Brad GoochBesprekingen

I'm a huge Hall and Oates fan and I eagerly bought this when it came out. It's your standard "everything you want to know about" but it's extensively researched and well written. I still have this copy, in as bad a shape it is, I can't bring myself to let it go. And I may very well find myself re-reading it someday.

In poor taste.

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) was a Southern Writer and lifelong devout Roman Catholic, both of which characteristics were food for her body of work - two novels and many short stories.

Flannery's creativity emerged early and was recognized at both graduate school at the Iowa Writer's Workshop at University of Iowa and at Yaddo, a writer's retreat in upstate NY. During this period she wrote what was to become her first novel, Wise Blood. Once she was established as a writer with a body of published work, she often gave lectures on writing fiction.

O'Connor had many supporters and detractors. Despite the misunderstood subject matter of her stories, often containing violence and cruelty, she remained true to her faith and morality, saying in one of her many presentations on writing "If the writer is as an artist, his moral judgment will coincide with his dramatic judgment. It will be inseparable from the very act of seeing." For Flannery morality meant conveying a vision. She spent hours editing her stories in order to convey that vision.

She kept up a lively correspondence with friends and colleagues. But also served as a mentor to aspiring writers, many of whom made the initial overture addressed to her simply at Milledgeville, GA, and only some of whom she met in person. To one, a student at the time but later a poet and critic, and who admitted to a crisis of faith, she wrote of "mystery," which had become an important theological concept for her: "Where you have absolute solutions ... you have no need of faith...Mystery isn't something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge."

She was a contemporary of many southern writers, including William Faulkner, Carson McCullers and Katherine Porter, all of whom knew her and held her in high regard.

Diagnosed with lupus in 1951, she carried on most of her literary career with deteriorating health. Her life was cut short in 1964 at age 39. Some accolades at her death, regarding her writing, attest to the impact she made in that short life:

Thomas Merton: I write her name with all honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man's fall and his dishonor.

Robert Giroux, her publisher, spoke of her "clear vision" that "not only burns brighter than ever but it burns through the masks of what she called 'blind walls and low dodges of the heart' "

When asked why she wrote about freaks, she replied, displaying her considerable wit, "...because we are still able to recognize one."

Many articles and books have been written about her and her work. This is but one. It tells of her career, but also gives glimpses of her personal life: her immediate family and extended relations, her school days, and her love of birds, especially peacocks which she kept on her farm. A good overview and introduction to to an iconic writer.

This is a wonderful wonderful book which deserves to be reread, and then read yet again, after learning Persian! But first I need to finish learning to read Turkish, and then go on to Arabic in order to properly appreciate the life of this great Sufi mystic, poet and teacher. I may just have to purchase the library's copy of this book or buy a new one and donate it to the library.
Wow.
Peace.

This is a wonderful wonderful book which deserves to be reread, and then read yet again, after learning Persian! But first I need to finish learning to read Turkish, and then go on to Arabic in order to properly appreciate the life of this great Sufi mystic, poet and teacher. I may just have to purchase the library's copy of this book or buy a new one and donate it to the library.
Wow.
Peace.

Ray Johnson (1927–95) was a seminal Pop artist, a proto-conceptualist and a pioneer of mail art.

Always one to throw sand in the gears of art-world institutions, he tended to circulate his work either in truly alternative spaces (like sticking up out of the uneven floorboards of a warehouse downtown) or through the US Postal Service. Throughout his life, Johnson sent collages, drawings and less easily categorized forms of printed matter to friends, colleagues and strangers. Already in 1965, Grace Glueck described Johnson as “New York’s most famous unknown artist.”

Though his work resists efforts to pin it down, Johnson can be said to have found a particularly useful medium in collage. Collage allowed Johnson to reflect―but also to participate in―the modern collision of visual and verbal information that only became more frenzied as the 20th century wore on.

This volume collects 42 collages made by Johnson between 1966 and 1994, most never exhibited or published before, with a new essay by writer Brad Gooch, who first came into contact with Johnson when he began receiving unsolicited mail art shortly before the artist’s death. The collection of works in this volume shows the artist at his most expansive, combining art history with celebrity, word with image and the personal with the universal.

