Gaddis Centenary Roundtable: Para-Academic Venues for Discussing Gaddis and Other Innovative Fiction

Ali Chetwynd: Hello everyone. For this roundtable we’ll explore the opportunities for discussing Gaddis—and other innovative fiction—outside of strictly academic channels. I’ve got questions but if somebody says something that sparks your thoughts, respond to it as immediately as you like… First thing, though, if you can just briefly introduce: what is the thing that you do to provide a forum for non-academic discussions of innovative fiction? What is your “venue” and what has been Gaddis’s place in it?

Chad Post: Chris, you go first.

Chris Via: OK, I’ve been selected by Chad Post, let the records show… so going first is not a reflection of any kind of egocentrism on my part... Anyway, I do the YouTube channel “Leaf by Leaf”: I think the best way to explain how it got started is that I realized I was going to drive all of my coworkers and friends away if I didn't find a different outlet for talking about books like Gaddis’s. YouTube was not very native to me—I didn't really latch on to the YouTube generation—but someone suggested “hey there's this whole community, so-called ‘Booktube,’ out there and I guarantee if you throw some videos out there you will find the people who are interested to actually hear about this.” i.e., “stop telling me about it all.” So some of my earlier videos did kind of fall into that vein of, you know, the maximalist big book type thing: it’s what I'm drawn to. And early on I said something about Gaddis offhandedly, and then I got a slew of people saying “please do a full video on Gaddis, do a full video on Gaddis.” Honestly the first time that I came to Gaddis was by way of Mr Franzen, because I had to see what this was all about, and I fell in love with it. But I was floating in a vacuum: I didn't know anyone who was reading this book, I wasn't connected to anybody and so when the NYRB reissues came out I decided to do some full-length videos, and, sure enough, there's this whole community out there. What I do, I try to use the videos to give sort of a schematic or a little framework for people who most typically know of the books, and see them as daunting, and just need something to, on one hand, convince them that it’s worth the time, and on the other, to give some sort of guardrails to make that first approach a little more fruitful—to set up, of course, for the reread. So that's what I do, in a nutshell.

Edwin Turner: I have a blog called Biblioklept. When I started in 2006, I knew who Gaddis was. I read the “Mr Difficult” essay Chris mentioned in a print issue of Harper’s. Before that I had heard Gaddis’s name from a friend, probably in the late 90s or early 2000s but it was hard to get hold of the books, you know… I do remember taking The Recognitions out from my college library, and sort of pretending to read it. It took me another decade though; I think I first blogged about it in 2009. People have always responded to any morsel about Gaddis. As Chris said there's a big community of people that really respond to the work and I think it's probably more relevant than ever actually: especially J R.

Ali Chetwynd: And then Chad, you’re the other person who does something sort of non-Gaddis-specific, so how does the podcast work?

Chad Post: Everything that we do more or less launched out of when I worked at Dalkey Archive for a number of years and we ran a publication called Context Magazine that was sent out free of charge in batches of 25-100 to booksellers and academics, who then passed them along to any interested readers. It was a kind of print tabloid magazine with the goal of giving context (hence the name) for difficult authors, difficult books. It was longer essays that would introduce you to these writers in non-academic, but intelligent ways. After I left Dalkey and started Open Letter we had some time before our first book was going to release, so we started a website as well – Three Percent – that's evolved over time from being rants and essays to dealing with the translation database and statistics, to information about awards, excerpts… And podcasts, like the Three Percent Podcast about the industry. Along the way –  I guess it was long time ago now since we're about to do our 22nd season – we wanted to do another podcast that was more about books, so came up with the idea of doing what we call the Two Month Review (because none of the titles that we come up with are imaginative or inventive at all) in which we take a book and over a two month period talk about it every week as if it were like a serialised TV show. And that way we give people a slow-read opportunity to take on books that – like Chris said – that they're scared of. Like J R, obviously, or Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller which is a Joycean experimental novel from the Icelandic author Guðbergur Bergsson, the three huge Rodrigo Frésan books that are loaded with pop culture references, 2666…

This is mostly me and my very close friend Brian Wood who is a writer himself and a lot of the books that we’re using in there, he's never read before. Some of them I have, some I haven't: most of the time I have and they're books I want him to know about. It's been fun to try and find that same audience that we had with Context outside of the academy. I work at a university, and I have to teach classes and I see that as a great way of interacting and discussing literature, but there’s this larger audience like Chris and Edwin said. People interested in these books who are maybe just needing that little nudge or that little entryway or that little bit of humour to find their way into the text. The text might be befuddling, but at least you’re not on your own thinking “I don't quite get this”: you can listen to a couple of people trying to puzzle it out and unpack it. The podcasts have turned out to be rather evergreen. I'll get like emails from people doing research on a book – such as Antoine Volodine’s Radiant Terminus, which comes up a lot – who will say “there's no other information out there aside from your podcast about this book, so we're citing the Two Month Review.” My reply is usually: “well that's interesting, and I hope you know we’re not professionals at any of this so, you know, good luck!” But TMR is broadcast on YouTube and made into a podcast in the hopes of hitting various audiences. There's an interactive element for the handful of people who want to type in questions, but for most other people they just download and listen to it in their spare time whenever.

Ali Chetwynd: Then before we get on to Jeff and Victoria I just wanted to come back and ask Chris and Edwin: Chad just mentioned some of the other authors that have been important to the Two Month Review, so apart from Gaddis who have been other authors that you’ve had especially interesting or valuable responses and interactions with your audience about?

Chris Via: Oh, I can say right off the bat it would have to be foremost William T Vollmann. I think Vollmann is probably my favourite living American author, hands down, and I did a really crummy appreciation video early on and I was so surprised… well, the main thing I was surprised about is how few people had heard of him because I felt that, you know, he's grown to the point where he's got, you know, big publishers – Penguin, Viking, and so on – but yet still so sorely overlooked, apparently. I always recommend The Atlas as the starting point for Vollmann and I don't think there's been a single person who hasn't come back and basically said something along the lines of “where has this author been!?”—you know—“this is incredible!” So that will be my one pick I'll put out there.

Chad Post: I want to throw one thing in really quick that might be relevant, which is that Paul Slovak was the editor for all the Vollmann books basically forever. And a couple decades ago, I was in his office, right before Europe Central was nominated for the National Book Award, and he was talking about how every year he had to fight to keep Vollmann’s books in print because they didn't hit the right sales level: they weren't selling the 3000 copies a year that Penguin wanted for any backlist book to remain in print, and so he would go to the mat and have to fight for them every time. And with the National Book Award I think he got a minor reprieve, but he's fired now: he got fired in this most recent round of layoffs. The fact that these big authors have been at—I mean Gaddis was a Penguin author—the fact that they were at these large presses and weren’t getting the support that they needed to stay in print is concerning. The things that we're all doing are all trying to make it more possible for these sorts of authors and these sorts of books to reach the necessary sales to stay in print. And everything you do adds to that and helps that out.

