ANNOUNCEMENT - Losing Friends, Influencing No One: Exploring The Life And Work of William Gaddis

A whole new project alongside my usual ramblings

Hi, thank you to everyone who has kept up with the RealityOnToast blog over the last few years. Your support really means a great deal to me and I shall always remain greatly appreciative.

I have spent the past year of my life immersed in the literature of the American post-WW2 novelist, William Gaddis. It has been a journey that has brought me a tremendous amount of joy, and now I am hoping to inflict that joy onto any of you who’ll do me the honour of listening. Today, I am unveiling the start of a new side project:

Losing Friends, Influencing No One: Exploring the life of William Gaddis

This will be running alongside my usual output but will be a much more intensive project. We will be taking a look at each of Gaddis’s five novels and taking them apart piece by piece, section by section, in a kind of pseudo-book club style. Of course there is no obligation to read the novels yourself but to provide those of you brave enough to attempt it with a companion. The aim is to create a space in which we can better understand one of the great literary minds of the last century, access the novels easier than through the brick wall of (WONDERFUL!!!) annotations online, and to broaden our understanding of literature as a whole.

What all of this means in a practical sense is that I will be releasing the work here [on Substack], for free, under the banner of, Losing Friends, Influencing No One. I will also be branching out into video content to YouTube at a later date. For the hardcore, however, I have started a Patreon account which, for $5 a month will get you access to all of my research material, provide you with work-in-progress updates, and will allow you to chat directly to me about the work. This is primarily to offset how time consuming a project of this magnitude will be. Paid subscription will not be mandatory to anyone. I will be keeping the main material free. The Patreon is for people who would like to help me out and who would want a little more.

I hope you will be willing to join me soon as we discuss just who William Gaddis is, and how it is we got to his masterwork: The Recognitions (1955)

Ryan Sweeney (@TheCautiousCrip/Insta: TeaWithZizek)

If you want to support this project on Patreon, here’s the link: https://patreon.com/RealityOnToast?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink