Agape Agape - pg. 51

Out giving readings from the Blithedale Romance to entertain this gaping clutch of pleasure seeking chance persons, this enormous market of the non-literate and half-literate devouring the poets who compose to please the bad taste of their reviewers end up instructing one another, what this glorious democracy in the arts is all about isn't it? Get up there and perform with what Hawthorne called "that damned mob of scribbling women," even Poe with his mechanized genius for forcing order on chaos scorning the public and thirsting for fame, and Melville, good God Melville? Begins Moby Dick wants everybody to read it finishes daring them to, has to borrow money to write it because Harper's won't give him an advance, they publish it and he still owes them a hundred and forty-five dollars and eighty-three cents never forget that figure, "dollars damn me!" he tells Hawthorne, writes that terrible Pierre you can't get thirty pages into hates feeling he must take his readers where they expect to go, talk about elitism about setting yourself apart from the common herd beyond reason above reason on the shelf with the dead white guys ends up in the Custom House at four dollars a day reduced to a non-person, to herd anonymity humiliated castrated eliminated as a threat that's what it's all about that's what I have to explain.

Agape Agape - pg. 49

try to educate them did they buy those "Educator" piano rolls teach them to play with their hands no, went right on discovering their unsuspected talent playing with their feet here's Flaubert yes, "The entire dream of democracy" he says, "is to raise the proletariat to the level of bourgeois stupidity." You want the essence of elitism there he was, his idea of art that "the artist must no more appear in his work than God does in nature, that the artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed" good God, the rate things change a generation lasts four days what posterity? Everywhere present and nowhere visible leads him right into the embrace of the death of the author whose intention have no connection with the meaning of the text which is indeterminate anyway,

Agape Agape - pg. 37

and, and, get my breath before I lose the, these belly-talkers and detached selves bred and cloned to be reproduced because that's the heart of it, where the individual is lost, the unique is lost, where authenticity is lost not just authenticity but the whole concept of authenticity, that love for the beautiful creation before it's created that that, it was Chesterton wasn't it? That natural merging of created life in this creation in love that transcends it, a celebration of the love that created it they called agape, that lovefeast in the early church, yes. That's what's lost, what you don't find in these products of the imitative arts that are made for reproduction of a grand scale got to find some paper, piece of black paper I've finally got the pencil now, now.

Agape Agape - pg. 36

Cloned like slaves by the pantomimics who could imitate anything like, yes like the black slaves bred in Virginia when Eli Whitney's cotton gin revolutionized the world markets for American cotton, people making millions, the African slave trade forbidden, illegal, over and done, so breeding slaves to cultivate the cotton turned Virginia into an immense breeding farm says Henry Adams' sharper brother exporting 40, 000 blacks a year to the southern states' plantations where the market set the price piece of paper two whole heaps of it but they're all no wait, letter here almost dry from those eye test doctors about clearing up this bleary vision with the predni, what in the, prednisone?

Agape Agape - pg. 29

You find it wherever you look, the body as a prison and there's the rabbinical student dying of love for a woman engaged to somebody else so his spirit inhabits her body, slips in when she's asleep and her body's unoccupied and the rabbi comes in to exorcise this dybbuk, who may be having a grand time in there. This guilt, guilt, guilt step in it wherever you go in this pile somewhere, what was I looking for, these pages on Tolstoy no I put those under here with some broken, with this training your mind to recollect sins in a previous life to these cases today of recovered memories, same thing isn't it?

Agape Agape - pg. 23

Talks about the detachable self that can be withdrawn from the body, some kind of religious community Pythagoras set up with the ideas of lives to come, and these dangerous demons with lives and energies of their own according to Homer was it?

Agape Agape - pg. 15

"The biggest thrill in music is playing it yourself. It's your own participation that rouses your emotions most," whole thing breaks your heart, here's another. "Retains its artistic 'feel' indefinitely," goes back to the turn of the century before the player piano, when it was still the piano player, big thing you wheeled up to the piano same punched roll it played on the keys with wooden fingers, tiny felt-tipped wooden fingers playing Scarlatti, Bach, Haydn "and old Handel. Unhappy Schubert speaks to them in the sweet tones of Rosamunde. Beethoven, master of masters, thrills alike" right on to Chopin bemoaning the fate of Poland and breathing "the fiery valor of his countrymen in Polonaise" and here's Debussy and Grieg giving testimonials. "Many of the artists will never play again, but their phantom hands will live forever" there that's what it's about, no more wooden fingers byt phantom hands. "What stands between you and the music of the masters?"

Agape Agape - pg. 14

To reach the enormous markets of non-musical and half-musical and to conquer the growing prejudice of the truly musical" what are we going to do, educate this pleasure seeking rabble? There's Plato again agreeing that the excellence of music is measured by pleasure, but for this going out there playing You're a Dog-gone Daisy girl with its feet? Good God no, for them Plato rhymes with tomato, it can't be the pleasure of chance persons, he says, it's got to be music that delights the best educated of you get your poets composing to please the bad taste of their judges and finally the audience instructing each opther and that's what this glorious democracy's all about isn't it?

Agape Agape - pg. 7

Waiting to be entertained because that's where it satrted and that's where it ends up, avoiding pain and seeking pleasure play the piano with your feet, play cards, play pool play pushpin here it is, here's Huizinga talking about music and play he quotes Plato yes, here, "That which has neither utility nor truth nor likeness nor yet, in its effects, is harmful, can best be judged by the criterion of the charm that is in it, and by the pleasure it affords. Such pleasure, entailing as it does no appreciable good or ill, is play,"

JR - Closing

---- for all these here letters and offers I been getting because I mean like remember this here book that time where they wanted me to write about success and like free enterprise and all hey? And like remember where I read you on the train that time where there was this big groundswell about leading this here parade and entering public life and all? So I mean listen I got this neat idea hey, you listening? Hey? You listening ... ?

