Salome with the Head of John the Baptist — Juan de Flandes

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Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, c. 1496 by Juan de Flandes (c. 1460–1519)

Read “What a Thought,” a short story by Shirley Jackson

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“What a Thought”

by

Shirley Jackson

Dinner had been good. Margaret sat with her book on her lap and watched her husband digesting, an operation to which he always gave much time and thought. As she watched he put his cigar down without looking and used his free hand to turn the page of his paper. Margaret found herself thinking with some pride that unlike many men she had heard about, her husband did not fall asleep after a particularly good dinner.

She flipped the pages of her book idly; it was not interesting. She knew that if she asked her husband to take her to a movie, or out for a ride, or to play gin rummy, he would smile at her and agree; he was always willing to do things to please her, still, after ten years of marriage. An odd thought crossed her mind: she would pick up the heavy glass ashtray and smash her husband over the head with it.

“Like to go to a movie?” her husband asked.

“I don’t think so, thanks,” Margaret said. “Why?”

“You look sort of bored,” her husband said.

“Were you watching me?” Margaret asked. “I thought you were reading.”

“Just looked at you for a minute.” He smiled at her, the smile of a man who is still, after ten years of marriage, very fond of his wife.

The idea of smashing the glass ashtray over her husband’s head had never before occurred to Margaret, but now it would not leave her mind. She stirred uneasily in her chair, thinking: what a terrible thought to have, whatever made me think of such a thing? Probably a perverted affectionate gesture, and she laughed. Continue reading “Read “What a Thought,” a short story by Shirley Jackson” →

22 Nov. 2024

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Bought some books today, mass-market paperbacks by Barry N. Malzberg and Walter M. Miller, Jr. I don’t need them and honestly my eyes are so bad by now that I probably couldn’t make it through one—I’ll have to find them online probably. But they were so cheap and such a cheap indulgence and so lovely as objects.

I’ve only ever come across two Walter M. Miller Jr. books: A Canticle for Leibowitz, a fantastic post-apocalyptic western theodicy, and its sequel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, which, for whatever reasons, I’ve chosen to abstain from reading. His 1965 novel The View from the Stars looks fairly generic but I picked it up anyway. I also picked up Barry N. Malzberg’s The Destruction of the Temple, simply because it looks so goofy. I listened to an audiobook of his 1975 novel Galaxies earlier this year. It wasn’t very good, but it was also fascinating, a metatextual mess dripping with anxiety about/against the “legit” lit of Barthelme, Barth, Pynchon, et al. I found pirated copies of two “erotic” novels he wrote under the pseudonym Gerrold Watkins, 1969’s Southern Comfort and 1970’s A Satyr’s Romance. Both were better than Galaxies, and not nearly as horny as, say, Robert Coover’s pornographies. Southern Comfort is actually a pretty good novel. (I mean it’s also, like, very deeply problematic in many ways, but those are the same ways that maybe makes it so more interesting than so-called “legit” so-called “literary” fiction.)

As a weird bit of chaotic (serendipity is not the right word) coincidence, The Destruction of the Temple features this blurb/description:

The year is 2016, and President Kennedy is being murdered – again and again and again. The director has come to the charred ruins of New York to re-enact a mad dream from the past – the assassination of President Kennedy.

JFK was assassinated 22 Nov. 1963, of course, sixty years ago today.

Donald Barthelme’s Forty Stories in reverse, Part III

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Previously,

Stories 40-36

Stories 35-32

31. “Sakrete” (first published in The New Yorker, 25 Sep. 1983)

“Sakrete” is a silly little domestic riff about garbage can theft, rats, and an alcoholic trying to work with concrete. It’s not a very good story and I have no idea why it was included in Forty Stories. I do like that it shows a general respect for garbage cans and garbage collection (very interested parties should check out Stephen Dixon’s excellent novel Garbage). Here is the last paragraph, the highlight of the story:

 There are now no garbage cans on our street—no garbage cans left to steal. A committee of rats has joined with the Special Provisional committee in order to deal with the situation, which, the rats have made known, is attracting unwelcome rat elements from other areas of the city. Members of the two committees exchange secret grips, grips that I know not of. My wife drives groups of rats here and there in her yellow Pontiac convertible, attending important meetings. The crisis, she says, will be a long one. She has never been happier.

