Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 – July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his postmodern short stories and novels.

Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964) [short stories]

• Oh, there is nothing better than intelligent conversation except thrashing about in bed with a naked girl and Egmont Light Italic.
  • "Florence Green is 81"

• His examiner...said severely: "Baskerville, you blank round, discursiveness is not literature." "The aim of literature," Baskerville replied grandly, "is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart."
  • "Florence Green is 81"

• "The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love."
  • "Me and Miss Mandible"

• [picket sign] COGITO ERGO NOTHING!....[casual passerby:] "Cogito ergo your ass"....
  • "Marie, Marie, Hold On Tight"

• "It's true," Carl said, "with a kind of merde-y inner truth which shines forth as the objective correlative of what actually did happen, back home."
  • "Margins"

• “What makes The Joker tick I wonder?” Fredric said. “I mean what are his real motivations?”
  “Consider him at any level of conduct,” Bruce said slowly, “in the home, on the street, in interpersonal relations, in jail—always there is an extraordinary contradiction. He is dirty and compulsively neat, aloof and desperately gregarious, enthusiastic and sullen, generous and stingy, a snappy dresser and a scarecrow, a gentleman and a boor, given to extremes of happiness and despair, singularly well able to apply himself and capable of frittering away a lifetime in trivial pursuits, decorous and unseemly, kind and cruel, tolerant yet open to the most outrageous varieties of bigotry, a great friend and an implacable enemy, a lover and abominator of women, sweet-spoken and foul-mouthed, a rake and a puritan, swelling with hubris and haunted by inferiority, outcast and social climber, felon and philanthropist, barbarian and patron of the arts, enamored of novelty and solidly conservative, philosopher and fool, Republican and Democrat, large of soul and unbearably petty, distant and brimming with friendly impulses, an inveterate liar and astonishingly strict with petty cash, adventurous and timid, imaginative and stolid, malignly destructive and a planter of trees on Arbor Day—I tell you frankly, the man is a mess.”
  “That’s extremely well said Bruce,” Fredric stated. “I think you’ve given a very thoughtful analysis.”
  “I was paraphrasing what Mark Schorer said about Sinclair Lewis,” Bruce replied.
  • “The Joker’s Greatest Triumph”

• That night a tall foreign-looking man with a switchblade big as a butcherknife open in his hand walked into the loft without knocking and said “Good evening, Mr. Peterson, I am the cat-piano player, is there anything you’d particularly like to hear?” “Cat-piano?” Peterson said, gasping, shrinking from the knife. “What are you talking about? What do you want?” A biography of Nolde slid from his lap to the floor. “The cat-piano,” said the visitor, “is an instrument of the devil, a diabolical instrument. You needn’t sweat quite so much,” he added, sounding aggrieved. Peterson tried to be brave. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Let me explain,” the tall foreign-looking man said graciously. “The keyboard consists of eight cats—the octave—encased in the body of the instrument in such a way that only their heads and forepaws protrude. The player presses upon the appropriate paws, and the appropriate cats respond—with a kind of shriek. There is also provision made for pulling their tails. A tail-puller, or perhaps I should say a tail player” (he smiled a disingenuous smile) “is stationed at the rear of the instrument, where the tails are. At the correct moment the tail-puller pulls the correct tail. The tail-note is of course quite different from the paw-note and produces sounds in the upper registers. Have you ever seen such an instrument, Mr. Peterson?” “No, and I don’t believe it exists,” Peterson said heroically. “There is an excellent early seventeenth-century engraving by Franz van der Wyngaert, Mr. Peterson, in which a cat-piano appears. Played, as it happens, by a man with a wooden leg. You will observe my own leg.” The cat-piano player hoisted his trousers and a leglike contraption of wood, metal and plastic appeared. “And now, would you like to make a request? ‘The Martyrdom of St. Sabastian’? The ‘Romeo and Juliet’ overture? ‘Holiday for Strings’?” “But why—” Peterson began. “The kitten is crying for milk, Mr. Peterson. And whenever a kitten cries, the cat-piano plays.” “But it’s not my kitten,” Peterson said reasonably. “It’s just a kitten that wished itself on me. I’ve been trying to give it away. I’m not sure it’s still around. I haven’t seen it since the day before yesterday.” The kitten appeared, looked at Peterson reproachfully, and then rubbed itself against the cat-piano player’s mechanical leg. “Wait a minute!” Peterson exclaimed. “This thing is rigged! That cat hasn’t been here in two days. What do you want from me? What am I supposed to do?” “Choices, Mr. Peterson, choices. You chose that kitten as a way of encountering that which you are not, that is to say, kitten. An effort on the part of the pour-soi to—” “But it chose me!” Peterson cried, “the door was open and the first thing I knew it was lying in my bed, under the Army blanket. I didn’t have anything to do with it!” The cat-piano player repeated his disingenuous smile. “Yes, Mr. Peterson, I know, I know. Things are done to you, it is all a gigantic conspiracy. I’ve heard the story a hundred times. The kitten is here, is it not? The kitten is weeping, is it not?” Peterson looked at the kitten, which was crying huge tigerish tears into its empty dish. “Listen Mr. Peterson,” the cat-piano player said, “listen!” The blade of his immense knife jumped back into the handle with a thwack! and the hideous music began.
  • "A Shower of Gold"

Snow White (1967) [novel]

• “Try to be a man about whom nothing is known,” our father said, when we were young. Our father said several other interesting things, but we have forgotten what they were. “Keep quiet,” he said. That we remember. He wished more quiet. One tends to want that, in a National Park. Our father was a man about whom nothing was known. Nothing is known about him still. He gave us the recipes. He was not very interesting. A tree is more interesting. A suitcase is more interesting. A canned good is more interesting. When we sing the father hymn, we notice that he was not very interesting. The words of the hymn notice it. It is explictly commented upon, in the text.
  • pp.18–19

• No man's plenum, Mr. Quistgaard, is impervious to the awl of God's will.
  • p. 45

• The new thing, a great banality in white, off-white and poor-white, leaned up against the wall. “Interesting,” we said. “It’s poor,” Snow White said. “Poor, poor.” “Yes,” Paul said,” one of my poorer things I think.” “Not so poor of course as yesterday’s, poorer on the other hand than some,” she said. “Yes,” Paul said, “it has some of the qualities of poorness.” “Especially poor in the lower left-hand corner,” she said. “Yes,” Paul said, “I would go so far as to hurl it into the marketplace.” “They’re getting poorer,” she said. “Poorer and poorer,” Paul said with satisfaction, “descending to unexplored depths of poorness where no human intelligence has ever been.” ... “Sublimely poor,” she murmured. “Wallpaper,” he said.
  • p. 48

• “Sometimes I see signs on walls saying Kill the Rich,” Clem said. “And sometimes Kill the Rich has been crossed out and Harm the Rich written underneath. A clear gain for civilization I would say. And the one that says Jean-Paul Sartre Is a Fartre. Something going on there, you must admit. Dim flicker of something. ...”
  • p. 66

• We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of “sense” of what is going on. This “sense” is not to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lines themselves—looking at them and so arriving at a feeling not of satisfaction exactly, that is too much to expect, but of having read them, of having “completed” them.
  • p. 106

• "Take me home," Snow White said. "Take me home instantly. If there is anything worse than being home, it is being out."
  • p. 117

• “How old are you Hogo.” “Thirty-five Jane. A not unpleasant age to be.” “You don’t mind then. That you are not young.” “It has its buggy aspects as what does not?” “You don’t mind then that you are sagging in the direction of death.” “No, Jane.”
  • p. 128

• [Snow White talking to herself] “... No wonder we who are twenty-two don’t trust anybody over twelve. That is where you find people who know the score, under twelve. I think I will go out and speak to some eleven-year-olds, now, to refresh myself. Now or soon.”
  • p. 145

• “All right lad this is what we want with you. Your mission is this: to go out into the world and pull down all those election posters. Let’s get all those ugly faces off our streets and out of our elective offices. We are not going to vote any more, no matter how often they come around with their sound trucks and statesmanlike gestures. Pull down the sound trucks. Pull down the outstretched arms. To hell with the whole business. Voting has turned out to be a damned impertinence. They never do what we want them to do anyhow. And when they do what we want them to do, they don’t do it well. To hell with them. We are going to save up all our votes for the next twenty years and spend them all at one time. Maybe by that day there will be some Rabelaisian figure worth spending them on. ...”
  • p. 146

• ANATHEMATIZATION OF THE WORLD IS NOT AN ADEQUATE RESPONSE TO THE WORLD.
  • p. 178

Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968) [short stories]

• I decided I knew nothing. Friends put me in touch with a Miss R., a teacher, unorthodox they said, excellent they said, successful with difficult cases, steel shutters on the windows made the house safe. I had just learned via International Distress Coupon that Jane had been beaten up by a dwarf in a bar on Tenerife but Miss R. did not allow me to speak of it. “You know nothing,” she said, “you feel nothing, you are locked in a most savage and terrible ignorance, I despise you, my boy, mon cher, my heart. You must attend but you must not attend now, you must attend later, a day or a week or an hour, you are making me ill....” I nonevaluated these remarks as Korzybski instructed. But it was difficult.
  • “The Indian Uprising”

• “... Some people,” Miss R. said, “run to conceits or wisdom but I hold to the hard, brown, nutlike word. I might point out that there is enough aesthetic excitement here to satisfy anyone but a damned fool.”
  • “The Indian Uprising”

• The balloon, beginning at a point on Fourteenth Street, the exact location of which I cannot reveal, expanded northward until it reached the Park. There, I stopped it; at dawn the northernmost edges lay over the Plaza; the free-hanging motion was frivolous and gentle. But experiencing a faint irritation at stopping, even to protect the trees, and seeing no reason the balloon should not be allowed to expand upward, over the parts of the city it was already covering, into the “air space” to be found there, I asked the engineers to see to it. This expansion took place throughout the morning, soft imperceptible sighing of gas through the valves. The balloon then covered forty-five blocks north-south and an irregular area east-west, as many as six crosstown blocks on the Avenue in some places. That was the situation, then.
  • opening paragraph, “The Balloon”

• I met you under the balloon, on the occasion of your return from Norway; you asked if it was mine; I said it was. The balloon, I said, is a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure, having to do with the unease I felt at your absence, and with sexual deprivation, but now that your visit to Bergen has been terminated, it is no longer necessary or appropriate. Removal of the balloon was easy; trailer trucks carried away the depleted fabric, which is now stored in West Virginia, awaiting some other time of unhappiness, sometime, perhaps, when we are angry with one another.
  • closing paragraph, “The Balloon”