Edwin Turner: For me, probably pretty obvious: these sort of big maximalist books that people have questions about. Like Thomas Pynchon, you know people want to talk about that… Cormac McCarthy, just the probably obvious “cult novels” that now have huge cults, maybe to the point that it’s become very easy or even fashionable to bash these big books a bit now. But Chad brought up Antoine Volodine—and I don't write a lot about him but when I do post something on that, there's always somebody like “oh somebody's writing about this guy!” But mainly, the authors and books that get the most traction on Biblioklept are what people might expect, Roberto Bolaño, William Vollmann (I’d start with The Ice Shirt). Evan Dara –  I don't know if anybody reads that guy’s stuff, but again I think he’s in the same vein where even if you just share like a morsel people just respond to it. Again I think it goes back to that idea that there's a community that wants to discuss these authors, and that's really what happens anytime I post.

Chris Via: I have to slide in here and say that on the subject of Evan Dara, nobody's talked to him except maybe Steven Moore but someone brought it to my attention that, if you Google his name, my face appears, so a lot of people actually think that I'm him now.

Chad Post: That is a pseudonym…

Edwin Turner: Do you know who he is, Chad?

Chad Post: Ha! I don’t . . . well, I don’t remember. Martin Riker met him in person before we worked together at Dalkey, and he told me they had corresponded. I’ve had some contact, but aside from knowing that his books are fantastic and he seems really cool, I have no specifics.

Ali Chetwynd: So then to come to Jeff and Victoria, maybe starting with Jeff since you’re a fiction writer as well so I guess this conversation about advocacy for experimental fiction is relevant to you, but you were very involved with the Gaddis e-mail list in its very early days, so I wondered what your sense was of how that developed, what kind of role it played at the time, where you think it fits in now that there are so many other forums online for discussion of this kind of work in things like YouTube and podcasts… So what’s been your 20 years’ perspective on the Gaddis-list and how it's fitted into the public space for talking about interesting experimental or innovative fiction?

Jeff Bursey: As a preamble I’m going to show this book [Jeff brandishes Frederick Karl’s American Fiction 1940-1980]. This was my first introduction to William Gaddis and I guess I read it in 1984/85 and then I read a review of Carpenters Gothic in some popular magazine, and decided to order the three books that were out at that time, and took them to England and read them there. I say that because that means I was reading them in isolation, because in England Gaddis wasn't known at that time, and is only a bit better known at this time. So until I returned to North America in late ‘89, there was nobody that I knew who read him. Later I came across an excerpt from what would become Frolic in the New Yorker—the judge’s ruling on the dog caught in the artwork—and then I came across Steven Moore's name. So by the time the list came round, with Ron Dulin, and Victoria, and a couple of other people, we were all so excited that we could talk about Gaddis, or anything that branched into Gaddis’s writing from other writers or branched out from Gaddis. So there was often that Gaddis-and-Pynchon conversation; sometimes it was the schoolyard equivalent of “this one's better”: it's totally irrelevant, they're both good, but there were also long interpretations of aspects of his work, that went on for page after page on the Gaddis-list, and these were just fascinating to read.  To see a lot of people—very few of whom I ever met—talk about Gaddis with such urgency was, considering where I lived at the time, certainly something quite new. I should say, since Edwin mentioned the novel, that I was born in St. John's, Newfoundland in Labrador which is part of where The Ice Shirt takes place. So I was quite geographically separate from where any Gaddis activity would occur.

The list went on for some years and people contributed steadily, intermittently: Joseph Conte was an academic who contributed and I met him in 2001 at a conference in Louisville where I was giving a paper on Henry Miller (who was the reason I was reading the Karl book: to see what he had to say about Miller), and Joe Conte was giving a talk on John Barth, and afterwards I could say “I'm Jeff Bursey and you and I are on the same Gaddis-list.” Later I met Victoria and another woman named Anja [Ziedler], and a guy named John Soutter, so the Gaddis list was very important for me to not feel so isolated in my enthusiasm for him, because nobody in St John’s was going to be talking about him and his books just appeared very briefly if at all in a bookstore (usually a used bookstore). I did my own first novel—I finished it in ‘95 and it came out in 2010—that and the second novel received comparisons to Gaddis (and to Evan Dara coincidentally) as to the handling of dialogue and ideas. I’d also say that there are some people who are talking about these writers on Goodreads who we don't hear in other forums: it's a nice non-academic forum and many people contribute lengthy reviews about these books, and about many other writers of course, which could be of interest to Gaddis scholars: to take a troll through Goodreads and see who has written about Gaddis or what other writers’ reviews mention him, and there are a few people for whom he’s a touchstone.

Ali Chetwynd: Then Victoria you were one of the Gaddis-List founders and now the administrator of the Gaddis Annotations site…

Victoria Harding: Not a founder, no, that was Ron Dulin, at the time working as a video game tester in California, I think, and planning on going to film school, who got together a group of Gaddis readers online, on a service that cost $12 a month, I believe – but when I joined in about 1997, Jeff was there and one of the more active of about, I guess, 40 or so members, maybe more who were silent. A programmer in New York City, Curtiss Leung, was also on the list, and he is, more than anyone else, the founder of williamgaddis.org.  Jeff mentions the lack of literary activity in Newfoundland, but I read The Recognitions in about 1964 and in NYC and all the other places I'd lived before we went online, I'd never met anybody else who had ever heard of Gaddis or read him – except the person who owned the book that I read.  As Jeff describes, it was indeed exciting to find fans online on the gaddis-l.  And it’s amazing how sort of underground he was, at least for me, and of course he was still alive at that time:  I first heard of his death on the Gaddis list.

When I read The Recognitions, that was the only book that he had ever written and there was a question, of what's going to happen and will there be more? So then years later when J R came out, I couldn't wait to get that, had to wait till it went into paperback because of my finances at the time, and although I was very excited when I finally read it in the late 1980s, it was horribly disappointing because it wasn't The Recognitions. I had just been totally blown away by the first book, and then J R, the idea of these obnoxious people going at each other for page after page, you know… it just wasn't the kind of book that I expected.

I've since come around and now have a very different view of it, but my impression is that, in general, there is The Recognitions and then there are the other three books, essentially narratorless, and so readers come to him through very different ways.  Some of it has to do with the reception of Gaddis. I don't like talking about authors and their lives: I really like talking about the books themselves, but the negative critical reception of The Recognitions was so marked, I don't think his books can be talked about without eventually referring to Gaddis’s biography.

But in any case the person who really should be here—and I sent e-mail messages to five different accounts, and all of them bounced—is Ron Dulin, the amazing person who at some point before 1997 got together a group of people to talk about Gaddis online.  And I can't document this now, so there's an APB out for Ron Dulin: if anybody ever comes across anything I would really like to get this all put together again.

As with Jeff, I’ve met few group members in person, but I did meet Ron, just once, and we spent an afternoon together just talking about Gaddis, the list, books in general, and all kinds of things while we walked from the Staten Island ferry terminal to the NY Public Library main building at 42nd & Fifth Ave., quite a long walk with much talking time. As I recall, he started the online group and then in some way contacted Steven Moore whose guide to The Recognitions he had read, and Steve asked Ron to put that online, so that was the real beginning of the Gaddis web site.  When Curtiss Leung saw it, he suggested we form a Gaddis Annotations online discussion group and work on notes for all the other novels, which we did: their names are on the site. Around this time I got a hosting contract and bought the domain and that was the beginning of williamgaddis.org, which as some people know, is one of “my” literary sites collectively available at inwriting.org.