30. “Porcupines At The University” (Amateurs, 1976)

Another trifle—am I regretting this project, this rereading of Forty Stories? The stories in Sixty Stories are so, so much stronger—and those stories were organized chronologically. Going backwards through these is not really going backwards through time, through the artist’s anti-maturation, but rather just, like, making it more difficult to find one’s place in a book. “Porcupines” is a goof on academia that — and I say this as a compliment — at best reads like an alcoholic’s surrealist riff on a college film. Skip it!

29. “The Catechist” (Sadness , 1972)

This is a good story, “The Catechist.” But also a very Catholic one, without being, like, small-c catholic. There’s a bit of narrativizing here that Barthelme would eventually dispense with in his dialogues, the form that he would eventually settle on for his short stories. I say “settle on” but Barthelme died quite young, or, it seems to me, at 45, quite young—dying at 58. Barthelme died from throat cancer, probably a result of his alcoholism (pure conjecture on my part, this last clause):

The catechist reads from his book. “The candidate should be questioned as to his motives for becoming a Christian.”
I think: My motives?
He says: “Tell me about yourself.”
I say: “I’m forty. I have bad eyes. An enlarged liver.”
“That’s the alcohol,” he says.
“Yes,” I say.
“You’re very much like your father, there.”
“A shade more avid.”

28. “Lightning” (Overnight to Many Distant Cities, 1983)

This is a great story. Or at least a very good story, unexpectedly so, written a mode approaching near-realism or even near-dirty-realism. Was Barthelme flexing his muscles in the mirror after having read a story by Raymond Carver? Probably not, but I like to imagine it (I imagine his muscles beefier and musclier than they likely were). “Lightning” has a fairly straightforward ( and unBarthelemesque) plot:

Edward Connors, on assignment for Folks, set out to interview nine people who had been struck by lightning. “Nine?” he said to his editor, Penfield. “Nine, ten,” said Penfield, “doesn’t matter, but it has to be more than eight.” “Why?” asked Connors, and Penfield said that the layout was scheduled for five pages and they wanted at least two people who had been struck by lightning per page plus somebody pretty sensational for the opening page. “Slightly wonderful,” said Penfield, “nice body, I don’t have to tell you, somebody with a special face. Also, struck by lightning.”

The story is ultimately a romantic comedy, with reporter Edward finally finding his “face”:

People would dig slant wells for this woman, go out into a producing field with a tank truck in the dead of night and take off five thousand gallons of somebody else’s crude, write fanciful checks, establish Pyramid Clubs with tony marble-and-gold headquarters on Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse. What did he have to offer?

He finds something to offer. This is probably the best one yet in Forty Stories (in reverse, anyway).

19 Nov. 2024 (Blog about missing GY!BE and Alan Sparhawk this weekend in Atlanta)

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This is Friday—not today, I mean, this, this blog, is Friday, four or five days ago, depending on how you count such things. We were maybe fifteen or twenty minutes on the road heading northwest to Atlanta—my wife driving the first leg before we stopped for gas—when I checked social media again to see if Godspeed You! Black Emperor were still going to play that night. They were not. This information came via opener Low legend Alan Sparhawk, who had reported the past two nights’ shows canceled.

We headed north anyway. The kids had left school early; my daughter pointed out that she had already missed an AP Bio test and that she wasn’t going with me and the boy to the show anyway, she just wanted to go to Atlanta to hang out. Fair point, of course.

