Word: gassed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...describe a peach too perfectly," William Gass has written, "it is the poem that will make your mouth water...while the real peach rots." Photography's grip on reality can seem so compellingly firm and immediate that it is liable to be more persuasive, and pernicious, in its distortions, evasions and half-truths than any other imagemaking medium. Accordingly, the same peach can rot much faster in a photograph than in a painting or poem, and is likely to rot all the more completely. Even the percipient mind that recognizes beauty in all things, and that understands how an artist...
...Toby M. Gass, president of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra and a member...
Several of Fell's decipherments are based on inscriptions that professional archeologists say are frauds. The most interesting is a tablet found by one Reverend Jacob Gass in an Indian burial mound in Davenport, Iowa in 1877. (Among other errors in Fell's discussion of the tablet, he says it was found...
...erotic overtones of this surmise tinge Gass's entire argument. For he is not finally interested in pinning "blueness" to the wall, but in suggesting what is truly "blue" in the realm of art. Not, he insists, the vivid depiction of sexual activity. Literature can convey only a mechanical imitation of the real thing-and offer a skewed reality to boot: "I should like to suggest that at least on the face of it, a stroke by stroke story of a copulation is exactly as absurd as a chew by chew account of the consumption of a chicken...
This is a polemic, although the author does not alert the reader to the argument on the other side. His approach leads to a hermetic absorption with words as objects rather than signs pointing outward-precisely the premise that makes so much "experimental" writing so ghastly and unreadable. Gass also passes off a tautology as profundity: "I am firmly of the opinion that people who can't speak have nothing to say." This is both true and too cute by half; it nar- rows human awareness to the single focus of language, denies the very variety of living that...