• I went to the plain girl fair out Route 22 figuring I could get one if I just put on a kind face. This newspaper here had advertising the aspidistra store not far away by car where I went then and bought one to carry along. At the plain girl fair they were standing in sudden-death décolletage and brown arms everywhere. As you passed along into the tent after paying your dollar fifty carrying your aspidistra a blinding flash of some hundred contact lenses came. And a quality of dental work to shame the VA Hospital it was so fine. One fell in love temporarily with all this hard work and money spent just to please to improve. I was sad my dolphin friend was not there to see. I took one by the hand and said “come with me I will buy you a lobster.” My real face behind my kind face smiling. And the other girls on their pedestals waved and said “goodbye Marie.” And they also said “have a nice lobster,” and Marie waved back and said “bonne chance!” We motored to the lobster place over to Barwick, then danced by the light of the moon for a bit. And then to my hay where I tickled the naked soles of feet with a piece of it and admired her gestures of marvelous gaucherie. In my mind.
  • “This Newspaper Here”

• K. at His Desk
  He is neither abrupt with nor excessively kind to associates. Or he is both abrupt and kind.
  The telephone is, for him, a whip, a lash, but also a conduit for soothing words, a sink into which he can hurl gallons of syrup if it comes to that.
  He reads quickly, scratching brief comments (“Yes”, “No”) in corners of the paper. He slouches in the leather chair, looking about him with a slightly irritated air for new visitors, new difficulties. He spends his time sending and receiving messengers.
  “I spend my time sending and receiving messengers” he says. “Some of these messages are important. Others are not.”
  • “Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning”, opening

• Gallery-going
  K. enters a large gallery on Fifty-seventh Street, in the Fuller Building. His entourage includes several ladies and gentlemen. Works by a geometrist are on show. K. looks at the immense, rather theoretical paintings.
  “Well, at least we know he has a ruler.”
  The group dissolves in laughter. People repeat the remark to one another, laughing.
  The artist, who has been standing behind a dealer, regards K. with hatred.
  • “Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning”

• K. Puzzled by His Children
  The children are crying. There are several children, one about four, a boy, then another boy, slightly older, and a little girl, very beautiful, wearing blue jeans, crying. There are various objects on the grass, an electric train, a picture book, a red ball, a plastic basket, a plastic shovel.
  K. frowns at the children whose distress issues from no source immediately available to the eye, which seems uncaused, vacant, a general anguish. K. turns to the mother of these children who is standing nearby wearing hip-huggers which appear to be made of linked marshmallows studded with diamonds but then I am a notoriously poor observer.
  “Play with them”, he says.
  The mother of ten quietly suggests that K. himself “play with them”.
  K. picks up the picture book and begins to read to the children. But the book has a German text. It has been left behind, perhaps, by some foreign visitor. Nevertheless K. perseveres.
  “A ist der Affe, er isst mit der Pfote.” (“A is the Ape, he eats with his Paw.”)
  The crying of the children continues.
  • “Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning”

• I spoke to him then about the war. I said the same things people always say when they speak against the war. I said that the war was wrong. I said that large countries should not burn down small countries. I said that the government had made a series of errors. I said that these errors once small and forgivable were now immense and unforgivable. I said that the government was attempting to conceal its original errors under layers of new errors. I said that the government was sick with error, giddy with it. I said that tens of thousands of the enemy’s soldiers and civilians had been killed because of various errors, ours and theirs. I said that we are responsible for errors made in our name. I said that the government should not be allowed to make additional errors.
  • “Report”

• At that moment the son manqué entered the room. The son manqué was eight feet tall and wore a serape woven out of two hundred transistor radios, all turned on and tuned to different stations. Just by looking at him you could hear Portland and Nogales, Mexico.
  “No grass in the house?”
  Barbara got the grass which was kept in one of those little yellow and red metal canisters made for sending film back to Eastman Kodak.
  Edgar tried to think of a way to badmouth this immense son leaning over him like a large blaring building. But he couldn’t think of anything. Thinking of anything was beyond him. I sympathize. I myself have these problems. Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.
  • “The Dolt”

• The old Commissioner’s idea was essentially that if there was a disturbance on the city’s streets—some ethnic group cutting up some other ethnic group on a warm August evening—the Police Band would be sent in. The handsome dark-green band bus arriving with sirens singing, red lights whirling. Hard-pressed men on the beat in their white hats raising a grateful cheer. We stream out of the vehicle holding our instruments at high port. A skirmish line fronting the angry crowd. And play “Perdido”. The crowd washed with new and true emotion. Startled, they listen. Our emotion stronger than their emotion. A triumph of art over good sense.
  • “The Police Band”

• When my falling event was postponed, were you disappointed? Did you experience a disillusionment-event?
  • “Can We Talk”

• the hinder portion scalding-house good eating curve B in addition to the usual baths and ablutions military police sumptuousness of the washhouse risking misstatements kept distances iris to iris queen of holes damp, hairy legs note of anger chanting and shouting konk sense of “mold” on the “muff” sense of “talk” on the “surface” konk2 all sorts of chemical girl who delivered the letter give it a bone plummy bare legs saturated in every belief and ignorance rational living private client bad bosom uncertain workmen mutton-tugger obedience to the rules of the logical system Lord Muck hot tears harmonica rascal
  • “Alice”

• that’s chaos can you produce chaos? Alice asked certainly I can produce chaos I said I produced chaos she regarded the chaos chaos is handsome and attractive she said and more durable than regret I said and more nourishing than regret she said
  • “Alice”

• chaos is tasty AND USEFUL TOO
  • ”Alice”

• Kellerman falls to his knees in front of the bench. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I committed endoarchy two times, melanicity four times, encropatomy seven times, and preprocity with igneous intent, pretolemicity, and overt cranialism once each.”

Within how long a period?:

Since Monday.:

Did you enjoy it?:

Which?:

Any of it.:

Some of it. Melanicity in the afternoon promotes a kind of limited joy.:

Have you left anything out?:

A great deal.:

• • “A Picture History of the War”

• See the moon? It hates us.
  • “See the Moon?"

• I wanted be be one, when I was young, a painter. But I couldn’t stand stretching the canvas. Does things to the fingernails. And that’s the first place people look.
  Fragments are the only forms I trust.
  Light-minded or no, I’m...riotous with mental health.
  • “See the Moon?”

• Gregory, you didn’t listen to my advice. I said try the Vernacular Isles. Where fish are two for a penny and women two for a fish. But you wanted M.I.T. and electron-spin-resonance spectroscopy.
  • “See the Moon?”

• It’s my hope that these...souvenirs...will someday merge, blur—cohere is the word, maybe—into something meaningful. A grand word, meaningful. What do I look for? A work of art, I’ll not accept anything less. Yes I know it’s shatteringly disingenuous but I wanted to be a painter. They get away with murder in my view; Mr. X on the Times agrees with me. You don’t know how I envy them. They can pick up a Baby Ruth wrapper on the street, glue it to the canvas (in the right place, of couse, there’s that), and lo! people crowd around and cry, “a real Baby Ruth wrapper, by God, what could be realer than that?” Fantastic metaphysical advantage. You hate them, if you’re ambitious.
  • “See the Moon?”

• We talked about the size of the baby, Ann and I. What could be deduced from the outside.
  I said it doesn’t look very big to me. She said it’s big enough for us. I said we don’t need such a great roaring big one after all. She said they cost the earth, those extra-large sizes. Our holdings in Johnson’s Baby Powder to be considered too. We’d need acres and acres. I said we’ll put it in a Skinner box maybe. She said no child of hers. Displayed like a rump roast. I said you haven’t wept lately. She said I keep getting bigger whether I laugh or cry.
  Dear Ann. I don’t think you’ve quite...
  What you don’t understand is, it’s like somebody walks up you and says, I have a battleship I can’t use, would you like to have a battleship. And you say, yes yes, I’ve never had a battleship, I’ve always wanted one. And he says, it has four sixteen-inch guns forward, and a catapult for launching scout planes. And you say, I’ve always wanted to launch scout planes. And he says, it’s yours, and then you have this battleship. And then you have to paint it, because it’s rusting, and clean it, because it’s dirty, and anchor it somewhere, because the Police Department wants you to get it off the streets. And the crew is crying, and there are silverfish in the chartroom and a funny knocking sound in the No. 2 hold, and the chaplain can’t find the Palestrina tapes for the Sunday service. And you can’t get anybody to sit with it. And finally you discover that what you have here is this great, big, pink-and-blue rockabye battleship.
  • “See the Moon?”

• There was no particular point at which I stopped being promising.
  • “See the Moon?”

• I set out to study cardinals, about whom science knows nothing. It seemed to me that cardinals could be known in the same way we know fishes or roses, by classification and enumeration. A perverse project, perhaps, but who else has embraced this point of view? Difficult nowadays to find a point of view kinky enough to call one’s own, with Sade himself being carried through the streets on the shoulders of sociologists, cheers and shouting, ticker tape unwinding from high windows...
  • “See the Moon?”

• Too, maybe I was trying on the role. Not for myself. When a child is born, the locus of one’s hopes...shifts, slightly. Not altogether, not all at once. But you feel it, this displacement. You speak up, strike attitudes, like the mother of a tiny Lollabrigida. Drunk with possibility once more.
  • “See the Moon?”