My son was bummed and I was bummed. I don’t know exactly how he came to Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s strange, hypnotic, droney anthems—via an algorithm, really—but a few years ago I heard him blasting Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven in his bedroom. I gave him my copy of their debut LP, F♯ A♯ ∞, which I’d bought from the band back in 1998 or 1999 when they opened for Low at a record story I was working at in Florida. They knocked our socks off. It seemed there were more Godspeeds Yous than audience members, and to be clear, the tiny record store was packed. It was a summer afternoon in Florida; very hot and very sunny, a throbbing miasma of sound across Hemming Park, now James Weldon Johnson Park, in beautiful ugly downtown Jacksonville.

(It was just such a night my friend Travis was arrested for skateboarding across Laura Street. Jayskating. (I don’t think it was the same night.))

After the show I bought their record. It had a pouch crammed with incidentals—flattened pennies, a Canadian stamp, some illustrated scraps. I think I listened to it a million times that summer. One of the guys in the band asked me where they could get some hash in Jacksonville. I suggested the Waffle House. Low played after; everyone sat down, exhausted from what Godspeed had required. It was lovely. Perfect day.

I had really wanted to experience my imaginative inversion of this concert this past weekend, but it didn’t emerge. I mean Alan Sparhawk, whose new record is so strange and daring and wonderful—I wanted to see that with my kid, who, he, my kid, wanted to see the ensemble Godspeed do their drone magic. I bought him an Aphex Twin record at Wax n’ Facts as a consolation prize, and he bought himself the first volume of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira at A Capella Books. I picked up a first edition hardback of William Gaddis’s last novel Agapē Agape.

And so well we made a weekend of it, browsing book stores and record stores and walking the Beltline. Love that city and my best wishes to GY!BE founding member, Efrim Menuck—I hate that we missed you on the tour but I hope that your health recovers. Thank you for making music my son and I love. 

 

Mass-market Monday | Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means

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The Girls of Slender Means, Muriel Spark. Penguin Books (1966). Cover photograph by Robert Croxford. 142 pages.

From a thing a wrote back in 2020:

Slender Means unself-consciously employs postmodern techniques to paint a vibrant picture of what the End of the War might feel like. The climax coincides with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the title takes on a whole new meaning, and the whole thing unexpectedly ends in a negative religious epiphany.

Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste (Book acquired, 14 Nov. 2024)

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Got a review copy of Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, a slim lil fellow from NYRB in translation by Charlotte Mandell. The back cover includes a blurb from William H. Gass—

Monsieur Teste is a monster, and is meant to be—an awesome, wholly individualized machine—yet in a sense he is also the sort of inhuman being Valéry aimed to become himself: a Narcissus of the best kind, a scientific observer of consciousness, a man untroubled by inroads of worldly trivia, who vacations in his head the way a Platonist finds his Florida in the realm of Forms.

What the fuck does Gass mean by “Florida” here? I really want to know.

This style of post, the book acquired post, is an established, which is to say tired, blog post format on this blog, Biblioklept, probably going back a decade now, born from a glut of review copies piling up, mostly unasked for but many asked for, books that stack up their own measures of guilt, unread, or then maybe read, months, years later—but the post style is ephemeral, yes, fluffy, sure, embarrassing even maybe. The form is stale; I apologize. I do think the Valéry book seems pretty cool.

I have a not-insubstantial stack of newly acquired new (and used books) stacked on the cherry side table by the black leather couch that I should have made book acquired posts about. These have piled up over the last few weeks. These are not interesting sentences (several of the books seem very interesting).

I am not going to find the new form I want here, am I?

When I was a freshman in high school, my then-girlfriend’s older brother gave me a mixtape that a girl had given him. He didn’t like anything on the mixtape; he liked Buddy Holly. I can’t remember why he gave me the tape—I think I saw it in his car and asked about it. But it ended up changing my life in some ways, as small giant things like songs or books or films can do when they come over you at the right time and place.

