Word: taking
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This weekend they take aim at the third jewel of their fall season triple crown, that elusive gem which eluded them last year...
This assault on mechanical modernism--one of Barth's correspondents describes "those symbol-fraught Swiss watches and Schwarzwald cuckoo clocks of Modernism"--hardly fits a novel that follows a schematic masterplan. You see, if you take the seven letters of the title-word "letters," superimpose them on a seven-month calendar using a quaint motto, so that the letters of the motto form the letters of "letters," then each letter of the motto will fall neatly onto a date in the calendar, one for each of the letters in the book...
...still want to assay the bulk of Letters--out of a sentimental attachment to Barth's brilliant earlier epic-length efforts, Giles Goat-Boy and The Sot-Weed Factor, or out of sheer quixotic nerve--you could take the advice of Jacob Horner, formerly the protagonist of The End of the Road and now a pawn wandering Barth's checkerboard...
...TAKE A FAMOUS CHARACTER as protagonist, add a wife and kids and a few servants, mix in a fair amount of imagined 'typical daily life' and arrive at the typewriter with the ready made historical novel. Thus we learn how Freud puts on his shirt, or how Lincoln liked his eggs. Our interest in these quotidian events lies mainly in the protagonist's eventual fame or historical dimensions...
George Wald, Higgins Professor of Biology Emeritus, recalled, "The last book I read in the bathroom was Meetings With Remarkable Men by Gurdjieff." Wald also expressed some concern about his image: "This will probably take away what little shreds of respectability I have left...