City Life (1970) [short stories]

• Why!...there’s my father!...sitting in the bed there!...and he’s weeping!...as though his heart would burst!...Father!...how is this?...who has wounded you?...name the man!...why I’ll...I’ll...here, Father, take this handkerchief!...and this handkerchief!...and this handkerchief!...I’ll run for a towel...for a doctor...for a priest...for a good fairy...is there...can you...can I...a cup of hot tea?...bowl of steaming soup?...shot of Calvados?...a joint?...a red jacket?...a blue jacket?...Father, please!...look at me, Father...who has insulted you?...are you, then, compromised?...ruined?...a slander is going around?...an obloquy?...a traducement?...’sdeath!...I won’t permit it!...I won’t abide it!...I’ll...move every mountain...climb...every river...etc.
  • “Views of My Father Weeping”

• Rationalization
  The problems of art. New artists have been obtained. These do not object to, and indeed argue enthusiastically for, the rationalization process. Production is up. Quality-control devices have been installed at those points where the interests of artists and audiences intersect. Shipping and distribution have been improved out of all recognition. (It is in this area, they say in Paraguay, that traditional practices were most blameworthy.) The rationalized art is dispatched from central art dumps to regional art dumps, and from there into the lifestreams of cities. Each citizen is given as much art as his system can tolerate. Marketing considerations have not been allowed to dictate product mix; rather, each artist is encouraged to maintain, in his software, highly personal, even idiosyncratic, standards (the so-called “hand of the artist” concept). Rationalization produces simpler circuits and therefore a saving in hardware. Each artist’s product is translated into a statement in symbolic logic. The statement is then “minimized” by various clever methods. The simpler statement is translated back into the design of a simpler circuit. Foamed by a number of techniques, the art is then run through heavy steel rollers. Flip-flop switches control its further development. Sheet art is generally dried in smoke and is dark brown in color. Bulk art is air-dried, and changes color in particular historical epochs.
  • “Paraguay”

• I think the government is very often in ironic relation to itself. And that’s helpful. For example: we’re spending a great deal of money for this army we have, a very large army, beautifully equipped. We’re spending something on the order of twenty billions a year for it. Now, the whole point of an army is—what’s the word?—deterrence. And the nut of deterrence is credibility. So what does the government do? It goes and sells off its surplus uniforms. And the kids start wearing them, because they’re cheap and have some sort of style. And immediately you get this vast clown army in the streets parodying the real army. And they mix periods, you know, you get parody British grenadiers and parody World War I types and parody Sierra Maestra types. So you have all these kids walking around wearing these filthy uniforms with wound stripes, hash marks, Silver Stars, but also ostrich feathers, Day-Glo vests, amulets containing powdered rhinoceros horn... You have this splendid clown army in the streets standing over against the real one. And of course the clown army constitutes a very serious attack on all the ideas which support the real army including the basic notion of having an army at all. The government has opened itself to all this, this undermining of its own credibility, just because it wants to make a few dollars peddling old uniforms....
  • “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel”

• But when I call for the Phantom of the Opera on Thursday, at the appointed hour, he is not there.
  What vexation!
  Am I not slightly relieved?
  Can it be that he doesn’t like me?
  I sit down on the kerb, outside the Opera. People passing look at me. I will wait here for a hundred years. Or until the hot meat of romance is cooled by the dull gravy of common sense once more.
  • “The Phantom of the Opera’s Friend”, conclusion

• Or a long sentence moving at a certain pace down the page aiming for the bottom—if not the bottom of this page then of some other page—where it can rest, or stop for a moment to think about the questions raised by its own (temporary) existence, which ends when the page is turned, or the sentence falls out of the mind that holds it (temporarily) in some kind of embrace, not necessarily an ardent one, but more perhaps the kind of embrace enjoyed (or endured) by a wife who has just waked up and is on her way to the bathroom in the morning to wash her hair, and is bumped into by her husband, who has been lounging at the breakfast table reading the newspaper, and didn’t see her coming out of the bedroom, but, when he bumps into her, or is bumped into by her, raises his hands to embrace her lightly, transiently, because he knows that if he gives her a real embrace so early in the morning, before she has properly shaken the dreams out of her head, and [...]
  • “Sentence”, first page of nine

• ...immediately after the commercial they’re going to play a new rock song by your favorite group, a cut that has never been aired before, and you want to hear it and respond to it in a new way, a way that accords with whatever you’re feeling at the moment, or might feel, if the threat of new experience could be (temporarily) overbalanced by the promise of possible positive benefits, or what the mind construes as such, remembering that these are often, really, disguised defeats (not that such defeats are not, at times, good for your character, teaching you that it is not by success alone that one surmounts life, but that setbacks, too, contribute to that roughening of the personality that, by providing a textured surface to place against that of life, enables you to leave slight traces, or smudges, on the face of human history—your mark) and after all, benefit-seeking always has something of the smell of raw vanity about it, as if you wished to decorate your own brow with laurel, or wear your medals to a cookout, when the invitation had said nothing about them, and although the ego is always hungry (we are told) it is well to remember that ongoing success is nearly as meaningless as ongoing lack of success, which can make you sick, and that it is good to leave a few crumbs on the table for the rest of your brethren, not to sweep it all into the little beaded purse of your soul but to allow others, too, part of the gratification, and if you share in this way you will find the clouds smiling on you, and the postman bringing you letters, and bicycles available when you want to rent them, and many other signs, however guarded and limited, of the community’s (temporary) approval of you, or at least of its willingness to let you believe (temporarily) that it finds you not so lacking in commendible virtues as it had previously allowed you to think, from its scorn of your merits, as it might be put, or anyway its consistent refusal to recognize your basic humanness and its secret blackball of the project of your remaining alive, made in executive session by its ruling bodies, which, as everyone knows, carry out concealed programs of reward and punishment, under the rose, causing faint alterations of the status quo, behind your back, at various points along the periphery of community life, together with other enterprises not dissimilar in tone, such as producing films that have special qualities, or attributes, such as a film where the second half of it is a holy mystery, and girls and women are not permitted to see it, or writing novels in which the final chapter is a plastic bag filled with water, which you can touch, but not drink...
  • “Sentence”

• bins black and green seventh eighth rehearsal pings a bit fussy at times fair scattering grand and exciting world of his fabrication topple out against surface irregularities fragilization of the gut constitutive misrecognitions of the ego most mature artist then in Regina loops of chain into a box several feet away Hiltons and Ritzes fault-tracing forty whacks active enthusiasm old cell is darker and they use the “Don’t Know” category less often than younger people I am glad to be here and intend to do what I can to remain mangle stools tables bases and pedestals without my tree, which gives me rest hot pipe stacked-up cellos spend the semi-private parts of their lives wailing before 1908 had himself photographed with a number of very attractive young girls breasts like ballrooms and orchestras (as in English factories) social eminence Dutch sailors’ eyes subsequently destroyed many of these works
  • “Bone Bubbles”, first paragraph of fourteen

• love tap the glass is one and three-sixteenths inches thick laminated with plastic top stop a bullet from almost any sidearm indifferent office cleaners smudge views of the acrobat ordered the girl to get up and dress herself dream of the dandy leaves and their veins modern soft skin a car drives up a policeman jumps out tinkling sackcloth provocative back controlled nausea whimpering forms pardonable in that they trump irresistible to any faithful mind hybrid tissues zut powerful story of a half-naked girl caught between two emotions two wavy sheets of steel food towers in Turin a collection of dirks who is that very sick man? age-old eating habits crowd celebrating the matter with him is that he is crazy Paul and Barnabas preaching a bunch of extras going by sketch and final version automatic pump salad holder taking the French shoe tired lines to be taken literally no sexual relations with them
  • “Bone Bubbles”, ultimate paragraph

• The death of God left the angels in a strange position. They were overtaken suddenly by a fundamental question. One can attempt to imagine the moment. How did they look at the instant the question invaded them, flooding the angelic consciousness, taking hold with terrifying force? The question was, “What are angels?”
  New to questioning, unaccustomed to terror, unskilled in aloneness, the angels (we assume) fell into despair.
  • "On Angels," opening

• A great waiter died, and all of the other waiters were saddened. At the restaurant, sadness was expressed. Black napkins were draped over black arms. Black tableclothes were distributed. Several nearby streets were painted black—those leading to the establishment in which Guignol had placed his plates with legendary tact. Guignol’s medals (for like a great beer he had been decorated many times, at international exhibitions in Paris, Brussels, Rio de Janeiro) were turned over to his mistress, La Lupe. The body was poached in white wine, stock, olive oil, vinegar, aromatic vegetables, herbs, garlic, and slices of lemon for twenty-four hours and displayed en Aspic on a bed of lettuce leaves. Hundreds of famous triflers appeared to pay their last respects. Guignol’s colleagues recalled with pleasure the master’s most notable eccentricity. Having coolly persuaded some innocent to select a thirty-dollar bottle of wine, he never failed to lean forward conspiratorially and whisper in his victim’s ear, “Cuts the grease.”
  • “Brain Damage”

• I worked for newspapers. I worked for newspapers at a time when I was not competent to do so. I reported inaccurately. I failed to get all the facts. I misspelled names. I garbled figures. I wasted copy paper. I pretended to know things I did not know. I pretended to understand things beyond my understanding. I oversimplified. I was superior to things I was inferior to. I misinterpreted things that took place before me. I over- and underinterpreted what took place before me. I suppressed news the management wanted suppressed. I invented news the management wanted invented. I faked stories. I failed to discover the truth. I colored the truth with fancy. I had no respect for the truth. I failed to heed the adage, you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. I put lies in the paper. I put private jokes in the paper. I wrote headlines containing double entendres. I wrote stories while drunk. I abused copy boys. I curried favor with advertisers. I accepted gifts from interested parties. I was servile with superiors. I was harsh with people who called on the telephone seeking information. I gloated over police photographs of sex crimes. I touched type when the makeups weren’t looking. I took copy pencils home. I voted with management in Guild elections.
  • “Brain Damage”

• The Wapituil are like us to an extraordinary degree. They have a kinship system which is very similar to our kinship system. They address each other as “Mister”, “Mistress”, and “Miss”. They wear clothes which look very much like our clothes. They have a Fifth Avenue which divides their territory into east and west. They have a Chock Full o’ Nuts and a Chevrolet, one of each. They have a Museum of Modern Art and a telephone and a Martini, one of each. The Martini and the telephone are kept in the Museum of Modern Art. In fact they have everything that we have, but only one of each thing.
  We found that they lose interest very quickly. For instance they are fully industrialized, but they don’t seem interested in taking advantage of it. After the steel mill produced the ingot, it was shut down. They can conceptualize but they don’t follow through. For instance, their week has seven days—Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, and Monday. They have one disease, mononucleosis. The sex life of a Wapituil consists of a single experience, which he thinks about for a long time.
  • “Brain Damage”

• I went out into the garage and told Bill an interesting story which wasn’t true. Some people feel you should tell the truth, but those people are impious and wrong, and if you listen to what they say, you will be tragically unhappy all your life.
  • “Brain Damage”

• Oh there’s brain damage in the east, and brain damage in the west, and upstairs there’s brain damage, and downstairs there’s brain damage, and in my lady’s parlor—brain damage. Brain damage is widespread. Apollinaire was a victim of brain damage—you remember the photograph, the bandage on his head, and the poems... Bonnie and Clyde suffered from brain damage in the last four minutes of the picture. There’s brain damage oin the horizon, a great big blubbery cloud of it coming this way—
  And you can hide under the bed but brain damage is under the bed, and you can hide in the universities but they are the very seat and soul of brain damage— Brain damage caused by bears who put your bead in their foaming jaws while you are singing “Masters of War”... Brain damage caused by the sleeping revolution which no one can wake up... Brain damage caused by art. I could describe it better if I weren’t afflicted with it...
  This is the country of brain damage, this is the map of brain damage, these are the rivers of brain damage, and see, those lighted-up places are the airports of brain damage, where the damaged pilots land the big, damaged ships.
  The Immaculate Conception triggered a lot of brain damage at one time, but no longer does so. A team of Lippizaners has just published an autobiography. Is that any reason to accuse them of you-know-what? And I saw a girl walking down the street, she was singing “Me and My Winstons”, and I began singing it too, and that protected us, for a moment, from the terrible thing that might have happened...
  And there’s brain damage in Arizona, and brain damage in Maine, and little towns in Idaho are in the grip of it, and my blue heaven is black with it, brain damage covering everything like an unbreakable lease—
  Skiing along on the soft surface of brain damage, never to sink, because we don’t understand the danger—
  • “Brain Damage”, conclusion

• Elsa and Ramona watched the Motorola television set in their pajamas.
  —What else is on? Elsa asked.
  Ramona looked in the newspaper.
  —On 7 there’s Johnny Allegro with George Raft and Nina Foch. On 9 Johnny Angel with George Raft and Claire Trevor. On 11 there’s Johnny Apollo with Tyrone Power and Dorothy Lamour. On 13 is Johnny Concho with Frank Sinatra and Phyllis Kirk. On 2 is Johnny Dark with Tony Curtis and Piper Laurie. On 4 is Johnny Eager with Robert Taylor and Lana Turner. On 5 is Johnny O’Clock with Dick Powell and Evelyn Keyes. On 31 is Johnny Trouble with Stuart Whitman and Ethel Barrymore.
  —What’s this one we’re watching?
  —What time is it?
  —Eleven-thirty-five.
  Johnny Guitar with Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden.
  • “City Life”

The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or The Hithering Thithering Djinn (1971) [for children]

National Book Award winner

• One morning in a recent year, a year not too long ago—the year 1887, to be precise—a young girl named Mathilda awoke, stretched, yawned, scratched, and got out of bed.
  “What shall I do this morning?” she asked herself. “I think I shall go hooping. This looks like good hooping weather.”
  When she went out into the back yard, hoop in hand, she was amazed to discover that a mysterious Chinese house, only six feet high, had grown there overnight.
  Mathilda was disappointed. She had wanted a fire engine. Even though it wasn’t Christmas or her birthday or the day after a day on which she had been particularly good, she had hoped—just a faint, hazy hope—that when she went outside this morning a sparkling red fire engine would be standing there.
  “Well, a mysterious Chinese house is better than nothing,” she said to herself. “I suppose I’d better go inside and see what strange things happen to me there. Of course this house is rather small. I’m not even sure I can get inside the door.”
  At these words the mysterious Chinese house began to grow and grow. It grew and grew until it was nine feet tall, and sprouted a Chinese weather vane on top. And there was plenty of room to go through the door.
  “Plenty of room to go through the door now,” Mathilda reflected. “There’s absolutely nothing to prevent me from going inside. Nothing except those strange noises I hear there.”
  From inside the Chinese house came strange noises indeed—growls, howls, the whispering of elephants, the trumpeting of djinn.
  “I’m not scared,” Mathilda said. “Very few people are as brave as me.” And she walked through the door.
  • unpaginated; first three pages of text

Sadness (1972) [short stories]

"Critique de la Vie Quotidienne", "The Genius", "Perpetua", "The Party" and "A Film"

• Our evenings lacked promise. The world in the evening seems fraught with the absence of promise, if you are a married man. There is nothing to do but go home and drink your nine drinks and forget about it.
  Slumped there in your favorite chair, with your nine drinks lined up on the side table in soldierly array, and your hand never far from them, and your other hand holding on to the plumb belly of the overfed child, and perhaps rocking a bit, if the chair is a rocking chair as mine was is in those days, then it is true that a tiny tendril of contempt—strike that, content—might curl up from the storehouse where the world’s content is kept, and reach into your softened brain and take hold there, persuading you that this, at last, is the fruit of all your labors, which you’d been wondering about in such terms as, “Where is the fruit?” And so, newly cheered and warmed by this false insight, you reach out with your free hand (the one that is not clutching the nine drinks) and pat the hair of the child, and the child looks up into your face, gauging your mood as it were, and says, “Can I have a horse?,” which is after all a perfectly reasonable request, in some ways, but in other ways is total ruin to that state of six-o’clock equilibrium you have so painfully achieved, because, the child’s request, is of course absolutely out of the question, and so you say “No!” as forcefully as possible—a bark rather than a bite—in such a way as to put the quietus on this project, having a horse, once and for all, permanently. But, placing yourself in the child’s ragged shoes, which look more like used Brillo pads than shoes now that you regard them closely, you remember that time long ago on the other side of the Great War when you too desired a horse, and so, pulling yourself together, and putting another drink in your mouth (that makes three, I believe), you assume a thoughtful look (indeed, the same grave and thoughtful look you have been wearing all day, to confuse your enemies and armor yourself against the indifference of your friends) and begin to speak to the child softly, gently, cunningly even, explaining that the genus horse prefers the great open voids, where it can roam, and graze, and copulate with other attractive horses, to the confined space of a broke-down brownstone apartment, and that a horse if obtained would not be happy here, in the child’s apartment, and does he, the child, want an unhappy horse, moping and brooding, and lying all over the double bed in the bedroom, and perhaps vomiting at intervals, and maybe even kicking down a wall or two, to express its rage? But the child, sensing the way the discussion is trending, says impatiently, with a chop of its tiny hand, “No, I don’t mean that,” giving you to understand that it, the child, had not intended what you are arguing against but had intended something else altogether: a horse personally owned by it, the child, but pastured at a stable in the park, a horse such as Otto has—“Otto has a horse?” you say in astonishment—Otto being a school-fellow of the child, and indeed the same age, and no brighter as far as the naked eye can determine but perhaps a shade more fortunate in the wealth dimension, and the child nods, yes, Otto has a horse, and a film of tears is squeezed out and presented to you, over its eyes, and with liberal amounts of anathematization for Otto’s feckless parents and the profound hope that the fall of the market has ruined them beyond repair you push the weeping child with its filmic tears off your lap and onto the floor and turn to your wife, who has been listening to all of this with her face turned to the wall, and no doubt a look upon her face corresponding to that which St. Catherine of Siena bent upon poor Pope Gregory whilst reproaching him for the luxury of Avignon, if you could see it (but of course you cannot, as her face is turned to the wall)—you look, as I say, to your wife, as the cocktail hour fades, there being only two drinks left of the nine (and you have sworn a mighty oath never to take more than nine before supper, because of what it does to you), and inquire in the calmest tones available what is for supper and would she like to take a flying fuck at the moon for visiting this outrageous child upon you. She, rising with a regal sweep of her air naïf, and not failing to let you have a good look at her handsome legs, those legs you could have, if you were good, motors out of the room and into the kitchen, where she throws the dinner on the floor, so that when you enter the kitchen to get some more ice you begin skidding and skating about in a muck of pork chops, squash, sauce diable, Danish stainless-steel flatware, and Louis Martini Mountain Red. So, this being the content of your happy hour, you decide to break your iron-clad rule, that rule of rules, and have eleven drinks instead of the modest nine with which you had been wont to stave off the song of twilight, when the lights are low, and the flickering shadows, etc., etc. But, opening the refrigerator, you discover that the slovenly bitch has failed to fill up the ice trays so there is no more ice for your tenth and eleventh sloshes. On discovering this you are just about ready to throw in the entire enterprise, happy home, and go to the bordel for the evening, where at least you can be sure that everyone will be kind to you, and not ask you for a horse, and the floor will not be a muck of sauce diable and pork chops. But when you put your hand in your pocket you discover that there are only three dollars there—not enough to cover a sortie to the bordel, where Uni-Cards are not accepted, so that the entire scheme, going to the bordel, is blasted. Upon making these determinations, which are not such as to bring the hot flush of excitement to the old cheek, you measure out your iceless over-the-limit drinks, using a little cold water as a make-do, and return to what is called the “living” room, and prepare to live, for a little while longer, in a truce with your circumstances—aware that there are wretches worse off than you, people whose trepanations have not been successful, girls who have not been invited to the sexual revolution, priests still frocked. It is seven-thirty.
  • “Critique de la Vie Quotidienne”

• At night I drank and my hostility came roaring out if its cave like a jet-assisted banshee.
  • “Critique de la Vie Quotidienne”

• I looked at her then to see if I could discern traces of what I had seen in the beginning. There were traces but only traces. Vestiges. Hints of a formerly intact mystery never to be returned to its original wholeness. “I know what you’re doing,” she said, “you are touring the ruins.”
  • “Critique de la Vie Quotidienne”

• His assistants cluster about him. He is severe with them, demanding, punctilious, but this is for their own ultimate benefit. He devises hideously difficult problems, or complicates their work with sudden oblique comments that open whole new areas of investigation—yawning chasms under their feet. It is as if he wishes to place them in situations where only failure is possible. But failure, too, is a part of mental life. "I will make you failure-proof," he says jokingly. His assistants pale.
  • "The Genius"

• Is it true, as Valéry said, that every man of genius contains within himself a false man of genius?
  • "The Genius"

• "This is an age of personal ignorance. No one knows what others know. No one knows enough."
  • "The Genius"

• The genius is afraid to fly. The giant aircraft seems to him...flimsy. He hates the takeoff and he hates the landing and he detests being in the air. He hates the food, the stewardesses, the voice of the captain, and his fellow-passengers, especially those who are conspicuously at ease, who remove their coats, loosen their ties, and move up and down the aisles with drinks in their hands. In consequence, he rarely travels. The world comes to him.
  • "The Genius"

• Q: What do you consider the most important tool of the genius of today?
  A: Rubber cement.
  • "The Genius"

• He has urged that America be divided into four smaller countries. America, he says, is too big. "America does not look where it puts its foot," he says. This comment, which, coming from anyone else, would have engendered widespread indignation, is greeted with amused chuckles. The Chamber of Commerce sends him four cases of Teacher's Highland Cream.
  • "The Genius"

• The genius defines "inappropriate response":
  "Suppose my friend telephones and asks, 'Is my wife there?' 'No,' I reply, 'they went out, your wife and my wife, wearing new hats, they are giving themselves to sailors.' My friend is astounded at this news. 'But it's Election Day!' he cries. 'And it's beginning to rain!' I say."
  • "The Genius"

• The genius pays close attention to work being done in fields other than his own. He is well read in all of the sciences (with the exception of the social sciences); he follows the arts with a connoisseur’s acuteness; he is an accomplished amateur musician. He jogs. He dislikes chess. He was once photographed playing tennis with the Marx Brothers.
  He has devoted considerable thought to an attempt to define the sources of his genius. However, this attempt has led approximately nowhere. The mystery remains a mystery. He has therefore settled upon the following formula, which he repeats each time he is interviewed: “Historical forces.”
  • “The Genius”

• The government has decided to award the genius a few new medals—medals he has not been previously awarded. One medal is awarded for his work prior to 1936, one for his work from 1936 to the present, and one for his future work.
  • “The Genius”

• “I think that this thing, my work, has made me, in a sense, what I am. The work possesses a consciousness which shapes that of the worker. The work flatters the worker. Only the strongest worker can do this work, the work says. You must be a fine fellow, that you can do this work. But disaffection is also possible. The worker grows careless. The worker pays slight regard to the work, he ignores the work, he flirts with other work, he is unfaithful to the work. The work is insulted. And perhaps it finds little ways of telling the worker... The work slips in the hands of the worker—a little cut on the finger. You understand? The work becomes slow, sulky, consumes more time, becomes more tiring. The gaiety that once existed between the worker and the work has evaporated. A fine situation! Don’t you think?”
  • “The Genius”

• The genius has noticed that he does not interact with children successfully. (Anecdote)
  • “The Genius”

• Richness of the inner life of the genius:
  (1) Manic-oceanic states
  (2) Hatred of children
  (3) Piano playing
  (4) Subincised genitals
  (5) Subscription to Harper’s Bazaar
  (6) Stamp collection
  • “The Genius”

• The genius receives a very flattering letter from the University of Minnesota. The university wishes to become the depository of his papers, after he is dead. A new wing of the Library will be built to house them.
  The letter makes the genius angry. He takes a pair of scissors, cuts the letter into long thin strips, and mails it back to the Director of Libraries.
  • “The Genius”

• He takes long walks through the city streets, noting architectural details—particularly old ironwork. His mind is filled with ideas for a new— But at this moment a policeman approaches him. “Beg pardon, sir. Aren’t you—” “Yes,” the genius says, smiling. “My little boy is an admirer of yours,” the policeman says. He pulls out a pocket notebook. “If it’s not too much trouble...” Smiling, the genius signs his name.
  The genius carries his most important papers about with him in a green Sears, Roebuck toolbox.
  • “The Genius”

• He did not win the Nobel Prize again this year.
  It was neither the year of his country nor the year of his discipline. To console him, the National Foundation gives him a new house.
  • “The Genius”

• The genius meets with a group of students. The students tell the genius that the concept “genius” is not, currently, a popular one. Group effort, they say, is more socially productive than the isolated efforts of any one man, however gifted. Genius by its very nature sets itself over against the needs of the many. In answering its own imperatives, genius tends toward, even embraces, totalitarian forms of social organization. Tyranny of the gifted over the group, while bringing some advances in the short run, inevitably produces a set of conditions which—
  The genius smokes thoughtfully.
  • "The Genius"

• A giant brown pantechnicon disgorges the complete works of the Venerable Bede, in all translations, upon the genius’s lawn—a gift from the people of Cincinnati!
  • “The Genius”

• The genius is leafing through a magazine. Suddenly he us arrested by an advertisement:
  WHY DON’T YOU
  BECOME A
  PROFESSIONAL
  INTERIOR DECORATOR?
  Interior decoration is a high-income field, the advertisement says. The work is varied and interesting. One moves in a world of fashion, creativity, and ever-new challenge.
  The genius tears out the advertisement coupon.
  • “The Genius”

• Q: Is America a good place for genius?
  A: I have found America most hospitable to genius.
  • “The Genius”

• “I always say to myself, ‘What is the most important thing I can be thinking about at this minute?’ But then I don’t think about it.”
  • “The Genius”

• In the serenity of his genius, the genius reaches out to right wrongs—the sewer systems of cities, for example.
  • “The Genius”

• The genius is reading The Genius, a 736-page novel by Theodore Dreiser. He arrives at the last page:
  “ ‘What a sweet welter life is—how rich, how tender, how grim, how like a colorful symphony.’ ”
  “Great art dreams welled up into his soul as he viewed the sparkling deeps of space...”
  The genius gets up and looks at himself in a mirror.
  • “The Genius”

• An organization has been formed to appreciate his thought: the Blaufox Gesellschaft. Meetings are held once a month, in a room over a cafeteria in Buffalo, New York. He has always refused to have anything to do with the Gesellschaft, which reminds him uncomfortably of the Browning Society. However, he cannot prevent himself from glancing at the group’s twice-yearly Proceedings, which contains such sentences as “The imbuement of all reaches of the scholarly community with Blaufox’s views must, ab ovo, be our...”
  He falls into hysteria.
  • "The Genius"

• His driver’s license expires. But he does nothing about renewing it. He is vaguely troubled by the thought of the expired license (although he does not stop driving). But he loathes the idea of taking the examination again, of going physically to the examining station, of waiting in line for an examiner. He decides that if he writes a letter to the License Bureau requesting a new license, the bureau will grant him one without an examination because he is a genius. He is right. He writes the letter and the License Bureau sends him a new license, by return mail.
  • "The Genius"

• Moments of self-doubt...
  “Am I really a—”
  “What does it mean to be a—”
  “Can one refuse to be a—”
  • “The Genius”

• His worst moment: He is in a church, kneeling in a pew near the back. He is gradually made aware of a row of nuns, half a dozen, kneeling twenty feet ahead of him, their heads bent over their beads. One of the nuns however has turned her head almost completely around, and seems to be staring at him. The genius glances at her, glances away, then looks again: she is still staring at him. The genius is only visitng the church in the first place because the nave is said to be a particularly fine example of Burgundian Gothic. He places his eyes here, there, on the altar, on the stained glass, but each time they return to the nuns, his nun is still staring. The genius says to himself, This is my worst moment.
  • “The Genius”

• He is a drunk.
  • “The Genius”

• “A truly potent abstract concept avoids, resists closure. The ragged, blurred outlines of such a concept, like a net in which the fish have eaten large, gaping holes, permit entry and escape equally. What does one catch in such a net? The sea horse with a Monet in his mouth. How did the Monet get there? Is the value of the Monet less because it has gotten wet? Are there tooth marks in the Monet? Do sea horses have teeth? How large is the Monet? From which period? Is it a water lily or a group of water lilies? Do sea horses eat water lilies? Does Parke-Bernet know? Do oil and water mix? Is a mixture of oil and water bad for the digestion of the sea horse? Should art be expensive? Should artists wear beards? Ought beards be forbidden by law? Is underwater art better than overwater art? What does the experession ‘glad rags’ mean? Does it refer to Monet’s paint rags? In the Paris of 1878, what was the average monthly rent for a north-lit, spacious studio in an unfashionable district? If sea horses eat water lilies, what percent of their daily work energy, expressed in ergs, is generated thereby? Should the holes in the net be mended? In a fight between a sea horse and a flittermouse, which would you bet on? If I mend the net, will you forgive me? Do water rats chew upon the water lilies? Is there a water buffalo in the water cooler? If I fill my water gun to the waterline, can I then visit the watering place? Is fantasy an adequate substitute for correct behavior?”
  • “The Genius”

• The genius proposes a world inventory of genius, in order to harness and coordinate the efforts of genius everywhere to create a better life for all men.
  Letters are sent out...
  The response is staggering!
  Telegrams pour in...
  Geniuses of every stripe offer their cooperation.
  The Times prints an editorial praising the idea...
  Three thousand geniuses in one room!
  The genius falls into an ill humor. He refuses to speak to anyone for eight days.
  • “The Genius”

• But now a green Railway Express truck arrives at his door. It contains a field of stainless-steel tulips, courtesy of the Mayor and City Council of Houston, Texas. The genius signs the receipt, smiling...
  • “The Genius”; variant ending, from Forty Stories (1987): "But now a brown UPS truck arrives at his door. It contains a ceremonial sword (with inscription) forged in Toledo, courtesy of the Mayor and City Council of Toledo, Spain. The genius whips the blade about in the midmorning air, signing the receipt with his other hand..."

• Perpetua sat on the couch in her new apartment smoking dope with a handsome bassoon player. A few cats walked around.
  “Our art contributes nothing to the the revolution,” the bassoon player said. “We cosmetize reality.”
  “We are trustees of Form,” Perpetua said.
  “It is hard to make the revolution with a bassoon,” the bassoon player said.
  “Sabotage?” Perpetua suggested.
  “Sabotage would get me fired,” her companion replied. “The sabotage would be confused with ineptness any way.”
  I am tired of talking about the revolution, Perpetua thought.
  “Go away,” she said. The bassoon player put on his black raincoat and left.
  It is wonderful to be able to tell them to go away, she reflected. Then she said aloud, “Go away. Go away. Go away.”
  • “Perpetua"

• Perpetua went to her mother’s house for Christmas. Her mother was cooking the eighty-seventh turkey of her life. “God damn this turkey!” Perpetua’s mother shouted. “If anyone knew how I hate, loathe, and despise turkeys. If I had known that I would cook eighty-seven separate and distinct turkeys in my life, I would have split forty-four years ago. I would have been long gone for the tall timber.”
  Perpetua’s mother showed her a handsome new leather coat. “Tanned in the bile of matricides,” her mother said, with a meaningful look.
  • “Perpetua”

• I went to a party and corrected a pronunciation. The man whose voice I had adjusted fell back into the kitchen. I praised a Bonnard. It was not a Bonnard. My new glasses, I explained, and I’m terribly sorry, but significant variations elude me, vodka exhausts me, I was young once, essential services are being maintained.
  • “The Party”, opening