Meanwhile I had gotten in touch with Steven Moore, whom I saw but didn't meet at the Gaddis memorial in Manhattan, by mail, because he wasn't yet online, to get permission to use The Recognitions annotations html files I’d been given by Ron Dulin, and told him of our Gaddis list and the subgroup for additional annotations, and found out he'd already started annotating the other novels, so he sent what he'd done, which many of the group amplified. And… that's the way the thing just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger, with the addition of sections on Gaddis nonfiction, tributes, Gaddis's appearances in other people's novels, and group members' additional research, notably Anja Zeidler's character and other lists and research on l'inconnue de la Seine and the Seven Deadly Sins table and more...

I'm sorry I feel like I'm talking longer than everybody else but I have a long history: that's my only excuse with this because it really has been a long time and a big part of my life.

Ali Chetwynd: And the Gaddis Annotations are still updating, right? So if people have new annotations to add they can contact somebody and the database will get bigger?

Victoria Harding: Absolutely. On the website I should probably make it even more prominent, but it says “if you have further ideas…”: Some of our best ideas have come that way, including the source for the “unswerving punctuality of chance” quotation, appearing in each novel, which came from somebody who looked at the website and said “oh, I know, that comes from Thomas Wolfe,” and sent it in. And of course we were delighted, and so was he because I put his name on it, and he said “my name and everything!” I don't know if he had anything to do with Gaddis, but clearly he was a Thomas Wolfe reader anyway…

Ali Chetwynd: Cool, so my next general question is: what does your particular venue let you do well—in terms of advocacy like some of you mentioned, or in terms of organising conversations—and then what kinds of things is your particular venue less suited to? Are there things that you'd like to do in terms of promoting or organising discussions of this kind of literature that you don't think that your medium allows for? What have been the strengths and limits that you've seen with your particular format over time?

Chris Via: By the way, Victoria, you can go on and on: I was fascinated. I would love to hear more and more, so no apologies necessary. I'll say that Steven Moore—just a quick anecdote—I bought his hardcover of The Recognitions annotations from University of Nebraska Press and told him, and he immediately chided me and said “why on earth would you have purchased that: it's completely out of date: do not use that” and was very adamant. But I told him that I was simply a fanboy and bought it because I wanted to give it to him to inscribe and send back but… he had lots of good to say about the annotations website and urging people to use that: it's just been an amazing resource.

So then the question was strengths and weaknesses. I think my particular strength, based on feedback I've received, is—and I'm trying to think of this how to approach this in such a way to where it doesn't sound like advertisements for myself—the fact that I do work full time, totally outside of the literary world; I have a family; I have a daughter; I work in IT; and things like that; and it comes into a lot of my conversations in the videos... I think what connects with people is that: here is someone who does not read for a living. Not that even people connected with the literary scene necessarily get the time anymore to read: it’s really something you have to fight for no matter where you are, but I think that's something that people really connect with, with my venue specifically. It's almost like I'm showing that the average person who does, you know, work all day and in such a capacity where you can’t take time to read and you have to really kind of be selective about what you spend your time with… it's sort of like I proved that it can be done, and it can be done with books like The Recognitions, Infinite Jest, Gravity's Rainbow, and so on. Which gives me the freedom to talk about that with people who say “no, there's just no way, I don't have time,” but then the question I use is, well how many Netflix series have you watched in the last two months? And usually without even having to respond to that question, the light bulb kind of flicks on: “oh OK.” So, you know, if you're reading a polished book review in a notable journal, you're not going to be given the word count to go into certain things that I have the luxury to go into. I oftentimes will bring in the actual timetable that it took—when I'm getting ready to do my Tale of Genji video, I can talk about how long it took me to read, how I approach the chapters, and time management, and then annotations: how I did my note taking because I've developed a pseudo-system that allows me to then retain a lot more to dig at the book, to have more of a conversation with it. And then I have sort of an outline for going back and setting myself up for the rereadings… All of those things are things that a lot of people are curious about, but you might not think of when you're writing a review for The New Yorker, and that an editor would never allow in, as it would be seen as too pedestrian… So that's the definite strength is just that freedom because I can do whatever I want within the rules of Youtube… So then the other part was the negative aspects…

Ali Chetwynd: Yep, what does YouTube not let you do that you would like to be able to do when it comes to book discussions or creating things?

Chris Via: Well let me spin it this way, as I’ve had a lot of ideas and it's not necessarily what the medium—in my case being YouTube—wouldn't allow, or a restriction in that way, but probably more just my own personal time. Because I've had ideas about sitting and just reading through books and painstakingly going sentence by sentence, but that is more about just exhaustion and time. Then, not exactly negative feedback, but a restriction that has been voiced back to me: people have often remarked that they would much rather Leaf by Leaf be a podcast instead of a YouTube channel because they would much rather have that audio-only ability to just be on the go, for people who don't like to have the video going on their phone which kind of obliterates their ability to multitask. And I totally get that, and that's definitely one negative aspect of the videos. I mean, I like the visual aspect just because I can show the book: often the cover art is something that I definitely want to show, and facial expressions and things like that, and my library that I’m so proud of, I kind of want that on there. But I would say that's the biggest thing, that it's not as mobile. I'd have to think more about limitations: I feel like I'm just scratching at it. I definitely know a lot of stuff that I would like to do but the only restriction so far has been myself, my own time. I guess the other negative aspect of YouTube as a literary venue is that it doesn’t have inherent credibility, but I see that as a challenge to make what I have to say about the books as strong as possible.

Edwin Turner: I don't really know if blogging even… I don't know what advantages it has. It seems almost antiquated in 2023. I do think that it allows me to be a scissors-and-paste man: I love old magazines and stuff like that; I love just sort of going on a database or something and then going down a rabbit hole and then just sharing old clippings… Jeff brought up the Karl book, and I actually spent an hour yesterday trying to find it at this massive used bookstore (I ended up buying Steven Moore's book about the novel instead when I couldn't find the Karl), but I found Karl’s essay on “meganovels” which addresses Gaddis, just by going through some old Washington Post profile on Gaddis that came out when Carpenters Gothic did… The point being: anything that I share in the blog or write about comes from doing this kind of stuff, and it gives me an excuse to get in the weeds with these really weird things: I mean my wife and kids, my colleagues, they don't care about this stuff, you know, so it just gives me a medium to put something up even if it's just like an old picture of Gaddis’s calendar, or something that I find which is just totally “who cares about that?” but then there are people that care about it. So I guess that's one of the advantages of a blog: it still allows for that kind of cutting and pasting, and then I can scribble my own annotations or riffs. The blog doesn’t have to be “reviews” or “criticism.”

