Displaying news from 1 November 2006 to 1 December 2006.
i've been, for several years now, a fan of donald barthelme. his writing was introduced to me by trumpeter eli asher, when he read several passages from don b's short story the king of jazz. as one whose book-reading was always stratified, but usually abruptly cut short around page 100, barthelme's short stories were the perfect distillation of fiction. in fact, his style was so clean, so informed and so joyful, that i would often find myself bursting with laughter at a sentence like (i'm opening a book at random now,)
"When he came to look at the building, with a real-estate man hissing and oozing beside him, we lowered the blinds, muted or extinguished the lights, threw newspapers and dirty clothes on the floor in piles, burned rubber bands in ashtrays, and played Buxtehude on the hi-fi - shaking organ chords whose vibrations made the plaster falling from the ceiling fall faster."
phrases like "muted or extiguished the lights" still resonate with me. i want to bottle them, i want to give them away to people as gifts. i feel a warming over my heart - probably a jealous hatred in disguise: "how come I didn't think of it?!" - but warmth! like no other writer i've come across (leonard michaels, a close second).
his humor is literally stunning; his references (buxtehude's organ works have never seen such fame!) come from a sense of all-encompassing care with all subjects. john barth recalls an answer barthelme gave to a johns hopkins student who asked how to become a better writer: "for starters, read through the whole history of philosophy, from the pre-socratics up through the last semester. that might help." the student replied, "but coach barth has already advised us to read all of literature, from gilgamesh up through the last semester...."
"that too."
for a while i thought barthelme's work consisted of two books: sixty stories and forty stories... i was too entranced at first to notice that they were anthologies. i investigated the "also by donald barthelme" lists and found a wealth of work that had every bit of momentum i had hoped for. City Life, Guilty Pleasures, Overnight To Many Distant Cities, Amateurs, Great Days, Sadness, Unspeakable Practices Unnatural Acts, Come Back Dr. Caligari. these were the short story collections. there were the longer works of fiction: The Dead Father, Paradise, The King, Snow White, the posthumous anthologies: Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews, The Teachings of Don B.: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays. among a few others (all much harder to find, but out there nonetheless) there was a children's book. a book that won the national book award in 1972. The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine, or The Hithering Thithering Djinn. it was so hard to find in stores so jen and i went to check it out from the library. the copy in circulation was "lost" and so we sat in the childrens section of the NY Public Library and read the 'non-circulating' copy to each other. she found a copy for me last year and gave it to me for my birthday; it's one of my favorite books still.
i was playing soccer with some friends and some friends of friends this past summer and one mentioned working at Farrar Straus & Giroux (the publisher that, in the 60s and 70s put out an enourmous amount of near-perfect literature including works by leonard michaels, grace paley, susan sontag, and barthelme). i told her about barthelme's children's book and how unfortunate it is that it only exists in one edition (its first). i remembered working at barnes and noble, and constantly checking the seach engine to see if any barthelme was being put back into print, and i watched the store's collection grow from sixty stories, forty stories and snow white, to include paradise (an interesting choice in my opinion), the dead father, and the king. cut to yesterday, when, while doing my searches for nice copies of old DB (barthelme was the first fiction-writing author after milan kundera that made me want to invest in hard cover books with the thought of passing them down to my children one day) i discovered, quite by mistake, that the slightly irregular fire engine, or the hithering thithering djinn, was back in print, for the first time since the seventies.
for a more-or-less complete list of barthelme's published work, check this out.
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