read the donald barthelme syllabus

Because I know damn well already that I can’t get through Beckett, besides Waiting for Godot, and life is just too short… however, I recognize this list as a really solid summation of a lot of the recommendations I’ve heard over the years from good writers and teachers of writing, so I’m going to go ahead and adopt this as a goal and get through as much of it as I can. I can’t afford to go get an MFA. Maybe reading this list will be the poor-man’s MFA for me.

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.

i was having a crummy night a few nights ago, so i sat around and used the list site to set up the syllabus properly. it took forever (so many out of print books!), but i guess it will be useful. in a few instances, i took some liberties, since it’s really up to the individual to consider how many pushcart prize anthologies they really need to read, for example.

if anyone else with this goal uses those lists, come on and use mine. i’ll feel all purposeful then.

Stole this list from Amy from Luton. Thank you. What a great list. Did Donald Barthelme give this out at some course he taught? Where did this come from? Here’s the list (green, I own; blue, I’ve read previously; red, I’ve read since starting):

1. At Swim Two Birds – Flann O’Brien

2. The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien

3. Collected Short Stories – Isaac Babel

4. Labyrinths – Borges
5. Other Inquisitions – Borges
6. One Hundred Years Of Solitude – Garcia Marquez
7. Correction – Thomas Bernhard
8. Nog – Rudy Wurlitzer
9. Gimpel The Fool – Isaac B. Singer

10. The Assistant – Bernard Malamud

11. The Magic Barrel – Bernard Malamud

12. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison

13. Under The Volcano – Malcom Lowry
14. Entire – Samuel Beckett
15. Hunger – Knut Hamsun

16. I’m Not Stiller – Max Frisch

17. Man In The Holocene – Max Frisch

18. Seven Gothic Tales – Dinesen
19. Gogol’s Wife – Tommaso Landolfi
20. V – Thomas Pynchon
21. The Lime Twig – John Hawkes

22. Blood Oranges – John Hawkes

23. Little Disturbances Of Man – Grace Paley

24. I, Etc., – Susan Sontag

25. Tell Me A Riddle – Tillie Olson

26. Hero With A Thousand Faces – Campbell

27. Henderson The Rain King – Bellow

28. The Coup – John Updike

29. Rabbit, Run – John Updike
30. The Paris Review Interviews – Various
31. How We Live – ed, Rust Hills
32. Superfiction – ed, Joe David Bellamy
33. Pushcart Prize Anthologies (no specific years given!)
The Pushcart Prize V

The Pushcart Prize IX

The Pushcart Prize XXV
34. The Writer On Her Work – ed, Sternburg
35. Manifestos Of Surrealism – Andre Breton
36. Documents Of Modern Art – ed, Motherwell
37. Against Interpretation – Susan Sontag
38. A Homemade World – Hugh Kenner
39. Letters – Flaubert
40. Sexual Perversity In Chicago – Mamet
41. The Changeling – Joy Williams
42. The New Fiction – ed, Joe David Bellamy
43. Going After Cacciato -Tim O’Brien

44. The Palm-Wine Drunkard – Amos Tutola

45. Searching For Caleb – Ann Tyler
46. Thank You – Kenneth Koch
47. Collected Poems – Frank O’Hara
48. Rivers And Mountains – John Ashbery
49. Tragic Magic – Wesley Brown
50. Mythologies – Roland Barthes
51. The Pleasure Of The Text – Barthes
52. For A New Novel – Robbe-Grillet

53. Falling In Place – Ann Beattie

54. In The Heart Of The Heart Of The Country – William Gass

55. Fiction And The Figures Of Life – Gass

56. The World Within The Word – Gass

57. Advertisements For Myself – Mailer

58. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

59. Journey To The End Of The Night – Celine
60. The Box Man – Kobo Abe
61. Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino

62. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams – Peter Handke

63. Kaspar And Other Plays – Peter Handke
64. Nadja – Andre Breton
65. Chimera – John Barth
66. Lost In The Funhouse – John Barth
67. The Moviegoer – Walker Percy

68. Black Tickets – Jayne Anne Phillips

69. Collected Stories – Peter Taylor

70. The Pure And The Impure – Colette
71. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please – Carver
72. Collected Stories – John Cheever
73. I Would Have Saved Them If I Could – Leonard Michaels
74. Collected Stories – Eudora Welty
75. The Oranging Of America – Max Apple
76. Collected Stories – Flannery O’Connor
77. Mumbo Jumbo – Ishmael Reed

78. Song Of Solomon – Toni Morrison

79. The Death Of Artemio Cruz – Carlos Fuentes

80. The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting – Milan Kundera

81. The Rhetoric Of Fiction – Wayne C. Booth

P.S. The lists must stop!

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.

today i finished #71:
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please by Carver.

i liked everything about this book except for how it made me feel. reading it first thing in the morning really sets you in a funny mood for the day.

4 down, 77 to go.

today i finished #58:
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.

“Well, well, well. If it isn’t fat, stinking billygoat Billyboy in poison. How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you’ve got any yarbles that is, you eunuch jelly thou!”

this is another that has been sitting on my shelves for an embarassingly long time without being read. i’m glad i was spurred into reading it – it was amazing. one of my favourites that i’ve read since beginning these book lists.

3 down, 78 to go.