As far as limitations there's just so many. I think blogs have been supplanted by true online communities, and rightfully so: I mean Reddit and Twitter are places where people can discuss the literature—like the old listservs… there's more of a discussion element. Blogs had that for a while in the 2010s but that seems to have gone away, so that's definitely a limitation: it’s become a more static and solitary kind of thing as opposed to like a podcast where usually you're bouncing ideas off of someone.  But then I guess an advantage is that I'm not on camera, so nobody would have to see me…

Chad Post: Yeah I guess one of the perceived advantages that we sort of baked into the Two Month Review in particular was that, because it's sort of episodic and can involve recaps, there would be entry points all throughout the season. We didn't want to exclude. You want to make it so that, especially if we could get guests on, that guest could read 50 pages of the book, sort of know the surrounding sections, maybe have read it years ago, and be an interesting guest with a different sort of “angle.” You know, talk about their background and their relationship to the book and then get into its specifics. What we saw as an advantage, is that the reading is slow: that there's a pacing advantage for people don't want to read 700 pages in a week or two, but for whom 50-60 pages a week doesn't seem daunting, seems possible in terms of a time commitment. But the problem has been that like with most serialized properties, the numbers start out high on the first couple episodes and then the listenership tails off dramatically. And so it becomes a bit weird, like we're finishing the season for these four people who are actively still watching us live. But then over time numbers trend up after the live episodes are done. One of the disadvantages I see with everything right now, with the blog, podcasts, and so on, is being able to reach people, because the standard mechanisms have been screwed with for so long: it used to be that Google Reader and RSS feeds were a way to keeping aware of what was coming out. You could put something up and you’d have as much space as you wanted to, you could do whatever you wanted to and an excerpt would appear in an organized way for all subscribers—people who knew to click through the snippet and get the whole article. And now there are no feeds that people really pay attention to, and to promote a new podcast into the world of “X” or Instagram reels or whatever is shaky. It doesn't really track super well: like I finally signed up for Instagram’s professional thing, only to find that there are a lot of engagements but very few click-throughs to the actual podcast episode. And that's one of the trickier parts I think, is trying to get seen within a world in which—especially now that the writers are on strike and actors are on strike everyone has a podcast—so getting the podcast to cut through the noise and be recognized is really the biggest difficulty. So we’ve sort of leaned into “well if we make all of this content it will find its home slowly but surely over time.” The other advantage I suppose is that because it's super freewheeling and can be edited we don't worry too much about saying things that are stupid or factually wrong. There's like a real sort of sloppiness that's semi-intentional so that people don’t feel intimidated, and that I find a lot easier to do on a live podcast than I do with writing, where I'm a little bit more hesitant to leave in bad jokes or things that could be edited out. The podcast at least has that sort of vibe and flow in which you never know what's going to happen: maybe that’s an advantage, maybe a disadvantage…

Ali Chetwynd: And then to go back to the founding of the Gaddis list and think about how that functions today, what's your sense Jeff of what the e-mail listserv format does well? And what does it not let you do that you would like to be able to do?

Jeff Bursey: I think the list is generally far less active now than it was when it started, which coincides with what Chad just said about “a lot of popularity at the beginning.” But of course at that time there were very few places that we could talk about Gaddis, and the more methods we have of communication, as everybody here knows, the less we actually communicate. So there is nothing that can be done to make the list as it is today look like the list when it began, with a gradually swelling number of fervent people who are submitting things two, three, four times a day. I don't think we can go back to that time and I don’t think we can do anything about the list: it still is active, which I'm grateful for, and like others have said Victoria deserves so much credit beyond what words could say for maintaining that.

For my own writing purposes I do a lot of literary criticism and some literary essays, but not academic writing, and if I can find the opportunity to work Gaddis in, I will do that. Perhaps that spreads the word a little bit. My own books, when they come out people refer to Gaddis: I’m not asking them to, so they come up with it on their own… What we have is an atomised world where perhaps some venues that we don't think about as fertile places for Gaddis discussion… What are we overlooking? What are we not inquiring about, as to where activity is occurring, then to possibly align ourselves with those areas which we just don't think about. Goodreads is another example I've used before, because there is definitely a permanent number of people who read Gaddis, and some dislike the books but some very much like them. Just because it's a popular venue doesn't mean that we don't have to have anything to do with it: I’ve enjoyed it and there are some good writers on Goodreads who write extensive reviews of many different kinds of books. The Gaddis-L itself now is more about I think annotations—and Victoria can quite easily correct me on that—and sightings, or Gaddis things that we've all read about that appear to be in the real world. But the list will not have its heyday again, and the podcasts of today will not have the heyday of podcasts when they first came about. So we need to cast about for the new ways.

Chad Post: So you’re saying you’re going to start the Gaddis TikTok channel?

Jeff Bursey: Oh no, I don’t think I would ever do a TikTok channel.

Victoria Harding: Let me say, though: my impression was that Ron Dulin gathered together however many people there were—perhaps a dozen or less—and they started a reading of The Recognitions. That's what we don't do in the group anymore, and one possible reason for that is that—forgive me anybody that this might offend—a lot of academic people have joined the group, and there is nothing that is more the kiss of death to a discussion among avid readers than to have somebody say “when I taught Gaddis blah blah blah…”  People think, “oh this guy is actually getting paid for reading Gaddis, and so I can't say anything.” So I've had the idea of trying to get back to having readings, because as you say, Jeff, it has devolved now into these little sightings, and we sometimes also have graduate students who use the group to ask questions, help them write their theses, and then you know they're not one of us anymore, they're one of them because they are now in the business… so I think this is reconcilable somehow.

But I kind of bridled at the “para-academic” title, it’s sort of like “analogue” you know it used to just be a clock and now we have to say that it's a particular and old kind of clock. So I want the Gaddis List, and I hope the website, to be facilities, not dominated by academic readers or those who publish their ideas somewhere. A lot of us have grown old on this list and so perhaps we don't have all that initial enthusiasm of discovering people that we can talk to about this, but I want to try:  there's nothing else for it because otherwise it's just not fun anymore, as you can tell from how slow it usually is.

Amazingly, from a very unusual source, a man who is translating Carpenter's Gothic into Dutch in the hopes of getting it published, joined the group and his questions and his understandings have triggered a lot of thought in the group, and I've started rereading it. It was never my favorite book, and it isn't, still, and probably never will be.  But I'm considering whether to try getting a reading going in the group, and people can drop in and out if they've read it, or read it for the first time or once again. I think there must be some way to do this. I've mentioned to Ali that there's a Reddit Gaddis group that seems, as somebody said, much more immediate, much quicker responding, but we couldn't get in touch with a moderator to find out about it for this roundtable. But I’m going to pursue it: I'm a member of the group, it's not very active at the moment, but what has taken place there looks a lot like the Gaddis list 15 or 20 years ago. So you know we'll see if it can be kept going.

Ali Chetwynd: With the annotations, it seems like whenever I see people online saying, you know, “how do I make sense of Gaddis?” or whatever, the annotations are always the first thing people will point them to. We know one of the difficulties with Gaddis is if you're not used to his style just processing what's going on in the narrative, and the annotations page seems to be the source that gets recommended for almost any new Gaddis reader if they're reading a passage and they can't work out what the actual events are underneath the style…

Victoria Harding: But do you think it’s necessary? I mean I had nothing, for any of the books, and I didn't think I was missing anything. I obviously was: I didn't know all of the stuff that's annotated. But I mean it's a real question, you know, at the level of reading. I mean I was just swept away by, particularly The Recognitions but all of them, Frolic… it just gets you going and you don't really need to know the citation for the legal case or Gaddis’s experience that fed into that. It's possibly interesting after the fact, but… It's a question not a statement but I just never experienced this need to have somebody saying “oh that means this,” or “oh you know that's there because of something.”

