberant.
This one and this one and this one.

These oranges hold it all. I love
my family my work. My captured city.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 19 May 2006 22:22 (nineteen years ago)

Although I wonder if it will only be Ken and me on this thread?

― Casuistry (Chris P), Friday, 19 May 2006 22:23 (nineteen years ago)

I should have sat in on one of his classes. Didn't he recently have something published?

― youn (youn), Friday, 19 May 2006 22:37 (nineteen years ago)

Cas, you f--ked me up!

― Sons Of The Redd Desert (Ken L), Friday, 19 May 2006 23:26 (nineteen years ago)

too bad. I've owned all of his books at one point or another, but never read any of them!

― kyle (akmonday), Saturday, 20 May 2006 00:51 (nineteen years ago)

I did what now?

― Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 20 May 2006 02:47 (nineteen years ago)

RIP.

I bought "Aberration of Starlight" because I'll generally give Dalkey Archive things a bash.

I adore it, of the various non-linear novels based on whirls of images and words, it's probably my favourite, which is to say that I found it the most consistently engaging. I gave my copy away some time ago to a songwriter whose approach to melody and lyrics reminded me of "AoS". I never heard anything back from him so I guess he couldn't see what I was on about.

I must replace it sometime.

― Tim (Tim), Saturday, 20 May 2006 16:18 (nineteen years ago)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/nyregion/22sorrentino.html

― Casuistry (Chris P), Monday, 22 May 2006 07:51 (nineteen years ago)

Interesting. Another point of view.

― Sons Of The Redd Desert (Ken L), Monday, 22 May 2006 10:04 (nineteen years ago)

I know that lots of people don't get him, but I don't really understand it. Maybe they get thrown off by the superficial silliness that is not the usual ponderous gravitas that signifies "literature," or maybe they prefer the ponderous silliness of some of his contemporaries.

This guy seems to get it.

― Sons Of The Redd Desert (Ken L), Monday, 22 May 2006 10:18 (nineteen years ago)

When did the Times obit, come out, this morning? I guess that doesn't quite qualify as a day late and a dollar short. Over the weekend I think there was some bloggish word that Sorrentino fils wondered whether the Times would ignore his father "in death as they did in life."

― Sons Of The Redd Desert (Ken L), Monday, 22 May 2006 13:51 (nineteen years ago)

I liked all the stuff
I ever read by this guy,
guess I'll read some more

― Haikunym (Haikunym), Monday, 22 May 2006 14:00 (nineteen years ago)

This is about how long I suspected it would take, how long it has taken for many of the recent writer deaths to appear. (I have their obits on my RSS feed these days, so I have a better sense of it.)

Anyway they even mention how they named Mulligan Stew a "Notable Book" or whatever the eyar it came out. I grant that's not the accolades they offer many other writers but it's hardly nothing.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Monday, 22 May 2006 15:19 (nineteen years ago)

Actually, it looks like Mulligan Stew got two favorable reviews in the Times that year, the one by Malcolm Bradbury mentioned in the obit, and one by John Leonard which is hidden on the cover of the Dalkey Archive edition.

― Sons Of The Redd Desert (Ken L), Monday, 22 May 2006 17:47 (nineteen years ago)

Some interesting soundfiles here

― Sons Of The Redd Desert (Ken L), Tuesday, 23 May 2006 13:08 (nineteen years ago)

I got Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things from the university library. No one else had since 1972.

― tom west (thomp), Tuesday, 23 May 2006 15:13 (nineteen years ago)

five months pass...

Looks like teh Dalkey Archive recently republished Red the Fiend.

― The Redd 47 Ronin (Ken L), Wednesday, 8 November 2006 06:28 (nineteen years ago)

five years pass...

http://lastexitmag.com/article/27-fragments-for-gilbert-sorrentino

― Shakes-a-maxion (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 17 May 2012 01:46 (thirteen years ago)

one year passes...

Article linked upthread, "Sorrentino's Synthetic Ink-quisitions" by Anthony Miller, holds up. Here are some other links for reference:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/gilbert-sorrentino
http://www.raintaxi.com/online/1997fall/packoflies.shtml
http://requitedjournal.com/index.php?/essay/jeremy-m-davies/

Also, the short story collection The Moon In Its Flight- the title story is a killer- and some of the later novels are now available as ebooks.

― A Sorrow Beyond Memes (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 3 September 2013 01:44 (twelve years ago)

Bet you guys never knew about the Sorrentino Stegner brouhaha.

― A Sorrow Beyond Memes (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 5 September 2013 04:15 (twelve years ago)

I know I didn't.

― A Sorrow Beyond Memes (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 5 September 2013 04:15 (twelve years ago)

*tumbleweed*

― A Sorrow Beyond Memes (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 5 September 2013 04:15 (twelve years ago)

*tundra*

― A Sorrow Beyond Memes (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 5 September 2013 04:16 (twelve years ago)

hi there james.

― Fizzles, Thursday, 5 September 2013 06:12 (twelve years ago)

I like the moon in its flight (story, haven't read the collection). Been meaning to check out more sorrentino

― I Accidentally Dommed Your Sub (wins), Thursday, 5 September 2013 06:28 (twelve years ago)

I love Under the Shadow. The language is masterful and the mood is incredible. Plus, it's short.

― Frederik B, Thursday, 5 September 2013 11:24 (twelve years ago)

And yet, the obituary is such an impressive work of focused and directed indifference that now, years later, it has been suggested that the piece was a plant: that GS himself, or some other member of the little “deviant” horde of Sorrentinophiles, was trying, here, to be certain that death would not elicit any of the vacuous revisions we often see in popular appraisal.

― I Am the Cosimo Code (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 5 September 2013 12:08 (twelve years ago)

Having a distinguished appointment to make, and with the whole English-speaking world to hunt in, [the English Department] came up with a coterie writer of minimum distinction

― I Am the Cosimo Code (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 5 September 2013 12:09 (twelve years ago)

eight years pass...

So his son Christopher has written a memoir which seems like a must read.

― Santa’s Got a Brand New Borad (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 14 December 2021 21:49 (three years ago)

Some Sotobait right here:

She told me that he frequently embarrassed her by drinking too much, the spectacularly emblematic story here being the time my father managed, during a party at Dawn Powell’s home, to fall through a skylight.

― Santa’s Got a Brand New Borad (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 16 December 2021 12:29 (three years ago)

Falling through a spotlight sober happens all the time.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 16 December 2021 13:12 (three years ago)

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