Short story writer and poet Gooch has written a fine and lively biography of O'Hara, who was killed at the age of 40 in 1966 by a speeding Jeep on the beach at Fire Island after living through the whirlwind of artistic and bohemian life in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s. Born in Grafton, Mass., O'Hara left his strict Catholic father and alcoholic mother for the Navy before matriculating at Harvard and venturing to the University of Michigan. Gooch paints the everyday details of O'Hara's life--he was a published poet, a critic for ArtNews and a curator at the Museum of Modern Art --with friendly and specific strokes. His career, loves and influences in New York City are all here: correspondence with John Ashbery about William Carlos Williams; posing nude while employed at MOMA; angry bouts with abstract painter Grace Hartigan, etc. Photos not seen by PW. BOMC alternate.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Gooch offers a lengthy first biography of Frank O'Hara, the New York School poet of the Fifties and Sixties who espoused the Abstract Expressionism that gave way to Pop Art. Born of a Massachusetts Irish Catholic family, O'Hara contemplated music as a career but, after serving in the navy and attending Harvard, he decided on poetry. He did graduate work at the University of Michigan, then came to New York and became a poet, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and critic for ArtNews. He assisted many avant-garde poets and painters; his multimedia outlook marks much of his poetry. This well-researched book is generously garnished both with samples of his work and his homosexual attachments and details his struggle with alcohol. Tragically, O'Hara was struck and killed by a car in 1966, at the age of 40. Recommended for general and special collections.
- Kenneth Mintz, Hoboken P.L., N.J.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

After enjoying Flannery's stories for a long time, it was great learning more about her life, inspiration and process.

Stunningly well-researched and very readable bio of a great New York City poet. Like Gertrude Stein, he created word pictures or added words to pictures. O'Hara lived life on the edge, sadly he drank too much - and even sadder had to die much too early. A poet who howled to high heaven. "One must live in a way; we must channel, there is not time nor space, one must hurry, one must avoid impediments, snares, detours; one must not be stifled in a closed social or artistic railway station waiting for the train; I've a long way to go, and I'm late already."

In his new memoir Smash Cut, novelist (Scary Kisses) and biographer (City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara) Brad Gooch recounts his experiences in New York City during the turbulent ’70s and ’80s. With his relationship with filmmaker Howard Brookner as the focus, Gooch covers a dizzying array of events and a constellation of notable characters in retelling his life with Brookner, from their first date in 1978 to Howard’s death at age 34 in 1989. Interspersed with photos, drawings and other documents, the memoir uses the titular “smash cut” film device of “splicing one image or event up against another totally unrelated image or event” to tell its story. At times, Gooch hesitates, puts off telling a detail or a story, most often about some sexual or drug-related transgression, as exploring the “wild side” in the ‘70s and ‘80s meant trips to the infamous Mineshaft bar, speed, cocaine and heroin as well as clubbing at the Paradise Garage and visiting with Chelsea Hotel neighbor Virgil Thompson. Gooch gets over these hesitations and presses on, telling almost all. Oddly, however, what’s often missing in Smash Cut is not detail, for there is a good deal of that, but the difficult to put ones finger on ‘flavor’ of the times. What did it feel like to be in these places, live at these times? However, if, as Tolstoy famously wrote “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” Brad Gooch has given us a fine example of what a happy gay couple holding onto each other through tumultuous and finally tragic times looks like.
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/05/03/smash-cut-a-memoir-of-howard-art-the...

It has a kind of hypnotic power that makes it better than it has a right to be. It's sort of about being gay and sort of about being submissive, like it sort of gropes for the ideas without the words to manifest them.

I remember reading WISE BLOOD and some of O'Connor's stories when I was in grad school, back in 1969-70. I can't remember if I knew then that O'Connor had only died about five years earlier. What I do remember is how taken I was with her odd characters in that "grotesque" southern literature she became so famous for. Brad Gooch's biography, FLANNERY, answered a lot of questions about O'Connor's short, mostly cloistered sort of life. There is so much information here, about her early schooling in Savannah, her family's devout Catholicism, her college days in Georgia and Iowa, her fascination with birds (chickens, pheasants, and especially peacocks). I mean, geeze, there's a LOT of stuff in here, most of which I found pretty damn interesting.