I read in the Reddit group, or maybe not the Gaddis one but another book one: somebody was warning that you have to be careful using the Gaddis site because even if you're just looking at the cast of characters on our pages for, say, J R, you get spoilers. I never thought about that, and it's something I think that might be worth correcting.  Or at least warning visitors about.

Jeff Bursey: I agree with Victoria: I started reading Gaddis in 1987 in London, England and there was no way to find out what this meant, this particular line, or this particular allusion, but you don't need to. You can simply enjoy the book as it is and if there's mystery there there's nothing wrong with that and I think the allusions and references and quotations differ for readers. Some of them will be more obscure, some will just pop out to some people. Like the example that you gave Victoria, about the “unswerving punctuality of chance” (I believe the guy’s name was Todd, who pointed the source out, now it comes to me). So I just read it and thought “that's a lovely phrase that Gaddis wrote,” and I simply enjoyed it in the book. And I think what we sometimes forget is the enjoyment of a book, not the investigation or exploration: and I speak as someone who has written a lot of long reviews on many different books. But the thing is to make sure that the mystery still remains so that a reader who is only reading with whatever they know can still get fun from it. We need to retain the fun factor.

Edwin Turner: I do think, though, that a lot of, I don’t want to say younger readers, but readers who’ve grown up with the internet always being there: they read in a very different way than people before. I recently reread Russell Hoban's novel Riddley Walker and there were things in it that I found myself looking up on Wikipedia that I never did before, just because I could. And it enriched my understanding of the novel. But to go back to what you guys were saying, the first time I tried to read The Recognitions, when I was 20 in 1999, and if Wikipedia existed, I didn't know about it. And I didn’t have those wonderful annotations, which later provided the right guardrails to keep me on track in the narrative. So I think there’s a balance where you have to be able to be entertained by something to enjoy it and not be overcome with trying to pin down each element of it. But I do think younger people who’ve grown up with the Internet, they are used to immediately looking for “what does this mean?”

Victoria Harding: I think recently that somebody said something about how readers today seem so apprehensive about needing to understand things: you know, unwilling to just read through a book, so I have a little bit of guilt about the annotations site in that the page existing suggests that you should—or, worse, need to—know all that stuff.  And does it really improve your pleasure in any way to know the full story of a martyr or the meaning of military acronyms?  Or does it just impede your reading involvement?

Edwin Turner: So as somebody who's spent a lot of time there, I don't think that's the case at all! I think that people can treat it more as a resource, a place to get a possible answer to the question, “oh, what is this?” – because I think most people who read, especially a book that big, OK you’ve got to get through and you can't just sit and get hung up on every little detail, every little reference you might not get: but sometimes you do get hooked on a detail, hung up on a line and then you're like “OK, can somebody help me with this?” Which is really what most of Reddit and Twitter Gaddis have been: just “did anybody else notice X&Y&Z?” So I think that it's a tool like anything else, or a toolkit, but it doesn't have to be a total How-to guide.

Ali Chetwynd: One thing that that brings up is I think a couple of you mentioned “Mr Difficult,” the Franzen essay, as the way that you came across Gaddis, and I think framing him in that “difficulty” way—positively or negatively—frames him and a lot of these other innovative writers as if what they are is a challenge or a test, right? So that the goal is to get through it and make sure that you've understood everything and then you've done Gaddis and this reflects well on you. Whereas what I like in all of the things that all five of you have put together is that that comprehension-check approach is not what you're doing: they're all forums for better understanding for more enjoyment and, as you said, transmitting the fun side of things.

Jeff Bursey: “Mr Difficult” actually frames Franzen more so than it does Gaddis, and tells us about what kind of writer and reader Franzen was and then became—much to his own detriment I think.

Ali Chetwynd: Actually one thing that made me happy about the conference that we ran last year was that nobody mentioned Franzen until the very very final paper of the final day and I was increasingly excited to get through it with no Franzen reference and then “Jonathan Franzen argued…” and our perfect 100% record of organizing a Gaddis conference sort of unbounded by Franzen went up in smoke.

Victoria Harding: Yes, someone at the conference said that they teach Franzen with Gaddis: I couldn't believe it (though perhaps to be fair it was her way of doing away with him). But I thought that was really ill-advised, and he only published and got away with it because Gaddis was dead! And not all that long dead: he never could have written such a thing if Gaddis had been alive: he would have responded, “You poor little thing, why don't you just go read the Hardy Boys,” or whatever you instantly understand. I just don't think Franzen’s name should be mentioned in connection with Gaddis. Few people would ever would have heard of him if he hadn’t attached himself to Gaddis’s coattails. He did write his own books: let him be satisfied with his own audience.

Ali Chetwynd: And that's a good transition to my next question! Which is, what do you all think of as your audience? I’m intrigued about how you go about finding an audience for what you do. Do you just put things out there and then hope that people will kind of come along to it, or do you actively seek out particular places where you can reach out and find new people? So how do you develop an audience in the kind of forums that you work in?

Chad Post: I have a segue that includes Franzen. So, I met him one time in person at a National Endowment for the Arts event in the early 2000s where he was speaking. We met ahead of time. He knew that I worked for Dalkey Archive. Yet during the middle of his speech he was asked about audience—this was after The Corrections came out, and the whole blow up with Oprah, all that literary controversy—and he was like “well you know, all I want to do is write books that people read: not those kind of books published at places like Dalkey Archive where they’re only read by three people who stay in a closet their whole lives” and I remember thinking, “you know what, dude? Fuck you!” Anyhow… so in terms of audience and in terms of the way that we go about it we should be better: I mean we have a website with sixteen years of history and content that has had various very high points—such as when we ran the Best Translated Book Award, or posts related to the translation database—and we know how to publish books and have a decent system and voice for marketing these titles, and yet I think most of our attempts at trying to generate word of mouth are just throwing things at various platforms and hoping. I mean you just mentioned the Reddit Gaddis thing. One time I quickly searched for TMR on Reddit and found a whole thread about our Bolaño season with in-depth discussions and “new episode dropped!” comments. Not only had I never even seen this, but never even thought to look on there. It was such a great surprise! There are more people out there very on board with what we’re doing. So there is an outlet…

One of the dreams that I had was to get some independent bookstores to support the podcast. We announce the next titles far in advance and have a reasonable reading schedule, so stores could easily promote the book to their customers while recommending they listen to the podcast and join a larger community of readers. We tried having a forum on Goodreads at one point in time and it didn't really take, in part because I didn't have the time to post there with any regularity, which I think is something that you have to do at the beginning. Otherwise we rely a lot upon just our e-mail list and then leverage the guests we have on to draw a larger audience. But otherwise I feel like it's just the continual grind of how many times can you throw the same thing in front of people until it clicks and they pay attention.

