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i have been reading
the teachings of don b., which titular reference i didn't get, actually, until i read the titular piece. which was funny, in a way, if not in other ways. like lots of the pieces here it seems like it could have been written by many other new yorker contributors. like, for instance, 'wasteland!', in which lionel bart adapts t.s. eliot, could easily be in that anthology of woody allen's light prose. and probably would be funnier, there.
that said there's a lot that is unmistakably barthelme-ish, and lots that i would not have said was "unmistakably barthelme-ish" had it been described to me, but having read it certainly is, like his terrifying, terrifying recipes, which seem to be approaching a point we might call "take 12 dozen campbell's soup cans..."
barthelme seems to improve with more barthelme.
i would quite like to make a mission of reading the barthelme syllabus. is there anyone here that would join me in that? i do mean syllabus and not corpus, i mean the 81-book thing.
i am stalled on the teachings right now because i have got to six "interchapters" from overnight to many distant cities. i am not entirely certain as to the identity of an 'interchapter', but i fear that reading six of them in a row is to frustrate their purpose.
― tom west (thomp), Friday, 10 February 2006 15:47 (eighteen years ago) link
im reading 60 stories, i think i dont like it, i think i might like it, it reminds me of updike and kafka
― Anthony Easton, Wednesday, 15 February 2006 11:22 (eighteen years ago) link
are the bits that remind you of updike generally separate from the bits that remind you of kafka, or is it not that clear-cut?
― tom west (thomp), Wednesday, 15 February 2006 11:27 (eighteen years ago) link
i'll start a thread when i get fifty percent through philip k dick.
did the order i made on yr label show up alright? i realised the other day i didn't know if paypal gave you my address or not
― tom west (thomp), Saturday, 18 February 2006 18:21 (eighteen years ago) link
No, no it did not! Let me investigate.
[doodlydoodlydoodly]
OMG! There are a few orders I had no idea about! Crap!
― Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 18 February 2006 19:07 (eighteen years ago) link
eep.
is there one through from my displayed email address's paypal account? it should have a delivery address in staffordshire, uk; if this isn't how things are could you email me at um t0m.w3st@gm41l.com, only, you know, with proper letters? hope that's not too much of a pig's ear and so forth
― tom west (thomp), Saturday, 18 February 2006 19:52 (eighteen years ago) link
sixteen years pass...
from the Forgotten Novelists thread:
Barthelme's "Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning" was a revelation to teen me: each paragraph was like, a scene, man, but of what and from what it was up to me to decide, also how much it mattered, since I also had the impression of index cards as playing cards. Wrote something like that, deliberately on my teen level, about a girl I knew, to an extent.
Dave Hickey wrote about DB's Come Back, Dr. Caligari as a crucial breakthrough for his own writing---not, alas, his fiction, which he was already fleeing (this is the afterword to his remarkable Prior Convictions: Stories From The Sixties).
So now I want to read that one, at least. Some of the later DB stories I came across seemed like scenic routes to Dad jokes, but will keep an eye out for whatever.
― dow, Saturday, 1 October 2022
"RKSVD" was published in an early issue of New American Review, the redoutable mass market pb lit mag (b.1967-d.1977).
― dow, Wednesday, 9 November 2022 17:52 (one year ago) link