There were a few bands on the tape that I knew or had heard of, and even some I owned albums by, like the Cure and the Smiths. But for the most part, the tape opened a new aural world to me. I heard My Bloody Valentine, Big Star, Ride, the Cocteau Twins, and This Mortal Coil, among others, for the first time. There were also two songs by one band: Slowdive’s “When the Sun Hits” and “Dagger.”

(This particular blog post is no longer about acquiring a Valéry translation; it is about something else.)

Those songs are from Slowdive’s 1993 classic Souvlaki. I owned it on cassette. That cassette melted, just slightly, on the top of my 1985 Camry’s dashboard in like August of 1995. The tape was just warped enough not to fit into a cassette deck. I liked to imagine how it would sound. The next year, my lucky privileged ass found a used CD of Slowdive’s follow-up, Pygmallion on a school trip to London. Slowdive kinda sorta broke up after that.

I have always been a proponent of bands breaking up. I think a decade is long enough; get what you need done in five or six albums and move on. There are many many exceptions to this rule. But generally, I don’t think beloved bands—by which I means bands beloved by me—should keep going on too long. And if they break up, they should stay broken.

But I bought Slowdive’s 2017 reunion album Slowdive used at a St. Petersburg record store and listened to it again and again, amazed at how strong it was, how true to form. My kids liked it a lot. And then they put out a record last year, Everything Is Alive—I like that one too (not as good as the self titled one).

(There’s no point to any of this; I might’ve had some wine; I might just feel like writing.)

I guess if you’d told me back in ’95 or ’05 or even ’15 that I’d see a reunited Slowdive twice in one year I’d say that that sounded silly. (The ’15 version of me that had seen Dinosaur Jr.’s dinosaur act wouldn’t have been interested.) But we went out into the woods to see Slowdive this Sunday. They played the St. Augustine Amphitheatre to a large, strange, diverse crowd, out there in the Florida air. A band named Wisp, TikTok famous I’m told, opened, and they were pretty good. But Slowdive was perfect—better than back in May in Atlanta—echo and reverb ringing out into Anastasia State Park.

We stayed in a cheap motel off of AIA that night—another sign of my age. When I was younger, I could drive six hours, watch a band, and drive the six hours back without blinking. We are about 45 minutes from St. Augustine. It was a nice night out.

A younger version of me could’ve read the 80 pages of Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste in the time it took to twiddle my thumbs in this post and write a real (and likely bad) review to boot. Again, apologies. I’m getting old, a dinosaur act. But I can’t break up, not now.

Slowdive, St. Augustine Amphitheatre, 10 Nov. 2024 Slowdive, St. Augustine Amphitheatre, 10 Nov. 2024

Curtain or Vision — Remedios Varo

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Curtain or Vision, 1959 by Remedios Varo (1908-1963)

Read “A Sudden Story,” a very short tale by Robert Coover

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“A Sudden Story” by Robert Coover
Once upon a time, suddenly, while it still could, the story began. For the hero, setting forth, there was of course nothing sudden about it, neither about the setting forth, which he’d spent his entire lifetime anticipating, nor about any conceivable endings, which seemed, like the horizon, to be always somewhere else. For the dragon, however, who was stupid, everything was sudden. He was suddenly hungry and then he was suddenly eating something. Always, it was like the first time. Then, all of a sudden, he’d remember having eaten something like that before: a certain familiar sourness… And, just as suddenly, he’d forger. The hero, coming suddenly upon the dragon (he’d been trekking for years through enchanted forests, endless deserts, cities carbonized by dragonbreath, for him “suddenly” was not exactly the word), found himself envying, as he drew his sword (a possible ending had just loomed up before him, as though the horizon had, with the desperate illusion of suddenness, tipped), the dragon’s tenseless freedom. Freedom? the dragon might have asked, had he not been so stupid, chewing over meanwhile the sudden familiar sourness (a memory… ?) on his breath. From what? (Forgotten.)