• Today we filmed the moon rocks. We set up in the moon Rock Room, at the Smithsonian. There they were. The moon rocks. The moon rocks were the greatest thing we had ever seen in our entire lives! The moon rocks were red, green, blue, yellow, black, and white. They scintillated, sparkled, glinted, glittered, twinkled, and gleamed. They produced booms, thunderclaps, explosions, clashes, splashes, and roars. They sat on a pillow of the purest Velcro, and people who touched the pillow were able to throw away their crutches and jump in the air. Four cases of gout and eleven instances of hyperbolic paraboloidism were cured before our eyes. The air rained crutches. The moon rocks drew you toward them with a fatal irresistibility, but at the same time held you at a seemly distance with a decent reserve. Peering into the moon rocks, you could see the future and the past in color, and you could change them in any way you wished. The moon rocks gave off a slight hum, which cleaned your teeth, and a brilliant glow, which absolved you from sin. The moon rocks whistled Finlandia, by Jean Sibelius, while reciting The Confessions of St. Augustine, by I.F. Stone. The moon rocks were as good as a meaningful and emotionally rewarding seduction that you had not expected. The moon rocks were as good as listening to what the members of the Supreme Court say to each other, in the Supreme Court Locker Room. They were as good as a war. The moon rocks were better than a presentation copy of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language signed by Geoffrey Chaucer himself. They were better than a movie in which the President refuses to tell the people what to do to save themselves from the terrible thing that is about to happen, although he knows what ought to be done and has written a secret memorandum about it. The moon rocks were better than a good cup of coffee from an urn decorated with the change of Philomel, by the barbarous king. The moon rocks were better than a ¡huelga! led by Mongo Santamaria, with additional dialogue by St. John of the Cross and special effects by Melmouth the Wanderer. The moon rocks surpassed our expectations. The dynamite out-of-sight very heavy and together moon rocks turned us on, to the highest degree. There was blood on our eyes, when we had finished filming them.
  • ”A Film”

"The Sandman", "The Catechist", "The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace", "The Rise of Capitalism" and "Daumier"

• ...what an artist does, is fail. Any reading of the literature... (I mean the literature of artistic creation), however summary, will persuade you instantly that the paradigmatic artistic experience is that of failure. The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition. There is something “out there” which cannot be brought “here”. This is standard. I don’t mean bad artists, I mean good artists. There is no such thing as a “successful artist” (except, of course, in worldly terms).
  • “The Sandman”

• (Parenthetically, the problem of analysts sleeping with their patients is well known and I understand that Susan has been routinely seducing you—a reflex, she can’t help it—throughout the analysis. I understand that there is a new splinter group of therapists, behaviorists of some kind, who take this to be some kind of ethic? Is this true? Does this mean that they do it only when they want to, or whether they want to or not? At a dinner party the other evening a lady analyst was saying that three cases of this kind had recently come to her attention and she seemed to think that this was rather a lot. The problem of maintaining mentorship is, as we know, not easy. I think you have done very well in this regard, and God knows it must have been difficult, given those skirts Susan wears that unbutton up to the crotch and which she routinely leaves unbuttoned to the third button.)
  Am I wandering too much for you? Bear with me. The world is waiting for the sunrise.
  • “The Sandman”

• He says: “Sunday the day of rest and worship is hated by all classes of men in every country to which the Word has been carried. Hatred of Sunday in London approaches one hundred percent. Hatred of Sunday in Rio produces suicides. Hatred of Sunday in Madrid is only appeased by the ritual slaughter of large black animals, in rings. Hatred of Sunday in Munich is the stuff of legend. Hatred of Sunday in Sydney in considered by the knowledgeable to be hatred of Sunday at its most exquisite.”
  • “The Cathechist”

• ”Would you say, originally, that you had a vocation? Heard a call?”
  “I heard many things. Screams. Suites for unaccompanied cello. I did not hear a call.”
  “Nevertheless—”
  “Nevertheless I went to the clerical-equipment store and purchased a summer cassock and a winter cassock. The summer cassock has short sleeves. I purchased a black hat.”
  • “The Catechist”

• We recruited fools for the show. We had spots for a number of fools (and in the big all-fool number that occurs immediately after the second act, some specialties). But fools are hard to find. Usually they don’t like to admit it. We settled for gowks, gulls, mooncalfs. A few babies, boobies, sillies, simps. A barmie was engaged, along with certain dumdums and beefheads. A noodle. When you see them all wandering around, under the colored lights, gibbering and performing miracles, you are surprised.
  • “The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace”

• In the summer of the show, grave robbers appeared in the show. Famous graves were robbed, before your eyes. Winding-sheets were unwound and things best forgotten were remembered. Sad themes were played by the band, bereft of its mind by the death of its tradition. In the soft evening of the show, a troupe of agoutis performed tax evasion atop tall, swaying yellow poles. Before your eyes.
  • “The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace”

• It is difficult to keep the public interested.
  The public demands new wonders piled on new wonders.
  Often we don’t know where our next marvel is coming from.
  The supply of strange ideas is not endless.
  The development of new wonders is not like the production of canned goods. Some things appear to be wonders in the beginning, but when you become familar with them, are not wonderful at all. Sometimes a seventy-five-foot highly paid cacodemon will raise only the tiniest ‘’frisson’’. Some of us have even thought of folding the show—closing it down. That thought has been gliding through the hallways and rehearsal rooms of the show.
  

The new volcano we have just placed under contract seems very promising...

• • “The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace”, conclusion

• Capitalism places every man in competition with his fellows for a share of the available wealth. A few people accumulate big piles, but most do not. The sense of community falls victim to this struggle. Increased abundance and prosperity are tied to growing "productivity". A hierarchy of functionaries interposes itself between the people and the leadership. The good of the private corporation is seen as prior to the public good. The world market system tightens control in the capitalist countries and terrorizes the Third World. All things are manipulated to these ends. The King of Jordan sits at his ham radio, inviting strangers to the palace. I visit my assistant mistress. "Well, Azalea," I say, sitting in the best chair, "what has happened to you since my last visit?" Azalea tells me what has happened to her. She has covered a sofa, and written a novel. Jack has behaved badly. Roger has lost his job (replaced by an electric eye). Gigi's children are in the hospital being detoxified, all three. Azalea herself is dying of love. I stroke her buttocks, which are perfection, if you can have perfection, under the capitalist system. "It is better to marry than to burn," St. Paul says, but St. Paul is largely discredited now, for the toughness of his views does not accord with the experience of advanced industrial societies. I smoke a cigar, to disoblige the cat.
  • “The Rise of Capitalism”

• I am not rich again this morning! I put my head between Marta’s breasts, to hide my shame.
  • “The Rise of Capitalism”

• Capitalism arose and took off its pajamas.
  • “The Rise of Capitalism”

• As a flower moves toward the florist, women move toward men who are not good for them. Self-actualization is not to be achieved in terms of another person, but you don’t know that, when you begin.
  • “The Rise of Capitalism”

• The imminent heat-death of the universe is not a bad thing, because it is a long way off.
  • “The Rise of Capitalism”

• I left Amelia’s place and entered the October afternoon. The afternoon was dying giving way to the dark night, yet some amount of sunglow still warmed the cunning-wrought cobbles of the street. Many citizens both male and female were hurring hither and thither on errands of importance, each agitato step compromising slightly the sheen of the gray fine-troweled sidewalk. Immature citizens in several sizes were massed before a large factorylike structure where advanced techniques transformed them into true-thinking right-acting members of the three social classes, lower, middle, and upper middle. Some number of these were engaged in ludic agon with basketballs, the same being hurled against passing vehicles producing an unpredictable rebound. Dispersed amidst the hurly and burly of the children were their tenders, shouting. Inmixed with this broil were ordinary denizens of the quarter—shopmen, rentiers, churls, sellers of various drugs, stum-drinkers, aunties, girls whose jeans had been improved with appliqué rose blossoms in the cleft of the buttocks, practicers of the priest hustle, and the like. Two officers of the Shore Patrol were hitting an imbecile Sea Scout with long shapely well-modeled nightsticks under the impression that they had jurisdiction. A man was swearing fine-sounding swearwords at a small yellow motorcar of Italian extraction, the same having joined its bumper to another bumper, the two bumpers intertangling like shameless lovers in the act of love. A man in the organic-vegetable hustle stood in the back of a truck praising tomatoes, the same being abulge with tomato-muscle and ablaze with minimum daily requirements. Several members of the madman profession made the air sweet with their imprecating and their moans and the subtle music of the tearing of their hair.
  • “Daumier”

• Then Daumier looked at Celeste and saw that the legs on her were as strong and sweet-shaped as ampersands and the buttocks on her were as pretty as two pictures and the waist on her was as neat and incurved as the waist of a fiddle and the shoulders on her were as tempting as sex crimes and the hair on her was as long and black as Lent and the movement of the whole was honey, and he sank into a swoon.
  • “Daumier”

Guilty Pleasures (1974) [non-fiction]

characterized by Tracy Daugherty as “a collection of Nixon satires, graphic collages, and social critiques” [Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme (2009), p. 384]

• LeDuff’s argument (in Shock Art #37) that an image, once floated on the international art-sea, is a fish that anyone may grab with impunity, and make it his own, would not persuade an oyster. Questions of primacy are not to be scumbled in this way, which, had he been writing from a European perspective, he would understand, and be ashamed. The brutality of the American rape of the world’s exhibition spaces and organs of art-information has distanciated his senses. The historical aspects have been adequately trodden by others, but there is one category yet to be entertained—that of the psychological. The fact that LeDuff is replicated in every museum, in every journal, that one cannot turn one’s gaze without bumping into this raw plethora, LeDuff, LeDuff, LeDuff (whereas poor Bruno, the true progenitor, is eating the tops of bunches of carrots)—what has this done to LeDuff himself? It has turned him into a dead artist, but the corpse yet bounces in its grave, calling attention toward itself in the most unseemly manner. But truth cannot be swallowed forever. When the real story of low optical stimulus is indited, Bruno will be rectified.
  • “Letters to the Editore”

The Dead Father (1975) [novel]

• The Dead Father’s head. The main thing is, his eyes are open. Staring up into the sky. The eyes a two-valued blue, the blues of the Gitanes cigarette pack. The head never moves. Decades of staring. The brow is noble, good Christ, what else? Broad and noble. And serene, of course, he’s dead, what else if not serene? From the tip of his finely shaped delicately nostriled nose to the ground, fall of five and one half meters, figure obtained by triangulation. The hair is gray but a young gray. Full, almost to the shoulder, it is possible to admire the hair for a long time, many do, on a Sunday or other holiday or in those sandwich hours neatly placed between fattish slices of work. Jawline compares favorably to a rock formation. Imposing, rugged, all that. The great jaw contains thirty-two teeth, twenty-eight of the whiteness of standard bathroom fixtures and four stained, the latter a consequence of addiction to tobacco, according to legend, this beige quartet to be found in the center of the lower jaw. He is not perfect, thank God for that. The full red lips drawn back in a slight rictus, slight but not unpleasant rictus, disclosing a bit of mackerel salad lodged between two of the stained four. We think it’s mackerel salad. It appears to be mackerel salad. In the sagas, it is mackerel salad.
  Dead, but still with us, still with us, but dead.
  • opening, pp. 9–10

