[lit-ideas] Re: Happiness or Meaning?

Mike: Then I let loose a rip-roaring lecture on love and prudery and familiarity and poetry and how poetry works and etc., etc., etc. Never was I so good! The principal heard about and asked me not to come back the next year.
If you haven't read it, you'd love _JR_ by William Gaddis. A composer working as a high school music teacher lets loose a rip-roaring lecture about Mozart's reward for his work being "a little coffin in the rain," and is quickly sacked.
Meanwhile, JR, a teenage business prodigy, is building a gigantic financial conglomerate using the pay phone outside his study hall. JR's holdings have grown so large he needs a corporate headquarters and offers the unemployed composer free room and board in exchange for his adult presence in the apartment (corporate headquarters). The composer accepts.
There follows a delicious romp about the position of the creative spirit in the commercial world. It's a laugh-out-loud-in-the-middle-of-the-night novel. Also a perfect dilation of the "hopeless striving to measure up to the reproaches of our culture." 

------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html

Other related posts: