Forthcoming: The Ear’s Mouth Must Move

So what’s happening?
I’m spreading news of The Ear’s Mouth Must Move: The Essential Interviews of William H. Gass, a forthcoming book edited by me, Stephen Schenkenberg, the person behind this website.

Which interviews will be included?
I’m still working my way through permissions requests, but I’m hoping to include about 15, starting with The Paris Review in 1976 and ending with an unpublished interview I conducted in 2009. In between (permissions-willing): Long conversations from places like The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Contemporary Literature, The Believer, Bookworm, and Vice. I’m also hoping to secure an established literary figure who admires Gass — there are several — to write a brief foreword. 

So just text?
Perhaps. I am also exploring the possibility of pairing the interviews with photographs by Michael Eastman, Gass’ friend and frequent collaborator (on Auguste Rodin, among other projects). 

What are some of the subjects Gass talks about? 
Literature. Philosophy. Metaphor. Reading. Painting. Critics. Music. Morality. Language. Religion. Architecture. Arguments with John Gardner Over Bourbon at 3 a.m. Rejections. Revisions. The Fascism of the Heart. History. The Sentence. Fairy Tales. Technology. Typewriters. 9/11. Post-Modernism. Academics. The Failures of High Culture. Censorship. Dying. List-Making. Truth. Form. The Limerick. Humanism. Communism. Mathematics. Tragedy. Sports. European Readers. Teaching. Fame. The Midwest. New York. Reading Aloud. Bookshelves. Biography. Family. Travel. Diaries. Raising Children. Politics. Money. Movies. Musicals. 

Who are some of the people Gass talks about?
James. Pope. Melville. Rilke. Valéry. Ransom. Stein. Gaddis. Elkin. Joyce. Barth. Wittgenstein. Woolf. Nietzsche. Shelley. Lowry. Nabakov. Heidegger. Hawkes. Capote. Borges. Browne. Donne. Fielding. Richardson. Eisenman. Wright. Mies. Cheever. Murdoch. Bellow. Tolstoy. West. Plato. Aristotle. Rushdie. Euclid. Newton. Dryden. Sterne. Abish. Strand. Calvino. Pound. Eliot. Stevens. Dickinson. Faulkner. Hawthorne. Shakespeare. Kiš. Schoenberg. Spinoza. W. Faulkner. Mahfouz. Hume. Hitler. Goebbels. Bachelard. Descartes. Galileo. Sophocles. Goethe. Poe. Steinbeck. Caldwell. Frege. Plotinus. St. Paul. Sontag. Thoreau. Moore. Erasmus. Rodin. Ovid. Hölderlin. Conrad. Ortega. Ginsberg. Morrison. Barthelme. Mallarmé. Ford. Obama. Cézanne. 

What are some of the things Gass says?

  • “I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.”
  • “Substance is more interesting than most of my friends.”
  • “Rilke, I suppose my favorite writer, is full of shit.”
  • “I think that Plato was mistaken.”
  • “Sophistication doesn’t redeem.”
  • “I write to indict mankind.” 

And much more — including whole pages where the above toughness is replaced by enthusiasm and humor. Gass laughs often in interviews. It’s just that he’s often less than hopeful about things like the human race.

Why a book of interviews with William H. Gass?
If you’re a regular reader of this website, you already know the answer to that question. But if you’ve come here for the first time, here’s one answer: I know of no other living writer this intellectually entertaining in conversation, this rooted in both literature and in philosophy (which he taught for a half-century), and this respected by bookish figures we ourselves respect (Michael Silverblatt, considered one of the country’s sharpest readers, considers Gass “our greatest living writer of prose in America”). There are other answers, but that is one. 

What connection do you have to Gass’ work?
I’ve written about Gass’ work for The Quarterly Conversation and Identity Theory. I interviewed him for The Believer. I founded and edit Reading William Gass (begun as Tunneling in 2007), the web’s only resource dedicated to Gass’ work. And during my three and a half years editing St. Louis Magazine, I was fortunate enough to publish one, two, three pieces of Gass’ non-fiction.

So who’s publishing this book?
I don’t know yet. I plan on spending the first half of 2011 introducing the book to a handful of publishers that might be suited to this project. (If that’s you, I’m at stephen@stephenschenkenberg.com.)

Isn’t there already a book of interviews with Gass?
Yes, Conversations with William H. Gass was published in 2003. The Ear’s Mouth Must Move will include a dozen interviews not included in Conversations. This is a smaller point, but as more than one reviewer has pointed out, Conversations wasn’t proofread very well. A decent amount of errors and typos made it into the published book. It’s a bummer, considering how much time I’ve spent in its pages. I’ll be shooting for something cleaner.

Is there a way I can stay up to date on the project?
Yes, just fill out this form. Thanks for your interest.

Image by Frank Di Piazza, used with permission.