And I do teach. It's funny what you Victoria said about academics killing all book discussions because we always have year-end and welcome parties for our department and I'll bring some of our new books along to give away and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “oh I don't want those, I don't have time to read” or “I've got to teach so I can't read these new books.” Well, I don’t even think academics read that widely outside their specialty. But in relation to how people find stuff: I teach an Intro to Literary Publishing class each semester that has a whole segment on marketing, and I’m endlessly trying to understand where these students find out about what they read and what they hear about those books. And after all these years it’s still pretty much a mystery. They generally say “someone recommended X book to me so I picked it up.” If I press a bit and ask how they know their favourite author has a new book coming out? Generally no idea. It seems way different than it was when I was in college, or maybe when any of us were in college. Even though we all have so much access to information, and yet there still seems to be a heavy reliance on haphazard coincidences and serendipitous encounters to find new media to consume. And so the best I think we can do with the podcast is just keep plugging and plugging away, and try and make good content: do the best you can with the thing that you can do. And it will land and find its audience. Hopefully. This sounds a bit depressing now that I say it aloud…

Jeff Bursey: Can I jump in and say that I know of Open Letter because of Chad? I follow Open Letter Books because I knew Chad at Review of Contemporary Fiction and I thought if he's associated with that it's probably going to be good quality.

Chad Post: Thank you, man.

Ali Chetwynd: So what about other people? Edwin or Chris, how do you go about finding your audience, or expanding the audience, and then how do you go about hearing back from the audience? Then what kinds of things tell you that you're reaching an audience or tell you that you're not?

Edwin Turner: I don't really have a good answer. I've been doing the blog since 2006, which seems like way too long, and there's definitely a core group of readers who interact and leave comments and stuff like that who I’ve sort of become friends with over the years just because of, again, those kinds of obscure tastes for a particular flavor of literature. In terms of reaching readers, traffic will spike when an instructor at some college has linked to something I've done. Or somebody will put something on another forum like Reddit and I'll get a huge traffic spike, but all the discussion will be at Reddit, not at my site: people writing, like, “look at this fucking idiot!” you know, like “look at what this idiot said,” and I'm like “you can come say that at the blog! I'll respond…” But that's it: I don't really chase engagement in any way, beyond linking my posts on Twitter; it's not like something that I look for that much anymore to be honest.

Maybe blogging will become retro in five years, I don't know, but it seems like a kind of a dead technology almost, when it used to be very robust. There used to be, not a big, but a robust blogging network of other bloggers who would share each other’s stuff and discuss and that’s kind of gone. I mean it still exists but to parrot what people have said about the listservs, its heyday has passed. But people still reach out to me and ask me weird things, and young kids will still write and say “hey I just read X&Y&Z: what else is in that same vein, in that same flavor?” And that's I guess why I still do it.

[Jeff Bursey departs for another engagement]

Chris Via: I have not done anything that you're supposed to do. In fact I think there really must be something rebellious within me that gets tickled by YouTube, because they're constantly bombarding me with all of these suggestions on improvement and audience growth and audience engagement, and something inside of me—this defiant creature—comes to life and I decide to do everything the opposite of what they ask.

So, they ask you to constantly tell people to “mash that subscribe button and make sure to like the video”: I have never said anything like that in any of my videos, and I refuse to ever do it. They tell you, you know, “short, focused videos!” and I've sort of made a little bit of a splash or a name for myself by doing the longest possible videos. My Gravity's Rainbow video was the first one that really took off: it was three and a half hours. In fact I dialled it in such that it was 3 hours and 33 minutes and 33 seconds. The J R and Recognitions videos were about an hour and that was me talking as fast as I can, and doing quick jump cuts, but then with Gravity’s Rainbow word just sort of spread and it was almost like the same thing that attracts people to these big, unwieldy, mysterious books suddenly started attracting people to “this guy who just goes on and on… forever.” So this past Christmas I did a six-and-a-half-hour video on War and Peace and who knows what will happen.

I get solicited all the time by these marketing companies telling me “hey, let us grow your channel” and all this stuff, and I just don't care about that. Honestly I just make the videos and put them out there. The most marketing that I do, if it can be called that, would be to also post it on Instagram and sometimes Twitter, just saying “hey this video is now live.” But I don't do anything outside of that, I just make the videos and put them out there. But what has been amazing—I don't know if it's something about YouTube—it's just the comments section on there. I do get this dashboard where I can see different metrics and so on but that starts to get a lot into what I do for a living and by the end of my work day I really don't even want to look at a screen at all: I really don't want to touch a computer; if I could have minions that did it all for me that would be even better. But I've gone in there a couple of times to see those metrics and I'm just not concerned with it because the people who want to hear about this stuff, and want to engage: they'll find it, at this point. You know, if it's out there on the Internet they're going to find it. I do have a subscriber account and you can see likes and dislikes; that can be a lot of fun, just looking at those and making inferences, but that's as far as I care.

One cool thing that it has fostered is a lot of communication between the viewers themselves, when they all talk amongst each other, and I could go on and on with stories about readers of a shared affinity who have found each other through the channel and have started their own channels, have started their own reading groups. I get told all the time that, you know, I've been mentioned on Reddit or I've been mentioned somewhere… to this day I’ve not gone and checked out Reddit, it sounds like I need to for at least the Gaddis stuff but again being in full-time IT, outside of my work day I really limit engagement with technology. I just want to talk about books and I want to read. But yeah, all I can think to say is I just put it out there: sort of a Field of Dreams type theme.

Ali Chetwynd: And do you all find people responding to the arguments you made, or are they just going off inspired by little things and then chaotically interacting with each other in unpredictable ways?

Chris Via: All of it, though dependent on the author. My Alexander Theroux videos are really interesting to see people clash, but yeah I get it all. You get the people who just kind of casually show up and they say “good morning.” I'm told that this is like a trend to be the first to comment on something, that it’s sort of like putting a flag in Everest. So from that level of immediate engagement all the way to people going into some really helpful and insightful conversation, just in the comments. Stuff that I didn't know about: I've learned so much from the people that show up. I think there's so many great readers out there that just the way that they're made up, they don't care to go into the university, they don't care to start a podcast, they don't care to start a channel, they just want to read: they love to read. It's like the true pure bookworm and those types will show up, really interesting because it’s just blow-your-mind depth of insight that some of these people you've never heard of will bring. But then all the way on the other side of the spectrum I've got a little cadre of people who have reached out to me enough they want to establish a personal connection, and they want to be in touch. I mean I've got a handful of people who simply want to send me an e-mail every now and then, or another group of people they just want to send me a picture of their book-stack of what they're currently reading at a given time. You know it's those readers like we've been saying: they're not interested in, you know, discursivities of the book: it's just the culture of reading, the glamour of reading, it's sort of like making reading cool again for outside the ivory towers… it's amazing, just the whole spectrum, and honestly the community of people has really blown me away. I never would have thought that all these people are out there.

Ali Chetwynd: Great. So before I ask my final question which is exactly about what relationship there could be between academia and the kind of things that you're all working on, do the rest of you have any interesting experiences with audiences? What have been the most productive ways that your audiences work with you? Like Chad, for example you said that the audience is quite often asking or providing questions or things to discuss on the podcast, is that right? And then Victoria you mentioned the Dutch translator whose questions have got you back interested in Carpenter’s Gothic… So what's been your experience of the best-case scenario for your kind of forum when it comes to getting communities together or developing conversations and interests and things?

