tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2991343547887142385.post4415584865492845793..comments2024-02-24T20:29:17.083-05:00Comments on MINDFUL PLEASURES: Two Kinds of Puritanism: Dennis Cooper and James WoodBRIAN OARDhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00695622618831825498noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2991343547887142385.post-37616305147679121562017-08-24T05:37:12.817-04:002017-08-24T05:37:12.817-04:00Gass has been eloquent on this theme many times. ...Gass has been eloquent on this theme many times. Once on the theme of minimalism he said, channeling Stanley Elkin, I believe, "less is not more...MORE is more."<br /><br />or<br /><br /><a href="https://www.believermag.com/issues/200511/?read=interview_gass" rel="nofollow">(In a 1978 public debate about fiction, John Gardner said, of his writing versus Gass’s: “The difference is that my 707 will fly and his is too encrusted with gold to get off the ground.” Gass replied, “There is always that danger. But what I really want is to have it sit there solid as a rock and have everybody think it is flying.”)</a> <br /><br />or <br /><br /><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/01/specials/gass-present.html" rel="nofollow">Why do I warn you about the perils of the present tense? Because there is a lot of it going around. What was once a rather rare disease has become an epidemic. In conjunction with the first person, in collusion with the declarative mode, in company with stammery elisions and verbal reticence - each often illnesses in their own right - it has become that major social and artistic malaise called minimalism, itself a misnomer. This is not the minimalism of Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett, or of Anton Webern and Kasimir Malevich, in which a few obsessively selected means are squeezed into a mighty More - that more, as Mies van der Rohe said, which is the large result of less. This is rather the less, less yields. This is modesty taken down a peg. Here we have the simple without the pretensions of simplicity, plainness without the pressures of an Amish or a Shaker ethic.</a> <br /><br /><br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com