There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.
From Kora in Hell: Improvisations by William Carlos Williams.
“At the End of the Mechanical Age”
by
Donald Barthelme
I went to the grocery store to buy some soap. I stood for a long time before the soaps in their attractive boxes, RUB and FAB and TUB and suchlike, I couldn’t decide so I closed my eyes and reached out blindly and when I opened my eyes I found her hand in mine.
Her name was Mrs. Davis, she said, and TUB was best for important cleaning experiences, in her opinion. So we went to lunch at a Mexican restaurant which as it happened she owned, she took me into the kitchen and showed me her stacks of handsome beige tortillas and the steam tables which were shiny-brite. I told her I wasn’t very good with women and she said it didn’t matter, few men were, and that nothing mattered, now that Jake was gone, but I would do as an interim project and sit down and have a Carta Blanca. So I sat down and had a cool Carta Blanca, God was standing in the basement reading the meters to see how much grace had been used up in the month of June. Grace is electricity, science has found, it is not like electricity, it is electricity and God was down in the basement reading the meters in His blue jump suit with the flashlight stuck in the back pocket.
“The mechanical age is drawing to a close,” I said to her.
“Or has already done so,” she replied.
“It was a good age,” I said. “I was comfortable in it, relatively. Probably I will not enjoy the age to come quite so much. I don’t like its look.”
“One must be fair. We don’t know yet what kind of an age the next one will be. Although I feel in my bones that it will be an age inimical to personal well-being and comfort, and that is what I like, personal well-being and comfort.”
“Do you suppose there is something to be done?” I asked her.
“Huddle and cling,” said Mrs. Davis. “We can huddle and cling. It will pall, of course, everything palls, in time…”
Then we went back to my house to huddle and cling, most women are two different colors when they remove their clothes especially in summer but Mrs. Davis was all one color, an ocher. She seemed to like huddling and clinging, she stayed for many days. From time to time she checked the restaurant keeping everything shiny-brite and distributing sums of money to the staff, returning with tortillas in sacks, cases of Carta Blanca, buckets of guacamole, but I paid her for it because I didn’t want to feel obligated.
There was a song I sang her, a song of great expectations.
“Ralph is coming,” I sang, “Ralph is striding in his suit of lights over moons and mountains, over parking lots and fountains, toward your silky side. Ralph is coming, he has a coat of many colors and all major credit cards and he is striding to meet you and culminate your foggy dreams in an explosion of blood and soil, at the end of the mechanical age. Ralph is coming preceded by fifty running men with spears and fifty dancing ladies who are throwing leaf spinach out of little baskets, in his path. Ralph is perfect,” I sang, “but he is also full of interesting tragic flaws, and he can drink fifty running men under the table without breaking his stride, and he can have congress with fifty dancing ladies without breaking his stride, even his socks are ironed, so natty is Ralph, but he is also right down in the mud with the rest of us, he markets the mud at high prices for specialized industrial uses and he is striding, striding, striding, toward your waiting heart. Of course you may not like him, some people are awfully picky… Ralph is coming,” I sang to her, “he is striding over dappled plains and crazy rivers and he will change your life for the better, probably you will be fainting with glee at the simple touch of his grave gentle grizzled hand although I am aware that some people can’t stand prosperity, Ralph is coming, I hear his hoofsteps on the drumhead of history, he is striding as he has been all his life toward you, you, you.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Davis said, when I had finished singing, “that is what I deserve, all right. But probably I will not get it. And in the meantime, there is you.”
God then rained for forty days and forty nights, when the water tore away the front of the house we got into the boat. Mrs. Davis liked the way I maneuvered the boat off the trailer and out of the garage, she was provoked into a memoir of Jake.
Continue reading “Read Donald Barthelme’s short story “At the End of the Mechanical Age””
Set list:
[Ed. note: The following citations come from one-star Amazon reviews of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. (See also: Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, George Orwell’s 1984, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, James Joyce’s Ulysses and David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress). I’ve preserved the reviewers’ own styles of punctuation and spelling].
the prejudice part was good
A classic american piece of caca
A court case is hardly a thrilling idea.
