The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings by William Gaddis

By William Gaddis

William Gaddis released in simple terms 4 novels in the course of his lifetime, yet with these works he earned himself a name as certainly one of America's maximum novelists. much less renowned is Gaddis's physique of good severe writings.

Here is quite a lot of his unique essays, a few released for the 1st time. From "'Stop participant. funny story No. 4,'" Gaddis's first nationwide e-book and the root for his projected heritage of the participant piano, to the identify essay approximately neglected possibilities in the USA up to now fifty years, to "Old Foes with New Faces," an exam of the connection among the author and the matter of religion-this varied assortment screens the ability of an self sufficient literary intelligence in an age more and more ruled via political and non secular conservatism.

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TREATMENT FOR A MOTION PICTURE ON “SOFTWARE” P r e p a r e d f o r I B M W o r l d Tr a d e C o r p . W r i t e r: Wi l l i a m G a d d i s The motion picture opens with a scene of a man happily playing the piano—or so it appears, though we cannot see his hands on the The Rush for Second Place 17 keys. When this scene is established, the off-screen Narrator states that this is a film about problem solving, and observes that almost any problem can be solved that can be stated adequately. This man, he continues, has a problem.

Is it worth being done by computer in terms of time saved? Is it adaptable to existing programs? Is it unique? And as an example of a problem situation less complex and desperate than that of the pedestrian, we turn to the dinner-party planning sequence taken from the IBM film View from the People Wall, in which a woman is shown planning the seating of her guests by trial and error. The Narrator points out the parallel in her approach to preparing computer software: stating the problem; collecting the information; abstracting the information; building the model; and manipulating the model.

Seelye, February 2, 1963). Gaddis avoided tonal problems that plague the early nonfiction by writing the novel almost entirely in dialogue, recycling as art the clichés, false starts, stutters, sound bites, and other waste products of the programmatic culture itself. Once he’d decided to go this route, he had no hesitation in breaking up the short essay he had labored over, and presenting it, through Gibbs, in a form more fragmentary than the original, which appears here for the first time. A G A P E¯ A G A P E The Secret History of the Player Piano PLEASE DO NOT SHOOT THE PIANIST HE IS DOING HIS BEST Posted in a Leadville saloon, this appeal caught the passing eye of Art in its ripe procession of one through the new frontier of the 8 William Gaddis eighties, where the frail human element still abounded even in the arts themselves.

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