Reading — Ernest Haskell

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Reading, c. 1914 by Ernest Haskell (1876-1925)

Mass-market Monday | Miguel de Unamuno’s Abel Sanchez and Other Stories

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Abel Sanchez and Other Stories, Miguel de Unamuno. Translated by Anthony Kerrigan. Regnery Gateway (1956). No cover designer or artist credited; cover image credited to the Bettman Archive. 267 pages.

I wrote a bit about the collection back in February:

A few weeks ago, I picked up Anthony Kerrigan’s translation of Miguel de Unamuno’s Abel Sanchez and Other Stories based on its cover and the blurb on its back. I wound up reading the shortest of the three tales, “The Madness of Dr. Montarco,” that night. The story’s plot is somewhat simple: A doctor moves to a new town and resumes his bad habit of writing fiction. He slowly goes insane as his readers (and patients) query him about the meaning of his stories, and he’s eventually committed to an asylum. The tale’s style evokes Edgar Allan Poe’s paranoia and finds an echo in Roberto Bolaño’s horror/comedy fits. The novella that makes up the bulk of the collection is Abel Sanchez, a Cain-Abel story that features one of literature’s greatest haters, a doctor named Joaquin who grows to hate his figurative brother, the painter Abel. Sad and funny, this 1917 novella feels contemporary with Kafka and points towards the existentialist novels of Albert Camus. (I’m saving the last tale, “Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr,” for a later day.)

7 Nov. 2024

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On 5 Nov. 2024, or, really, technically, it was the very early hours of 6 Nov. 2024, I found myself unable to read, the distraction I had wanted, and instead found some respite from anxiety looking again at online copies (is copies the right word? digital reproductions? images, of course, but none of it is the real thing) of Francisco Goya’s Pinturas negras, his Black Paintings. Goya painted these strange, engrossing murals on the walls of his homestead the Quinta del Sordo, outside of Madrid, his last home in Spain before his exile in France.

I’m not sure how I got there. I have an impulse to return to his depiction of Saturn chomping on his son any time I feel the pain of a modern world that is always and forever ancient.

I have never seen another painting that makes as much sense to me, which means I’m a fucken sicko—I am sure that there are nicer paintings out there (I’ve seen so many). The idea that Goya would paint such paintings on the walls of his own home captivates me. The dog painting is my favorite; all negative space, which I’ll edit out, the negative space, here:

I stumbled out my bed that night to look for Robert Hughes’ wonderful biography Goya, which sheds no true light on the black paintings, as far as I can recall. Here is what he offers:

THE GREAT SERIES of paintings Goya made for his own pleasure at about the same time is equally enigmatic, and likely to remain so. These were the Pinturas negras, the so-called Black Paintings with which, in his last Madrid years, Goya was covering the walls of his farmhouse on the other side of the Manzanares outside the city, now converted into his studio and semi-solitary hermitage. Nothing, he felt, obliged him to be available to the court anymore; as for private clients, they could come to him. The new house, according to its title deed, was “beyond the Segovia bridge … on the site where the Hermitage of the Guardian Angel formerly stood.” It had twenty-two acres of arable land, and a vegetable garden. Comfortable but not palatial, and in need of some renovation, it was sturdily built of brick and adobe, with two stories divided into several rooms, two attics, a well by the garden, and another in the courtyard. Goya paid 60,000 reales for it, cash. By a peculiar coincidence, the property next door had been owned by a farmer who was deaf, and so was named the Quinta del Sordo, the Deaf Man’s House. This name passed to Goya’s own property, since he was the only notable deaf man around.