It mainly compared people to Mockingbirds
it was just like any other book, nothing special.
It uses unutterable words and displeasing language.
I’m not rascist at all, so don’t make that assumption either.
Worst book ever written, a disgrace to American Liturature
Well, at least it was in my own language. Otherwise, it sucked.
I reckon this be anoth’r classic that doesn’t deserve that status.
I don’t like these kinds of books anyway, but I was assigned to read it! Yuk!
Simply put, this is a novel about racism written for people who received their knowledge about racism from this book!
If people would just leave old prejudices to heal themselves, it would all be better, and best of all, this book wouldn’t exist
In 1960 Harper Lee published To Kill A Mockingbird. About thrity years earlier William Faulkner had published the short story Dry September. ITS THE SAME STORY.
Although the author had some good points, I must say that this book sucked a big fat one star. I thought it was horribly thought out and it was considerably a snoozer. I seriously feel asleep readin this
I could write a novel that had notecard characters–even the narrator seemed a little hollow, and Boo Radley was just deus ex machina with a clever, sleepy-southern-town name–and no one would care.
this novel features the archetypal White hero with few flaws, his perfect children, the maid with just the right amount of “colored wisdom,” a black amn who is little more than a dullard, and the evil redneck who actually commited the crime!
It’s an uneven paste-job of short stories and pieces by Harper Lee promoted by her liberal New York publishing friends.
It is a very interesting and great book!!!!! I expecially liked how they talked of people standing up for what is right!! NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I kept hoping that they would get to the point and give me some instructions, but I still don’t know how to kill a mockingbird.
Thanks to all my friends who had to tourchure threw reading this disgrace and supporting me in not likeing the book.
Who really cares about a little girl that goes around the neighborhood doing things like spying on her albino neighbor.
Dissgusting beyond belief. Harper Lee owes an apology to untold numbers of girs, women, and families.
The rednecks are evil, the blacks are victims, and the self-righteous Atticus is too good to be true.
In a just world Harper Lee and her acolytes would be forced to live in the Hell the helped create.
i know slavery was bad and judging blacks and all that is bad but like come on were over it
By the way, DO NOT BUY, because if i find it in your house i won’t think to kindly of you.
All the book consists of is a middle-class family in the south with a few weird neighbors.
Scout and her brother, Jem, grow up while some wierd stuff happens all around them.
the charecters were poorly developed and obviously fake
no excimet in besides when it was in the court spot
I find no point in writing a book about segregation
I don’t see why this book is so fabeulos.
This book is very nasty
SUGAR.
by Gertrude Stein
A violent luck and a whole sample and even then quiet.
Water is squeezing, water is almost squeezing on lard. Water, water is a mountain and it is selected and it is so practical that there is no use in money. A mind under is exact and so it is necessary to have a mouth and eye glasses.
A question of sudden rises and more time than awfulness is so easy and shady. There is precisely that noise.
A peck a small piece not privately overseen, not at all not a slice, not at all crestfallen and open, not at all mounting and chaining and evenly surpassing, all the bidding comes to tea.
A separation is not tightly in worsted and sauce, it is so kept well and sectionally.
Put it in the stew, put it to shame. A little slight shadow and a solid fine furnace.
The teasing is tender and trying and thoughtful.
The line which sets sprinkling to be a remedy is beside the best cold.
A puzzle, a monster puzzle, a heavy choking, a neglected Tuesday.
Wet crossing and a likeness, any likeness, a likeness has blisters, it has that and teeth, it has the staggering blindly and a little green, any little green is ordinary.
One, two and one, two, nine, second and five and that.
A blaze, a search in between, a cow, only any wet place, only this tune.
Cut a gas jet uglier and then pierce pierce in between the next and negligence. Choose the rate to pay and pet pet very much. A collection of all around, a signal poison, a lack of languor and more hurts at ease.
A white bird, a colored mine, a mixed orange, a dog.
Cuddling comes in continuing a change.
A piece of separate outstanding rushing is so blind with open delicacy.
A canoe is orderly. A period is solemn. A cow is accepted.
A nice old chain is widening, it is absent, it is laid by.
Biblioklept 