JR - pg. 684

Stressing the vital necessity of expanded capital formation unimpeded by government restraints, Senator Broos' impassioned plea for a restoration of faith on the part of the common man in the free enterprise system as the cornerstone of those son of a bitches who still think winning's what it's all about give them a string of high p e ratio and a rising market it's all free enterprise all they howl about's government restraints interference double taxation, all free enterprise till they wreck the whole thing they're the first ones up there with a tin cup whining for the government to bail them out with a loan guarantee so they can do it all over again ...

JR - pg. 663

hear it I mean I bet it's as good as this thing you just made me ... hey? even if I don't hear exactly if I don't hear exactly what I'm suppose to ...? the wind came down, lost any voice but its own till it seized the clash of branches tossed bare over ruts leading into more ruts and the remnants of pavement, the rusted length of a car's muffler and the sodden heap of a mattress, torn pennants of paper swirled in the leaves and then the sudden iron nakedness of a piano frame still strung pounced shaping in the mud as though to fossilize a bedspring fused at this lonely height of passionate deformity caught now in a glance of lights where the ruts broke off on darkness spread glistening beyond, lights sweeping in with maritime disdain to stop and add a burst of flashlight reduced to the jarring cadence of a man on foot.

JR - pg. 652

... he came down brushing crumbs from the tattered magazine page. -- A quiet, soft voiced rather modest man who looks out from a calm impassive face and beetling brows, with deep set eyes that have such a startling clarity which makes them seem almost hit, hypnotic. They have a blue steel chill about them that suggests an austere, indrawn indwellingness. But they can sparkle with an engaging warmth and the bulldog set of his jaw breaks in a boyish grin when asked about his youth ... he hunched closer to blow at an icinged crumb

,

JR - pg. 645

-- Inside what, I ...

-- Like inside the company and all that's why they call it this insider suit see where you're this here ...

-- Inside? that's, how could I be inside there inside there isn't any inside! How could anybody believe the, the only inside's the one inside your head like these statements you make, these tapes you play over the phone to these newspapers virgin minerals gas discoveries the health plan of tomorrow travel of the future some reporter even found me out there he said he understood we were freezing sound now what kind of a ...

JR - pg. 620

-- Tom what the hell do you expect, kid like that she lives in a scene where hallucination is confused with vision all she ...

Agape Agape - Opening

No but you see I've got to explain all this because I don't, we don't know how much time there is left and I have to work on the, to finish this work of mine while I, why I've brought in this whole pile of books notes pages clippings and God knows what, get it all sorted and organized when I get this property divided up and the business and worries that go with it while they keep me here to be cut up and scraped and stapled cut up again my damn leg look at i, layered with staples like that old suit of Japanese armour in the dining hall feel like I'm being dismantled piece by piece, houses, cottages, stables orchards and all the damn decisions and distractions

VIKING

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

First published in 2002 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.

Copyright the Estate of William Gaddis, 2002

Afterword copyright Joseph Tabbi, 2002

All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Copyright 1980 by Thelma

D. Toole. Reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press.

Excerpts from Concrete by Thomas Bernhard, translated by David McLintock, Alfred A. Knopf,

1984, and The Loser by Thomas Bernhard, translated by Jack Dawson,

Knopf, 1991.

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the

product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to

actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirley coincidental.

CIP data available

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Garamond 3 with Schneidler Initials

Designed by Carla Bolte

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication

may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

JR - pg. 615

-- I mean look man are you going to stand there like that ...
-- Just tell me what's the difference you're the, you're what the young man from Racine invented aren't you no intimacy no, no commitment nothing, concave or convex to fit either sex aren't you ...
-- Man you're, I mean you're this real bastard aren't you ...

JR - pg. 603

-- Sixteen years like living with a God damned invalid sixteen years every time you come in sitting there waiting just like you left him wave his stick at you, plump up his pillow cut a paragraph add a sentence hold his God damned hand little warm milk a comma slip out for some air pack of cigarettes come back in right where you left him, eyes follow you around the room wave his God damned stick figure out what the hell he wants, plump the God damned pillow change bandage read aloud move a clause around wipe his chin new paragraph God damned eyes follow you out stay a week, stay a month whole God damned year think about something else, God damned friends asking how's he coming along all expect him out any day don't want bad news no news rather hear lies, big smile out any day now, walk down the street God damned sunshine begin to think maybe you'll meet him maybe cleared things up got out by himself come back open the God damned door right there where you left him ...

JR - pg. 556

-- Like they're delivering your thousand gross assorted plastic flowers from Hong Kong man.

JR - pg. 553

-- Come off it man like other people I mean like who, like I mean somebody's getting paid to be this weather forecaster someplace telling you fair and warm while you're like up to your ass in this blizzard I mean like who does anything man, I mean somebody gets a job and like the first thing they do they try to figure out how to not do it I mean look at you man, like this business job with all this mail and calls and these presents like only this business job with all this mail and calls and these dollars present writing this music for some band that's getting this money free to play it? Like I mean what's the difference if you get help off that and Al gets it off this welfare, I mean like you're both in music and like you weren't even very nice to him man.