But Goya painted wild things on his walls—Judith and Holofrenes, flying mystics, a pilgrimage, a Satanic Sabbath, old people eating soup. Men hitting each other with sticks, red blood white clouds lovely blue sky:

I mean I think I guess that it’s he did what he did—the gross, rough, beautiful paintings—that he, Goya, did them for himself, the so-called Black Paintings—I think that’s what makes me drawn to him, beyond their aesthetic powers, which is really what I mean to say, the images, the colors, the contours, the phantasies—

6 Nov. 2024

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Like a lot of US Americans I didn’t sleep too well last night. I went to bed too late and I rustled myself into some form of consciousness way too early. A veteran of past election eves, I did not overimbibe, but still felt groggy enough and well just plain like well disconcerted discombobulated discouraged enough to cancel meetings with my classes for the day. I didn’t have anything to give.

While I was in no way shocked by the results of the 2024 elections, I am nevertheless big-w Worried about all the things that may unfold, quickly, and without organized opposition, in the next six months. As has been the case for most of the presidential elections I’ve voted in, I voted against a candidate instead of for a candidate. I knew in Florida that my vote probably wouldn’t matter too much anyway.

I made myself go outside of my house into “Florida,” into Northeast Florida, which is, of course, also inside of my house, Florida, but I went outside early to take the air and look around. It was also garbage day in the neighborhood. I had a can with some nasty double-bagged rotten Jack O’Lanterns. We carved them on Halloween night and they wilted to a gray and black fuzz swarmed over with pestilence. I had to scrape their guts into the garden bed and hose the whole mess down. It’s not supposed to be this hot here this time of year, only it is and it has been, like regularly, consistently, predictably for well over a decade. The Florida air I stepped out into was gross: sticky, muggy, humidity near ninety percent and maybe 82° at nine in the morning. It did not feel like summer nor fall, but some other gross fifth season. None of this was colored by mood.

My mood was and is grim. I knew that voting for the incumbent’s proxy was simply kicking a can down the road; I knew that I was endorsing a system I had no belief in and that no one else I knew really seemed to believe in. I think I wanted just a little bit of the latter half of the 20th century to trickle down to my children, who are no longer really children. But it felt like a gross summer’s eve on this fall morning, and I remembered that climate change, which is to say global warming, which is to say the warming of the earth’s habitable surface as the result of fossil fuels—this so-called “climate change” didn’t even seem to be a blip in this election cycle. Again: kicking the can down the road, whistling past the graveyard, etc. Ostriches don’t really bury their heads in the sand though, and we all gotta know that the bill for the twentieth century is way past overdue.

But ostensibly this is a blog about literature or art; I don’t think anyone comes here for me to rant. So what am I reading?

I have been reading two books (three, really, or maybe more) and auditing two books. Audiobooks first: I am about half way through Dan Simmons’ Fall of Hyperion and I want to quit. I liked Hyperion but this one is just…I don’t have anything to say about it, except that I am sympathetic to Simmons’ anti-imperialist critique and I’m generally simpatico with his appropriation of the Romantics into a sci-fi epic (although, like, where the fuck is Blake?)—but the first book Hyperion was much better. Maybe it’s because he had a form to steal (Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales). I listen to this book in waking hours: driving, cooking, chores, etc.

The other audiobook is a fantastic rendition of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I do not listen to this book during waking hours; I fall asleep to it (or to Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians or to Sleep’s Holy Mountain or something else). Specifically, I’ve been falling asleep somewhere between chapters seven and eight this week. I love this book so much. I love the film version that came out like ten plus years ago, with Gary Oldman as Smiley. I used to love falling asleep to that film. I don’t actually know what happens in the narrative.


The two books I switch between before falling asleep to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy:

Olivier Schrauwen’s Sunday and Joy Williams’ Breaking and Entering.