• When I asked you to help me, [the Dead Father] said, it wasn’t because I needed help.
  Of course not, said Thomas.
  I’m doing this for you, essentially, the Dead Father said. For the general good, and thus, for you.
  Thomas said nothing.
  As so much else, said the Dead Father.
  Thomas said nothing.
  You never knew, said the Dead Father.
  Thomas turned his head.
  You told us, he said, repeatedly.
  Oh well yes I may have mentioned the odd initiative now and again. But you never knew. In the fullest sense. Because you are not a father.
  I am, Thomas said. You forget Elsie.
  Doesn’t count, said the Dead Father. A son can never, in the fullest sense, become a father. Some amount of amateur effort is possible. A son may after honest endeavor produce what some people might call, technically, children. But he remains a son. In the fullest sense.
  • pp. 45–46

• Best not to anticipate too much, said Thomas, it jiggles the possibilities.
  • p. 47

• And what did philosophy teach you? asked the Dead Father.
  It taught me that I have no talent for philosophy, said Thomas, bbbbbbut—
  But what?
  But I think everybody should have a little philosophy, Thomas said. It helps, a little. It helps. It is good. It is about half as good as music.
  • p. 76

• You see! Thomas exclaimed. There it is! Things are not simple. Error is always possible, even with the best intentions in the world. People make mistakes. Things are not done right. Right things are not done. There are cases which are not clear. You must be able to tolerate the anxiety. To do otherwise is to jump ship, ethics-wise.
  • p. 119

• Well there tall thin fellow, said Julie, why are you here?
  I heard there were strangers. We don’t often get strangers. I wanted to give it to you.
  Wanted to give what to us?
  He appears to be a dolt of some kind, Thomas said, sotto voce.
  The book, Peter said.
  What is it about?
  Peter had a frayed tattered disintegrating volume with showers of ratsnest falling out of it clutched to his chest.
  It is a manual, he said. Might be of some small use to you. On the other hand, might not.
  Are you the author? Julie asked
  Oh no, said Peter. I am the translator.
  From what language was it translated?
  It was translated from English, he said, into English.
  You must have studied English.
  Yes I did study English.
  Is it long? Thomas asked, looking at the thin book.
  It is not long, Peter said, and at the same time, too long.
  Then, furiously:
  Do you know what translators are paid?
  Not my fault, Julie said, as with much else in this world, not my fault.
  Pennies! Peter proclaimed.
  Are you selling us this book?
  No, Peter said, I am giving it to you as a gift. It is not worth selling.
  [...]
  Edition of forty, he said, printed originally on pieces of pumpernickel. This is the second edition.
  We must give you something, Thomas said. What can it be?
  You are strangers, Peter said. Your approval would be enough.
  You have it, Julie said. She kissed Peter on the forehead.
  I am justified, Peter said, for the time being. I can struggle on, for the time being. I am reified, for the time being.
  Exit of Peter.
  He didn’t ask much, said Thomas.
  His bargaining position is not the best, Julie said. He is a translator.
  They lay on their stomachs in the bed, looking at the book.
  The book was titled A Manual for Sons.
  The author was not credited.
  “Translated from the English by Peter Scatterpatter” was found on the title page.
  They began to read the book.
  • pp. 137–138

• Mad fathers stalk up and down the boulevards, shouting. Avoid them, or embrace them, or tell them your deepest thoughts—it makes no difference, they have deaf ears. If their dress is covered with sewn-on tin cans and their spittle is like a string of red boiled crayfish running head-to-tail down the front of their tin cans, serious impairment of the left brain is present. If, on the other hand, they are simply barking (no tin cans, spittle held securely in the pouch of the cheek), they have been driven to distraction by the intricacies of living with others. Go up to them, and, stilling their wooden clappers by putting your left hand between the hinged parts, say you’re sorry. If the barking ceases, this does not mean that they have heard you, it only means they are experiencing erotic thoughts of abominable luster. Permit them to enjoy these images for a space, and then strike them sharply in the nape with the blade of your tanned right hand. Say you’re sorry again. It won’t get through to them (because their brains are mush) but in pronouncing the words, your body will assume an attitude that conveys, in every country of the world, sorrow—this language they can understand. Gently feed them with bits of leftover meat you are carrying in your pockets. First hold the meat in front of their eyes, so that they can see what it is, and then point to their mouths, so that they know that the meat is for them. Mostly, they will open their mouths, at this point. If they do not, throw the meat in between barks. If the meat does not get all the way into the mouth but lands upon (say) the upper lip, hit them again in the neck, this often causes the mouth to pop open and the meat sticking to the upper lip to fall into the mouth. Nothing may work out in the way I have described; in this eventuality, you can do not much for the mad father except listen, for a while, to his babble. If he cries aloud, ”Stomp it, emptor!” then you must attempt to figure out the code. If he cries aloud, ”The fiends have killed your horse!” note down in your notebook the frequency with which the words “the” and “your” occur in his tirade. If he cries aloud, ”The cat’s in its cassock and flitter-to-hee moreso stomp it!” remember that he has already asked you once to “stomp it” and this must refer to something you are doing. So stomp it.
  • pp. 143–144, beginning of A Manual for Sons

• Son, I got bad news for you. You won’t understand the whole purport of it, ’cause you’re only six, and a little soft in the head too, that fontanelle never did close properly, I wonder why. But I can’t delay it any longer, son, I got to tell you the news. There ain’t no malice in it son, I hope you believe me. The thing is, you got to go to school, son, and get socialized. That’s the news. You’re turnin’ pale, son, I don’t blame you. It’s a terrible thing, but there it is. We’d socialize you here at home, your mother and I, except that we can’t stand to watch it, it’s that dreadful. And your mother and I who love you and always have and always will are a touch sensitive, son. We don’t want to hear your howls and screams. It’s going to be miserable, son, but you won’t hardly feel it. And I know you’ll do well and won’t run away and do anything to make us sad, your mother and I who love you. I know you’ll do well and won’t run away or fall down in fits either. Son, your little face is pitiful. Son, we can’t just let you roam the streets like some kind of crazy animal. Son, you got to get your natural impulses curbed. You’ve got to get your corners knocked off, son, you got to get realistic. They going to vamp you at that school, kid. They going to tear up your ass. They going to learn you how to think, you’ll get your letters there, your letters and your figures, your verbs and all that. Your mother and I could socialize you here at home but it would be too painful for your mother and I who love you. You’re going to meet the stick, son, the stick going to walk up to you and say howdy-do. You’re going to learn about your country at that school, son, oh beautiful for spacious skies. They going to lay just a raft of stuff on you at that school and I caution you not to resist, it ain’t appreciated. Just take it as it comes and you’ll be fine, son, just fine. You got to do right, son, you got to be realistic. They’ll be other kids in that school, kid, and ever’ last one of ’em will be after your lunch money. But don’t give ’em your lunch money, son, put it in your shoe. If they come up against you tell ’em the other kids already got it. That way you fool ’em, you see, son? What’s the matter with you? And watch out for the custodian, son, he’s mean. He don’t like his job. He wanted to be president of a bank. He’s not. It’s made him mean. Watch out for that sap he carries on his hip. Watch out for the teacher, son, she’s sour. Watch out for her tongue, it’ll cut you. She’s got a bad mouth on her, son, don’t balk her if you can help it. I got nothin’ against the schools, kid, they just doin’ their job. Hey kid what’s the matter with you kid? And if this school don’t do the job we’ll find one that can. We’re right behind you, son, your mother and I who love you. You’ll be gettin’ your sports there, your ball sports and your blood sports and watch out for the coach, he’s a disappointed man, some say a sadist but I don’t know about that. You got to develop your body, son. If they shove you, shove back. Don’t take nothin’ off nobody. Don’t show fear. Lay back and watch the guy next to you, do what he does. Except if he’s a damn fool. If he’s a damn fool you’ll know he’s a damn fool ’cause everybody’ll be hittin’ on him. Let me tell you ’bout that school, son. They do what they do ’cause I told them to do it. That’s why they do it. They didn’t think up those ideas their own selves. I told them to do it. Me and your mother who love you, we told them to do it. Behave yourself, kid! Do right! You’ll be fine there, kid, just fine. What’s the matter with you, kid? Don’t be that way. I hear the ice-cream man outside, son. You want to go and see the ice-cream man? Go get you an ice cream, son, and make sure you get your sprinkles. Go give the ice-cream man your quarter, son. And hurry back.
  • pp. 153–155

• Fathers and dandling: If a father fathers daughters, then our lives are eased. Daughters are for dandling, and are often dandled up until their seventeenth or eighteenth year. The hazard here, which must be faced, is that the father will want to sleep with his beautiful daughter, who is after all ‘’his’’ in a way that even his wife is not, in a way that even his most delicious mistress is not. Some fathers just say “Publish and be damned!” and go ahead and sleep with their new and amazingly sexual daughters, and accept what pangs accumulate afterward; most do not. Most fathers are sufficiently disciplined in this regard, by mental straps, so that the question never arises. When fathers are giving their daughters their “health” instruction (that is to say, talking to them about the reproductive process) (but this is most often done by mothers, in my experience) it is true that a subtle rinse of desire may be tinting the situation slightly (when you are hugging and kissing the small woman sitting on your lap it is hard to know when to stop, it is hard to stop yourself from proceeding as if she were a bigger woman not related to you by blood). But in most cases, the taboo is observed, and additional strictures imposed, such as, “Mary, you are never to allow that filthy John Wilkes Booth to lay a hand upon your bare, white, new breast.” Although in the modern age some fathers are moving rapidly in the other direction, toward the future, saying, “Here, Mary, here is your blue fifty-gallon drum of babykilling foam, with your initials stamped on it in a darker blue, see? there on the the top.” But the important thing about daughter-fathers is that, as fathers, they don’t count. Not to their daughters, I don’t mean—I have heard daughter-stories that would toast your hair—but to themselves. Fathers of daughters see themselves as ‘’hors concours’’ in the great exhibition, and this is a great relief. They do not have to teach hurling the caber. They tend, therefore, to take a milder, gentler hand (meanwhile holding on, with an iron grip, to all the fierce prerogatives that fatherhood of any kind conveys—the guidance system of a slap is an example). To say more than this about fathers of daughters us beyond me, even though I am the father of a daughter.
  • pp. 165–166

