John Ross Bowie

John Ross Bowie Instagram – Jesus Christ, this week.
In college, Professor DeAbruna assigned us the Floating Opera in Contemporary Fiction and the passage below rocked my foundations like a sort of literary vertigo. i’ve only read a couple of things by him… The only denser writer is maybe Pynchon or DeLillo but man he could work magic… RIP John Barth.
“So. Todd Andrews is my name. You can spell it with one or two d’s; I get letters addressed either way. I almost warned you against the single-d, for fear you’d say, ‘Tod is German for death: perhaps the name is symbolic.’ I myself use two d’s, partly in order to avoid that symbolism. But you see, I ended by not warning you at all, and that’s because it just occurred to me that the double-d Todd is symbolic, too, and accurately so. Tod is death, and this book hasn’t much to do with death; Todd is almost Tod—that is, almost death—and this book, if it gets written, has very much to do with almost-death.” | Posted on 04/Apr/2024 02:54:32