read the donald barthelme syllabus

i think one of the effects of reading this list is that it makes a huge chunk of 20th-century lit suddenly read a lot like donald barthelme. certainly that’s the impression i got when i got to the bit where the cowboys who’d escaped from a western novel were hanging around the dublin trams in this. like oh, huh. this reads a lot like barthelme!

i think this was his secret motivation in compiling it, obviously, to amophously absorb all this work to his own name. fucker.

4 d.; 77 t. g. -

less experimental than i’d expected: the only other of his i’d read was willie masters’s lonesome wife, which i read huddled in the stacks of the library to avoid the embarrassment of taking it to the counter.

eh, okay, it was okay, okay, i’m too tired to think, okay? okay.

3 down, 78 to go. (i’m not counting ones i read before this year. it seems purer, somehow.)

2 down, 79 to go.

well i have to admit i like koch less than i was hoping. because i’d come to o’hara and ashbery first i can’t help seeing a bit too much of them in him, maybe, and also a bit of donald barthelme himself, because of who wrote the list – but seriously ‘the artist’ could be one of his stories. it could be ‘dogs falling’, for example, although that might not be the actual title of that story: i mean the one about dogs falling. also because the gilbert sorrentino novel i just read mocked 60s free verse conventions a whole lot i couldn’t help it coming to mind. which is a pity. i found any poem with the word ‘love’ occurring in it more than twice was largely unreadable. that said, i have now ended up getting a buncha other poetry books out. ‘read more poetry’ might make a thing. or ‘look at more pictures’.

about two stanzas from my favorite of these poems, ‘lunch’:

Genoa! a stone’s throw from Acapulco
If an engine were built strong enough,
And down where the hulls and scungilli,
Glisteningly unconscious, agree,
I throw a game of shoes with Horace Sturnbul
And forget to eat lunch.

O launch, lunch, you dazzling hoary tunnel
To paradise!

(...)

And the lunchboat has arrived
From Spain.
Everyone getting sick is on it;
The bold people and the sadists are on it;
I am glad I am not on it,
I am having a big claw of garlic for lunch –
But it plucks me up in the air,
And there, above the ship, on a cloud
I see the angels eating lunch.
One has a beard, another a moustache,
And one has some mustard smeared on his ears.
A couple of them ask me if I want to go to Honolulu,
And I accept – it’s all right –
Another time zone: we’ll be able to have lunch.

well, let’s see. i have read, or in one case am reading:

1. At Swim Two Birds – Flann O’Brien
2. The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien
4. Labyrinths – Borges
– well, sort of. well, not really. i think i’ve read all the pieces within it, though. but i have wanted an excuse to buy a copy for a while.
6. One Hundred Years Of Solitude – Garcia Marquez
14. Entire – Samuel Beckett
– okay not really but i hope i had you going for a second there, huh, hey.
20. V – Thomas Pynchon
43. Going After Cacciato – Tim O’Brien
47. Collected Poems – Frank O’Hara
– well okay i haven’t read all of it from front to back ever.
50. Mythologies – Roland Barthes
58. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
60. The Box Man – Kobo Abe
– god, this is a great book. two characters have an argument, at one point, over which of them is in fact the narrator. bizarrely fond of kobo abe: andrea dworkin. well, she was.
66. Lost In The Funhouse – John Barth
71. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please – Carver
– insofar as pretty much all of it is in ‘where i’m calling from’, and insofar as i have no desire currently to read any more carver like ever.
77. Mumbo Jumbo – Ishmael Reed
– i think. is this the one with “Jes’ Grew”? daniel lippard has my copy, god damn him.
81. The Rhetoric Of Fiction – Wayne C. Booth

leaving me with, by my count, somewhere from sixty-six to seventy more, depending on how many of my bets i’m allowed to hedge.

i started reading wayne booth’s ‘the rhetoric of fiction’ today, allegedly as something to do with a paper i am theoretically writing on ulysses. i’ve actually been looking for an excuse to for two years, which is a little sad. here is a nice footnote of wayne booth’s, regarding james joyce:

”..but there have been other similarly subtle invitations to the decoding expert, ranging from the mosy solemn symbolic patternings to the playfulness of Joyce’s Noel greeting, “End a muddy crushness,” or the cry of his polygamist from his “bethel of Solyman’s,” “Brimgem young, bringem young, bringem young!”^{1^}

1^Finnegans Wake (Compass Books ed., 1959), pp. 534, 542. The novel was first published in 1939, though fragments of Work in Progress appeared throughout the preceding decade. If I dropped the point here I could no doubt leave some readers convinced that I have read Finnegans Wake. But I must confess that I have not; I do read in it, from time to time, with great delight until boredom sets in. Will someone, by the way, someone who has read this unreadable work, tell me whether that first “m” in the first “brimgem” is a typographical error? You don’t know? Or care? We are in trouble, you and I.”

- wayne booth, the rhetoric of fiction, 1983 (1961), university of chicago press ltd., london.

(university of chicago press, london? i can’t pretend to understand how this makes sense.)

i see i have been “cheered” in this goal of mine. also i see someone i don’t know in real life has picked up on it, which is strangely heartening. hullo, whoever-you-are, if you’re reading.