Gass

I'm not on Facebook and I don't tweet. The iphone my wife insists I have has the sound off. I haven't watched a commercial television program since Cheers. I don't watch network news and I gave up on CNN. I couldn't find satellite radio if I were dating a slutty NASA secretary. My car has no GPS and the sound of a text makes my skin crawl.

I am old, and while the setup looks ready for a vitriolic denouncement of all things modern tech, that is not my direction. Let me put it this way- avoiding the popular cultural filters, I have to find other outlets to let me know what's what. Allow me to introduce you to one, if you have not yet made his acquaintance.

William Gass has a voice that makes me feel less alone, even though he is now 85 years old. He is a cultural and literary critic and a respected novelist, which matters far less than that he is a stylist, and one of the few remaining. It doesn't matter what he's writing about- it's the getting there that counts. While I would humbly submit that his last novel, The Tunnel, is the last masterpiece of this generation's age, few agree. It makes no difference. The writing schools will continue to pump out spare-prosed breakdowns of marriages by those who haven't lived, and the thirtysomethings will applaud as they recognize their own failures in the self-congratulating whining nothings who inhabit those apartment walls. It's time to leave such fiction on the shelf. It is a whirlpool in a cul de sac, a self-lacerating mirror fuck that takes us nowhere but to our own misery. Reading ought to serve a better purpose.

Gass teaches philosophy, but he is a remarkably playful writer. Some smart guys like to slip some vulgar into their highbrow to show they can ride with the truck drivers, but for Gass, writing must be about all of it. Spiritual yearning and shit-stained yes-fucks. Art and assholes. Gods and garters. Gass makes reading about anything a pleasure, and that’s a sentence I really ought to end with. Plot, for the big man, is for Hollywood hacks. When the mind that reads meets a like mind that writes, narration is beyond the point. We seek connection beyond what we’re allowed when we drop the kids off at practice.

The long dorm bullshit sessions are over. When the swirl of middle-age life leaves you numb on the couch  again, no text or tweet or post will make ya feel any less alone. Gass reminds us that books can still deliver one kind of human connection that social media simply doesn’t offer- sustained and deep focus on another's consciousness. And if you’re extremely lucky, you just might find a writer who lets you know those horrific thoughts that arrive at your weakest moments are human thoughts, sent from the collective mind but rarely spoken aloud or the A-list won't find you on it. We need our truth tellers to remind us we are not entirely alienated. Gass’s erudition is far beyond mine, but he settles in on the page and makes you feel at home in the dark muck, the strange mix of higher aspirations and baser drives. When you read Gass, you recognize the breadth of your waking life delivered without judgment. A sample-

What hope of happiness now, now I must fuck my own hand?

I’m sick of living in your childhood.

He is human in his off hours.

If there were a god who did create, then he’d have the cock squirt scotch at climax, and oral sex would produce a genuine and weary climax.

Prison is a splendid place to put writers.  It gives them a sense of grievance, and we know that grievances are among authors' more powerful motives; it removes them from temptations, and we know how easily writers are tempted by bosom or bottle; it eliminates distractions, that of the housewife among the more miserable, and makes pointless all the petty steps which must be taken in order to advance one's commercial, scholarly, or political careers; it directs the mind to the main things: liberty, injustice, the misery of humankind, the irremediable loss of opportunity, man's vast immemorial waste of Time, now seen as not some abstract flow of tick to tock but as the lit wick of life itself blown out and the expired candle's timorous thread of smoke still unaccountably mistaken for the flame.

That comes from a one-minute skimming of one essay, and more and merrier frolic on nearly every page the critics hacked bile and snot upon. This is a man you don’t read, let alone meet, every day. Digging deep into his pages leaves the tinkling sound of the cell unheard and the querulous cry of junior a distant echo in the cobwebs of your bad day. The man gets it, and all you can say is thanks for sharing.