The thing is, O'Connor only wrote a couple of books. And there's a collection of about thirty stories she wrote over her short career, before she died of complications from lupus at the age of 39 in 1964. Apart from her grad school days in Iowa and a short stay in NYC, O'Connor spent most of her life on the family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, living with her mother. There are indications here that she may have been 'gay,' but Gooch never asserts this straight out, since it can't be proven. But her relationships with men always seemed chaste and/or problematic in some way; and there were a couple of close friendships with women (Betty Hester and Maryat Lee) that remained 'unrequited,' probably because of O'Connor's very strong sense of 'sin' - from her very Catholic upbringing. She was also a student of theology and divinity, which showed up so darkly in her quirky stories.

What I perhaps enjoyed most of all in Gooch's narrative were all the literary 'connections' in O'Connor's life, with the mentions of such luminary lights as: Elizabeth Hardwick, Caroline Gordon, Alfred Kazin, Robert Lowell, Robie Macauley (who later became the fiction editor for Playboy), Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, James Dickey (and his son, Christopher), Pete Dexter and many others. Because traveling was distasteful and often physically problematic for O'Connor, many of these folks admired her work enough to come to her.

So, given that most of O'Connor's life was spent in rural Georgia, how in the hell did Gooch manage to make this book so interesting? Well he relied heavily on O'Connor's voluminous correspondence and personal papers, and he used these sources very well. He must have, because I was fascinated by this bio of the somewhat reclusive O'Connor. I need to get hold of her Collected Stories to reacquaint myself first hand with her work. If you are a devotee of Flannery O'Connor, then this book is a must-read. Highly recommended.

well-written - good distillation of her wrtings & letters - from Gr co

While Gooch's writing isn't the most eloquent, it is fine-ish. The portrait he offers of O'Connor feels complete and I feel as though I have a stronger understanding of O'Connor as both a writer and a person. the 4-stars are more a reflection on how i feel about getting to understand o'connor a bit more and not really a reflection of the quality of writing. if i were rating gooch's prose...1 1/2 stars. but, gooch had access to a lot of documentation and information about o'connor and even though his writing style is clunky, he does succeed in sharing o'connor with readers.

The life of Flannery O'Connor and the work she produced would be of interest to any fan of her. But Brad Hooch fails in his attempt to bring her life to the page. I say "fail" but mean "didn't even try". Read why here:

http://mewlhouse.hubpages.com/hub/Flannery-OConnor-Deserves-a-Better-Man

At times insightful, if you can get past Gooch's own experiences. If interested read the last 7 pages, then may be the book.

This book is a must for anyone, like me, who loves Flannery O'Connor's work. Her story is remarkable in that someone who lived such a circumscribed life was able to have such a lasting impact on literature. Because of the lupus that killed her at 36, Flannery lived most of her adult life as isolated as Emily Dickinson. Since she has a small body of work and her stories are often grotesque, she was a mysterious figure to me until I read this biography. Now I can read her stories and understand where they come from. Her devout Catholicism and her physical and mental isolation account in large part for the world of her stories. My only quibble with the biography is that it ends rather abruptly, with little discussion about how and why she is more important writer in death than she was in life. It occurred to me while reading this that first, I have been reading Flannery O'Connor for almost as long as she was alive and secondly, were she still alive she would be about the same age as the current greatest living short story writer, William Trevor. What wonders might she have produced had she lived!

The Great White Expanses between lines and the gigantic margins tip you off that this is not a "dense" book. I guess the reader is expected to take notes. Gooch's advice and chatter is akin to bar talk, three glasses of wine minimum. It's harmless stuff, but hardly anything one would expect of a middle-aged, mature gay man. Gooch tries, but his profound narcissism defeats him at every turn -- or mirror -- found in this book.

In the midst of re-reading _The Habit of Being _ (a collection of Flannery O'Connor's correspondence) and her stories & occasional writings, I happened on this recent biography at a bargain price. I was interested in filling in some of the gaps in the writer's life, and this bio was an opportunity to do that.