Sunday is a true graphic novel: that term, “graphic novel,” a marketing gambit I’m sure, gets appended to pretty much any cartoonists’ self-contained work of, say, fifty-plus pages. But a lot of what we (and we includes very much me) call graphic novels are really short stories in comix/cartooning form. Schrauwen’s effort is a real novel, a real graphic novel a la allah ah lah lah From Hell or Jimmy Corrigan. It’s really fucking great, and if this weren’t a low-effort I am writing this for me and not you post, I would tell you why I think it’s really fucking great (I would describe the story, the so-called story, such as it is; I would riff on all the motifs; I would get lost in the coloring. I would I would I would…)

The other book I’ve been reading, the one I read after I read a chapter of Sunday and before I fall asleep to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is Joy Williams’ 1988 novel Breaking and Entering, which is about a strange young couple who, like, break and enter and then live in other people’s houses. These other people are snowbirds, although I don’t think Williams actually employs the term: people who own houses on the barrier islands of Florida’s Gulf Coast which they, like, inhabit only a scant season or two a year. Breaking and Entering is very, very Florida, crammed with weirdos and tragedies, farcical, ironic, and thickly sauced in the laugh-cry flavor. I’m not sure exactly where it’s set, but I do know that I do know the general area—again, the barrier islands, skinny shining strips of weird between the Gulf and the Tampa Bay. Not my haunts, exactly, northeastern Florida man that I am, but still the locus of so many of my fondest memories, the places I return to, where my family is, where the cars and boats stacked up in the streets of Pass-a-Grille and Treasure Island and St. Pete Beach after the once-in-a-century storms that happen several times in a season, after Helene, after Milton, where the houses faltered folded soaked, where the snowbirds can defer their false falls and warm winters in favor of safer stabler climes, where the locals pledge a future allegiance against the heat, the water, the wind, the salt. A future against the future.

Mass-market Monday | Leslie A. Fiedler’s Waiting for the End

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Waiting for the End, Leslie A. Fiedler. Penguin Books, Pelican imprint (1967). Cover design by Freda Morris. 274 pages.

From a riff a few years back:

Fiedler begins with the (then-recent) deaths of Hemingway and Faulkner. Fiedler uses the deaths of these “old men” to riff on the end of Modernism, although he never evokes the term. Neither does he use the term “postmodernism” in his book, although he edges towards it in his critiques of kitsch and middlebrow culture, and especially in his essay “The End of the Novel.” In parts of the book, he gets close to describing, or nearing a description of, an emergent postmodernist literature (John Barth and John Hawkes are favorite examples for Fiedler), but ultimately seems more resigned to writing an elegy for the avant garde. Other aspects of Waiting for the End, while well-intentioned, might strike contemporary ears as problematic, as the kids say, but Fiedler’s sharp and loose style are welcome over stodgy scholarship. Ultimately, I find the book compelling because of its middle position in its take on American literature. It’s the work of a critic seeing the beginnings of something that hasn’t quite emerged yet—but his eye is trained more closely on what’s disappearing into the past.

Donald Barthelme wants you to please tell David Markson that he’s not always coming out of that liquor store where you frequently see him

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I lived over near Sixth, and so I’d frequently walk up West Eleventh and we’d run into each other. He was a famous writer, and I had no reputation at all, so I was always kind of quiet around him. He was the Donald Barthelme. Once, I was walking with my daughter, who was about sixteen at the time, and we bumped into him. Afterward, she asked me who he was and I told her, and she said, ‘Dad! You didn’t even introduce me! My friends and I love his work!’ One time, [Barthelme’s editor] Faith Sale passed this message on to my wife; she said, ‘Donald Barthelme wants you to please tell David Markson that he’s not always coming out of that liquor store where you frequently see him. . .It was very funny. I, of course, went to a different liquor store, and was probably there more often than Don was in his!

An anecdote from David Markson, recorded in Tracy Daugherty’s Donald Barthelme biography, Hiding Man.