Chad Post: It depends on the season, and one of the things that I see as unfortunate is that it’s a struggle to reach listeners if we do a book that doesn't already have a built-in large audience. But if we do 2666 or J R? Everyone's there.

Chris Via: Yeah.

Chad Post: But then we'll do something else like “if you read J R you’re going to love this” then it’s whoosh, nothing. But for the books that are already popular we’ll have people watching live, chiming in in the comments to riff on our jokes, or to comment on stuff or throw in their own examples or questions. There are usually a handful of people each season who are locked in, always there on air and then they'll talk and that's very fun. We did record a few episodes live pre-pandemic, which was really exciting. These took place at a couple bookstores and at the Taste of Iceland celebration in New York City when we featured the aforementioned Guðbergur Bergsson. It was cool to have a live audience interacting, and it played out more of like a reading group where we were performing rather than one where you were expected to participate.

But in terms of academia stuff I’m a little burnt out as I reinvent my syllabus for the 9000th time with a dozen new ideas. But the connection between the podcast and academia should be greater. I think there are a lot of professors teaching some of these books who should be using all of the things we do as resources for students, but I don’t get the sense that is happening. I feel like there is still—at least at my university and I see it with my friends—a big divide between the very established tenured professors who do things the way they've always done them, and a much younger generation that has to strive to prove its credentials. And since none of the things we do (on the podcast or website) have like PhDs behind them or academic citations, I think they get overlooked. There’s vulgarity, jokes and observations that are designed to get people engaged, but are frequently unnecessary digressions: the podcast definitely isn’t tight nor is it a lecture. Whenever I interact with academics about the podcast there’s usually the vibe that the stuff I do isn’t serious enough. We're sort of bucking against that over-serious, stuffiness, and looking for what you mentioned Chris, the Power Readers. There are groups of people who consume tons and tons of books, read constantly, love reading, and although their habits might change over time, when they're there they're locked in. Those are the people I feel like we have the best experiences with.

And I don't know who most of these people are. For example, when we did the third volume in Frésan’s trilogy this guy emailed me to say that he had listened to the first episode on a whim and since we said don't worry about reading the other books he just started it with this. He then proceeded to send along a number of really thoughtful questions throughout the season and interacted live. He’s a perfect example of the sort of person I think our audience is, even if we don't know exactly who they are: they just tend to fall into that pattern of people who really just like to read and like to hear about books in a way that’s similar to how I like to listen to baseball podcasts. I don’t always pay attention, I don’t always know the names of the players, but I'm there for it, for the conversation, and we've tried to develop that sort of rapport that makes the podcast fun to listen to regardless. There are people looking for quasi-smart conversations to easvesdrop on that aren’t daunting or too intellectual. Or at least not too academically intellectual.

Ali Chetwynd: And then I was going to ask on that, Chris, one thing that really struck me about your videos especially the Gaddis ones is that I think you're the only YouTube book person I've seen who begins some of the videos by actually looking at the academic criticism, so, what's your sense of the relationship between what you do and academia? How do you draw on academic research and what do you think your stuff might be able to contribute to academic readers, be that teachers or scholars or whoever?

Chris Via: Yeah I was going to say that that's one thing that I didn't start out doing but then somewhere along the way I thought to myself… You know I do like to read academic writing and criticism, as well as the books themselves of course. I mean to a degree: of course there's some stuff that is just completely unreadable where I'm not sure what the point of it is. But it just struck me, I wonder how people would respond if I just—instead of trying to go into all the grand theories and frameworks that everybody's setting up—what if I just took sort of the meat or the most salient points of the academic and secondary criticism and just sort of presented those in a flurry or survey, because I do think there's a lot of stuff that is very illuminating. I can't remember exactly which scholar said it, maybe Tabbi or Moore [actually John Seelye in “Dryad in a Dead Oak Tree: The Incognito in The Recognitions”], but they said that The Recognitions is a Paradise Lost out of the Dunciad! Things like that, I just think it's so perfect and I couldn't have come up with that. And sure enough when I did (and I can't remember where along the line I started bringing in the secondary criticism, my sort of academic survey I guess) but people responded to it big time: I mean it became very popular and talked about and suddenly I'm getting emails from professors at different colleges and universities, you know they're thanking me that I brought up their paper that they had forgotten about, or something they worked on as a postdoc trying to get their PhD published before realising that it wasn't going to happen and just sort of resigning themselves to teaching. And a lot of them talk about how then they went on to watch the rest of the video which is decidedly unacademic but it gave them a vigour for reading again, and they talk about “rediscovering,” you know, the jaded academic now rediscovering that childlike reader who, like Victoria and Jeff were saying, didn't need to know what everything pointed to or what everything meant but just… swimming in the mystery of the ocean, you know.

And it's just brought me in touch with a lot of students: tons of students I'm in touch with now. And it's fun to be this person who can help bring people together: I brought a recent PhD graduate together with a publisher, Michael P Daley of First To Knock and they connected so much so that Michael Daley gave over the next issue of their periodical to this graduate to be a guest editor… And so I saw that that bridge you're talking about is just the networking of it. The first part being of course bringing the academic criticism into the videos in such a way that I think it’s more palatable: most people who are just readers and maybe get interested in looking at some criticism find themselves bewildered. So to just sort of give the Cliffs notes, or the “Chris’s notes” as people have called it, has been really effective.

And then the last thing I'd say, just something funny because I was invited this year to the David Foster Wallace Society conference, and I just have to share. The way they did this was it was pairs of people who each gave about a 30 minute presentation and then we sat at a table with a moderator and did about 15 minutes of questions, and I was the only one—if there hadn't have been someone who actually drove from the Jersey Shore to Gettysburg PA because they found out I was going to be there and wanted to meet me, which is extremely flattering—but if it hadn't have been for that particular person I wouldn't have been asked a single question. It was totally silent because my presentation was just so non-academic. You know these are all people who are working on books, they're working on chapters in an anthology, they're working on their doctorate, and it was just a really funny contrast. But it occurred to me at that moment “yet here I am,” you know, so there is something that's causing a bit of a bridge there to academia. I just sat there and I remember thinking in my mind we're going to get to the end of this and I'm not going to have been asked a single question, whereas the guy they paired me up with it was just one after another of questions. It's just kind of humorous: I love stuff like that.

Ali Chetwynd: And Victoria you mentioned earlier your scepticism about academic presence and the way that saying “I have taught Gaddis” can distort spontaneous or fluent conversation. So what's your sense with the annotations, how do you find that academics engage with them, and are there ways that you would prefer academics to engage with the Gaddis resources you've helped put together? And what's your own relation to academia as a reader of Gaddis? I suppose my final question for everyone is then going to be: what can academia do better to engage with the kind of audiences that you're reaching? So Victoria what do you think?