The chief strength of this biography is the way the author shows how Flannery O'Connor seized on details of her (relatively circumscribed) life and (chiefly literary) acquaintance for the genesis of many of her stories. The potential danger of this, which Gooch largely (although sometimes just barely) sidesteps, is that it may give the impression that O'Connor's fiction was largely a way to externalize and improve on the events and preoccupations of her personal life. Anyone who is already familiar with her stories will probably not be too disturbed by this treatment, but I think some readers of the biography who are not yet well-acquainted with O'Connor's fiction may have their reception of the stories, when they do eventually read them, tainted by the notion that the stories are all in some way "autobiographical." Caveat lector.

I suppose Gooch chose this way of recounting O'Connor's life, in part at least, because otherwise the biography would be a fairly bare tale (Flannery herself famously opined that no one would ever write the story of her life because it was so uneventful). By showing how personal details are reflected in her stories, the biographer manages to show that Flannery's imagination was so fertile that any small detail of her daily life could light a creative spark that she would fan into a blaze of glorious story-telling. Indeed, the account of her early years, for which Gooch depended on snippets of memories from people who knew her only slightly or from a distance, is the weakest part of the book, and the least sympathetic to the subject.

I would say that the weakness of the book, which will trouble many O'Connor devotees, is the fact that, while he clearly admires O'Connor as a writer, the biographer does not seem very sympathetic toward, or understanding of, the fundamental moral and theological wellsprings of her life and work. Since Flannery O'Connor repeatedly insisted that such was the absolute source of her creativity and the unswerving orientation of her life, it seems to me a significant weakness in a biography that the biographer has such a tenuous grasp on what really animated the life he is writing.

In the final analysis, I find this biography of Flannery O'Connor interesting, useful, but fundamentally flawed. I'm sorry that Sally Fitzgerald never finished her own biography of her friend's life, which would probably have given a much more sympathetic and understanding view, and which Brad Gooch mentions in his Acknowledgments as something that Fitzgerald worked on for many years but never completed. Nonetheless, I'm glad to have read Gooch's treatment of O'Connor's life, as it did what I had hoped, filling in the gaps left by _The Habit of Being_ and fleshing out some of the real-life characters who meant so much to her.

Loved this look into Flannery's world ... and the possible events that inspired/influenced her stories.

Flannery is a really well written biography. It made me want to go back and reread all Flannery O'Connor's short stories. The biography made me wish that I could have known her. I think that I would have liked her and I know that I admire the way she lived her short life.

I love Flannery O'Connor, but Icouldn't make it through FLANNERY. Just a bit too weedy for my tastes. Sorry.

See Joseph O'Neill's superb discussion, Touched by Evil," in Atlantic Monthly June 2009

Not knowing anything about Flannery O'Connor's life but having read some of her stories, I expected her to have a dark and twisted childhood; I'm happy to be wrong.

Gooch uses mountains of letters and interviews to get into O'Connor's short life from her birth and death in Georgia and all the other places in between. His approach is very "here are the facts--do with them as you will," and I liked how he didn't try to interpret the meaning behind her works as there seem to be enough other tomes that do that.

I now want to read the O'Connor novels I've missed and reread her stories and also delve into her prose and all the letters she wrote. Flannery O'Connor's story doesn't just end with this biography--it keeps on, and I think Gooch did an excellent job of telling it all while making the reader thirst for more.

I am not a huge fan of self-help books, but what Gooch says is true: in order to find love, you have to love yourself. He marches past the cliche with some solid writing and good examples, urging the reader to think about the things we do in pursuit of a mate and consider turning some of that energy inwards. Treat yourself the way you would a potential new boyfriend, he tells us, and you will be surprised how this can change your life for the better. The advice is old hat, but embraced as it is by Gooch's entertaining prose, it's charming and cozy as well.

I recommended this book to wordgirl2006 years ago and we periodically call each other to make sure each of us is setting aside time for "the boyfriend within." Sometimes when I have been neglecting the boyfriend within, I make myself a cup of hot chocolate, light some candles, and curl up in my favorite reading chair with Brad Gooch.½