Donald Barthelme’s Forty Stories in reverse, Part II

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Previously,

Stories 40-36

35. ” Overnight to Many Distant Cities” (Overnight to Many Distant Cities, 1983)

In Hiding Man, his 2010 Barthelme biography, Tracy Daugherty notes that Barthelme’s collection Overnight to Many Distant Cities was not particularly well-received by critics. Reviews were a mix of bafflement and derision, as Daugherty has it, which fits the tone near the end of Hiding Man: a career winding-down—Barthelme a happy father, content with a teaching gig, and committed to a new form for his stories, now pared down to spare and often oblique dialogues. Daugherty relays a detail from a rejection letter from Barthelme’s (one-time) champion at the New Yorker, Roger Angell: “Well, maybe we’ll learn to read you. It won’t be the first time that happened.”

In my estimation, Barthelme’s later stories do not diverge too radically from his earlier work. The techniques may have evolved (or devolved, if you like), but collage and pastiche are still a major mode, domestic themes prevail, and Our Bard is ever the ironist.

Barthelme sprinkles vignettes throughout Overnight to Many Distant Cities (like Hemingway’s In Our Time); its title track, coming at the end of the collection, is a travelogue in vignettes with our narrator and his family visiting places like Paris, London, Copenhagen… The story is essentially a series of anecdotes and arch asides (“Asked her opinion of Versailles, my daughter said she thought it was overdecorated”), and, as Barthelme’s wife Marion disclosed in Daugherty’s book, some of the material was directly drawn from their honeymoon in Barcelona (“In Barcelona the lights went out”). A taste:

In Stockholm we ate reindeer steak and I told the Prime Minister… That the price of booze was too high. Twenty dollars for a bottle of J&B! He (Olof Palme) agreed, most politely, and said that they financed the Army that way. The conference we were attending was held at a workers’ vacation center somewhat outside the city. Shamelessly, I asked for a double bed, there were none, we pushed two single beds together. An Israeli journalist sat on the two single beds drinking our costly whiskey and explaining the devilish policies of the Likud. Then it was time to go play with the Africans. A poet who had been for a time a Minister of Culture explained why he had burned a grand piano on the lawn in front of the Ministry. “The piano,” he said, “is not the national instrument of Uganda.”

Is it essential Barthelme? Of course not. But it’s nice enough.

34. ” The Film” (first published as “A Film” in the The New Yorker, September 26, 1970)

A nice little story that never quite transcends it’s marvelous opening lines:

Things have never been better, except that the child, one of the stars of our film, has just been stolen by vandals, and this will slow down the progress of the film somewhat, if not bring it to a halt. But might not this incident, which is not without its own human drama, be made part of the story line?

I just went back and read the last lines though, and they are also very good:

Truth! That is another thing they said our film wouldn’t contain. I had simply forgotten about it, in contemplating the series of triumphs that is my private life.

33. “110 West Sixty-First Street” (Amateurs, 1976)

An ugly tragic domestic comedy in just over a dozen paragraphs: Paul and Eugenie are trying to get over the death of their infant by going to erotic films. It doesn’t work; they take up cruelty–

“You are extremely self-righteous,” Eugenie said to Paul. “That is the one thing I can’t stand in a man. Sometimes I want to scream.”

“You are a slut without the courage to go out and be one,” Paul replied. “Why don’t you go to one of those bars and pick up somebody, for God’s sake?”

“It wouldn’t do any good,” Eugenie said.

32. “Captain Blood” (Overnight to Many Distant Cities, 1983)

So like one of my favorite things that Melville does in Moby-Dick is turn the whole thing into a drama, a play that is taking place in the narrator-cum-Ishmael’s consciousness, with Starbuck and Stubb milling and mulling on various decks, soliloquizing. And while the Captain Blood of “Captain Blood” is no Ahab, he’s still a compellingly goofy brooder:

Blood, at dawn, a solitary figure pacing the foredeck. The world of piracy is wide, and at the same time, narrow. One can be gallant all day long, and still end up with a spider monkey for a wife. And what does his mother think of him?

This isn’t Barthelme at his best—that stock was poured into Sixty Stories—but it’s still the jaunty, boyish fun flavor that I want when I dip into his stuff.

November — Koloman Moser

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November, 1902 by Koloman Moser (1868-1918)