Victoria Harding: I fully appreciate a lot about academic writing! it's wonderful to read afterwards, when you are just knocked down by a book, to read somebody's really great essay about it. You say two things: everything that I noticed, “ah there it is!” but then things I didn't notice, connections and so forth. I suppose I just think that academics should tread softly in a readers’ group, and not intimidate people, mostly be aware that it's a very intimidating thing. A friend of mine who's a computer programmer was in the Gaddis list, ten or fifteen years ago, and he compared one of his posts to those of teachers in the group… he complained people were posting weird things, such as assuming that everybody was a Marxist and things like that: sort of academic chit-chat. And he sent me a comparison of one of his recent posts and one of these people who make such assumptions in the “...and thus we can conclude...” type of writing. I had to say, that's that person’s problem, it doesn't have to be your problem. You can read anything in any way, or express it any way you want. I have been remiss through a whole bunch of personal circumstances in paying more attention to what's happening on the Gaddis list, and particularly not letting people feel that they are smacked down if they say something that strikes somebody the wrong way… As for the website, the whole idea was to make it from the contribution of everybody. Many people seem to think that it's Steven Moore’s website, and although he is certainly, almost of necessity, a major contributor, it isn't really: it's just that that he had done a lot of annotating and other writing before the site existed, and over some time I put nearly all of it on the site.

And so as I read Carpenters Gothic I looked at the notes for it and was deeply disappointed in them!  I think that they annotate things that don't require it:  it's not necessary, for example, to have the geographic location of some town that's mentioned, and then there are some personal opinions, such as, “this indicates that so and so…” I mean Steve didn't write all of these obviously but you know when I put them up there it didn’t strike me what was going on. Well, I'm going to see if I can get anybody to read along with me: I would really like to.

Ali Chetwynd: One annotations project that seems like it's much more in line with what you seem to value is that Anja Ziedler's trying to provide audio clips for every song that’s mentioned, is that right? I'm not someone who knows classical music at all, so to be able to go there and—if J R is partly a classical music novel—to be able to actually hear the sounds of whatever is referenced, I think that sort of thing is very useful and not in a pedantic kind of way.

Victoria Harding: As Gaddis recedes into the past it becomes more and more important. Anja and I are still working on it and I have a new way to do the sound clips that makes it easier to play them, so it's taking longer than expected, and of course I have to check available versions and consult about which one Gaddis would have had in mind. One of the annotations I’m working on with Anja is “Teddy Bears’ Picnic.” Some people may know this song from the fantastic British TV short series The Singing Detective: it is in there in all of its ominous weird power. But in looking it up I find that Bing Crosby recorded it in 1950 so therefore it was still current way later—the song dates from the 20s—so all of this is part of making useful notes… Nobody in the future is likely to know what “Teddy Bears’ Picnic” is about or why in Gaddis some drunken students are singing it, and so I think Anja’s work doing that kind of thing is really great, adds to the pleasure of reading.

And she did the character-lists also, but as mentioned I'm going to check them for spoilers. It is terrible to have somebody give plots away ahead of time. I don't even read the jacket copy on books: I don't wanna know in advance anything about the story or what others thought of it. There's one and only one chance in your whole life to be able to respond to a work directly without any mediation. I think that the annotations site is definitely for people who have read the books, not for people who are reading them. Forming your own thoughts and ideas – it's part of the joy of reading.

Ali Chetwynd: Then finally Edwin: you teach at the university level as well, right? So what's your sense of how academic thinking about the books that you talk about does or doesn't inform what you do on your site, and how your blog relates to the kind of conversations you have when you’re teaching?

Edwin Turner: I don't teach at a University, I teach at a Community College, so I teach mostly entry-level kind of writing classes: I probably would never assign Gaddis in the classroom… I mean I would love to, but you know, it’s not about me it's about what would improve the students’ reading, writing, critical thinking skills... I don't know, I don't have a great answer here. I would say that when I first sort of started directing my career towards academia I did so under a series of bad mistakes. But I would say that my then goal was to be able to read for a living. It just turned out teaching wasn't going to necessarily involve the kind of texts I want to read. And so the blog is giving me the opportunity to read and write about what I want to read and write about. So I'd sort of go back to something that Chris kept underlining: this idea that Gaddis is for readers. In the same way that a person can be an artistic writer, I think people can be artistic readers, but being an artistic reader doesn’t really find expression in another medium, you know? Reading is internal, private. It’s you and your mind and your eyes and your hands, and I think that Gaddis appeals to people who read for this flavor that you can't get anywhere else: this kind of energy that… there's approximations of it in similar writers that we kind of touched on, but it's its own energy. So any academic writing about Gaddis is just really maybe trying to describe that or analyse it or whatever, but really it should just be sort of steering people towards it. Like, “hey, you can read this too, you can: it's funny. It's really really funny, it'll make you laugh and it's also really really sad at times: you know, like it's heartbreaking at times. And you don't have to know everything that's happening in it.” And that's what more writing about Gaddis should do, is just to sort of steer people towards it and not kind of put it behind any kind of gate.

Ali Chetwynd: Yep, so any questions for each other or any final comments on things before we finish up?

Edwin Turner: I loved hearing Victoria talk about all the stuff she talked about. It was really interesting to me to kind of as somebody who came to these annotations fourteen years ago or something, just to kind of like think about what was behind it, so thank you.

Victoria Harding: I'm of course happy to hear that!  It's actually more like twenty-some years ago. It’s really a long time. As I said, we're all getting old, and I am looking to pass the site to somebody else to whom Gaddis is important. But I would like it to remain—this isn't fair, right, you give it away and then it's a gift—but I would like it to be a reader site still and not overprofessionalised, which would intimidate amateur readers. If it's possible to do it outside of a template it would be good, because it's much more flexible; however I understand from the family IT guy that you can make a really great website on WordPress.

I'm looking for somebody who particularly has the readerly approach so if any of you hear of anybody, please put me in touch. I talked about it with a retired professor and another academic, and he said that what he would like to do is to hire students to maintain it, as a student job. But he also said “give it a facelift” and I understand what give it a facelift means… I feel that I'm making the site largely look right for a writer whose novels are slightly, and sometimes extremely, antic, and have highly suggestive character names like Recktall Brown and Dan DiCephalis. With a writer like that I can do funny things that are very much Gaddis sort of things, like the money flowing on either side of annotations pages for J R, and similar relevant motifs. However – I would give up all of that as long as it just continued to be reader-oriented. And also, which I realised very very late, it should not have spoilers of any kind, or if that's impossible, then we need clear warnings about them. The Internet was really new back then too: at least it was to me. Somehow that made a difference: fewer models and conventions then.

Ali Chetwynd: I think before that there was only really Jack Green and his newsletter, right? That would have been the one equivalent of the things that you're all doing today.

Victoria Harding: Yes, in a way.  On the web there's always something new, it seems:  I just found a talk that Gaddis gave on Vermont Public Radio in which he says words to the effect: “I don't like doing this, I'm told that I'm not good at it, I don't have a good presence,” and he's absolutely right, he doesn't. He sounds wimpy, not like the person who wrote these imposing books. So it's just… focusing on the books is really the right idea.

Ali Chetwynd: That sounds like a good place to finish talking I think. So, thanks so much for sticking around and it's been really fun for me to talk to all of you: I hope it's been interesting for all of you as well. Thanks Victoria, Jeff, Edwin, Chad, and Chris.

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