• The sexual organs of fathers: The penises of fathers are traditionally hidden from the inspection of those who are not “clubbable”, as the expression runs. These penises are magical, but not most of the time. Most of the time they are “at rest”. In the “at rest” position they are small, almost shriveled, and easily concealed in carpenter’s aprons, chaps, bathing suits, or ordinary trousers. Actually they are not anything that you would want to show anyone, in this state, they are rather like mushrooms or, possibly, large snails. The magic, at these times, resides in other parts of the father (fingertips, right arm) and not in the penis. Occasionally a child, usually a bold six-year-old daughter, will request permission to see it. This request should be granted, once. But only in the early morning, when you are in bed, and only when an early-morning erection is not present. Yes, let her touch it (lightly, of course), but briefly. Do not permit her to linger or get too interested. Be matter-of-fact, kind, and undramatic. Pretend, for the moment, that it is as mundane as a big toe. And then calmly, without unseemly haste, cover it up again. Remember that she is being allowed to “touch it”, not “hold it”; the distinction is important. About sons you must use your own judgment. It is injudicious (as well as unnecessary) to terrify them; you have many other ways of accomplishing that. Chancre is a good reason for not doing any of this. When the penises of fathers are semi-erect, titillated by some stray erotic observation, such as a glimpse of an attractive female hoof, bereft of its slipper, knowing smiles should be exchanged with the other fathers present (better: half smiles) and the matter let drop. Semi-erectness is a half measure, as Aristotle knew; that is why most of the penises in museums have been knocked off with a mallet. The original artificers could not bear the idea of Aristotle’s disapproval, and mutilated their work rather than merit the scorn of the great Peripatetic. The notion that this mutilation was carried out by later (Christian) “cleanup squads” is untrue, pure legend. The matter is as I have presented it. The excited, mad, fully erect penis should be displayed only to the one who has excited it, for his or her lips, for the kiss of amelioration. Many other things can be done with the penises of fathers, but these have already been adequately described by other people. The penises of fathers are in every respect superior to the penises of nonfathers, not because of size or weight or any consideration of that sort but because of a metaphysical “responsibility”. This is true even of poor, bad, or insane fathers. African artifacts reflect this special situation. Pre-Columbian artifacts, for the most part, do not.
  • pp. 173–175

• Patricide: Patricide is a bad idea, first because it contrary to law and custom and second because it proves, beyond a doubt, that the father’s every fluted accusation against you was correct: you are a thoroughly bad individual, a patricide!—member of a class of persons universally ill-regarded. It is all right to feel this hot emotion, but not to act upon it. And it is not necessary. It is not necessary to slay your father, time will slay him, that is a virtual certainty. Your true task lies elsewhere.
  • p. 179

Amateurs (1976) [short stories]

• It is good to be a member of the bourgeoisie,” he said. “A boy likes being a member of the bourgeoisie. Being a member of the bourgeoisie is good for a boy. It makes him feel warm and happy. He can worry about his plants. His green plants. His plants and his quiches. His property taxes. The productivity of his workers. His plants/quiches/property taxes/workers/Land Rover. His sword hilt. His”
  • “Our Work and Why We Do It”

• Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he’d gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far (he did not deny that he had gone too far) did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something everybody did sometimes. We didn’t pay much attention to this argument. We asked him what sort of music he would like played at the hanging. He said he’d think about it but it would take him awhile to decide. I pointed out that we’d have to know soon, because Howard, who is a conductor, would have to hire and rehearse the musicians and he couldn’t begin until he knew what the music was going to be. Colby said he’d always been fond of Ives’s Fourth Symphony. Howard said that this was a “delaying tactic” and that everybody knew that the Ives was almost impossible to perform and would involve weeks of rehearsal, and that the size of the orchestra and chorus would put us way over the music budget. “Be reasonable”, he said to Colby. Colby said he’d try to think of something a little less exacting.
  • “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby”, first paragraph

• 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 importat 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.
  • “At the End of the Mechanical Age”, opening

• “And do you, Anne,” the minister said, “promise to make whatever mutually satisfactory accommodations necessary to reduce tensions and arrive at whatever previously agreed-upon goals both parties have harmoniously set in the appropriate sessions?”
  “I do,” said Mrs. Davis.
  “And do you, Thomas, promise to explore all differences thoroughly with patience and inner honesty ignoring no fruitful avenues of discussion and seeking at all times to achieve rapprochement while eschewing advantage in conflict situations?”
  “I do,” I said.
  “Well, now we are married,” said Mrs. Davis, “I think I will retain my present name if you don’t mind, I have always been Mrs. Davis and your name is a shade graceless, no offense, dear.”
  “O.K.,” I said.
  • “At the End of the Mechanical Age”

• After the explanation came the divorce.
  “Will you be wanting to contest the divorce?” I asked Mrs. Davis.
  “I think not,” she said calmly, “although I suppose one of us should, for the fun of the thing. An uncontested divorce always seems to me contrary to the spirit of divorce.”
  “That is true,” I said. “I have had the same feeling myself, not infrequently.”
  • “At the End of the Mechanical Age”

• The Balloon Man won’t sell to kids.
  Kids will come up to the Balloon Man and say, “Give us a blue balloon, Balloon Man,” and the Balloon Man will say, “Get outa here kids, these balloons are adults-only.” And the kids will say, “C’mon, Balloon Man, give us a red balloon and a green balloon and a white balloon, we got the money.” "Don’t want any kid-money,” the Balloon Man will say, “kid-money is wet and nasty and makes your hands wet and nasty and then you wipe ’em on your pants and your pants get all wet and nasty and you sit down to eat and the chair gets all wet and nasty, let that man in the brown hat draw near, he wants a balloon.” And the kids will say, “Oh please Balloon Man, we want the yellow balloons that never pop, we want to make us a smithereen.” “Ain’t gonna make no smithereen outa my fine yellow balloons,” says the Balloon Man, “your red balloon will pop sooner and your green balloon will pop later but your yellow balloon will never pop no matter how you stomp on it or stick it and beside the Balloon Man don’t sell to kids, it’s against his principles.”
  • “The Great Hug”

• Balloon Man sells the Balloon of Fatigue and the Balloon of Ora Pro Nobis and the Rune Balloon and the Balloon of the Last Thing to Do at Night; these are saffron-, cinnamon-, salt-, and celery-colored, respectively. He sells the Balloon of Not Yet and the Balloon of Sometimes. He works the circus, every circus. Some people don’t go to the circus and so don’t meet the Balloon Man and don’t get to buy a balloon. That’s sad. Near to most people in any given city at any given time won’t be at the circus. That’s unfortunate. They don’t get to buy a brown, whole-life-long cherishable Sir Isaiah Berlin Balloon. “I don’t sell the Balloon Jejeune,” the Balloon Man will say, “let them other people sell it, let them people have all that wet and nasty kid-money mitosising in their sock. ...” Balloon Man sells the Balloon of Those Things I Should Have Done I Did Not Do, a beige balloon. And the Balloon of the Ballade of the Crazy Junta, crimson of course. Balloon Man stands in a light rain near the popcorn pushing the Balloon of Wish I Was, the Balloon of Busoni Thinking, the Balloon of the Perforated Septum, the Balloon of Not Nice. Which one is my balloon, Balloon Man? Is it the Balloon of the Cartel of Noise Makers? Is it the Balloon of God Knows I Tried?
  • “The Great Hug”

• Pin Lady tells the truth. Balloon Man doesn’t lie, exactly. How can the Quibbling Balloon be called a lie? Pin Lady is more straightforward, Balloon Man is less straightforward. Their stances are semiantireprophetical. They’re falling down the hill together, two falls out of three. Pin him, Pin Lady. Expand, Balloon Man. When he created our butter-colored balloon, we felt better. A little better. The event that had happened to us went floating out into the world, was made useful to others. The Balloon Man says, “I got here the Balloon of the Last Concert. It’s not a bad balloon. Some people won’t like it. Some people will like it. I got the Balloon of Too Terrible. Not every balloon can make you happy. Not every balloon can trigger glee. But I insist that these balloons have a right to be heard! Let that man in the black cloak step closer, he wants a balloon.
  “The Balloon of Perhaps. My best balloon.”
  • “The Great Hug”, conclusion

• So.
  The situation is, I agree, desperate. But fortunately I know the proper way to proceed. That is why I am giving you these instructions. They will save your life. First, persuade yourself that the situation is not desperate (my instructions will save your life only if you have not already hopelessly compromised it by listening to the instructions of others, or to the whispers of your heart, which is in itself suspect, in that it has been taught how to behave—how to whisper, even—by the very culture that has produced the desperate situation). Persuade yourself, I say, that your original perception of the situation was damaged by not having taken into account all of the variables (for example, my instructions) and that the imminent disaster that hangs in the sky above you can be, with justice, downgraded to the rank of severe inconvenience by the application of corrected thinking. Do not let what happened to the dog weaken your resolve.
  • “What to Do Next”, opening

• This morning, at the breakfast table, a fierce attack from the captured woman.
  I am a shit, a vain preener, a watcher of television, a blatherer, a creephead, a monstrous coward who preys upon etc. etc. etc. and is not man enough to etc. etc. etc. Also I drink too much.
  This is all absolutely true. I have often thought the same things myself, especially, for some reason, upon awakening.
  I have a little more Canadian bacon.
  “And a skulker,” she says with relish. “One who—”
  I fix her in the viewfinder of my Pentax and shoot a whole new series, Fierce.
  The trouble with capturing one is that the original gesture is almost impossible to equal or improve upon.
  • “The Captured Woman”

• The part of the story that came next was suddenly missing, I couldn’t think of it, so I went into the next room and drank a glass of water (my “and then” still hanging in the frangible air) as if this were the most natural thing in the world to do at that point, thinking that I would “make up” something, while in the other room, to put in place of that part of the anecdote that had fallen out of my mind, to keep the light glittering in his cautious eyes. And in truth I was getting a little angry with him now, not fiercely angry but slightly désabusé, because he had been standing very close to me, closer than I really like people to stand, the rims of his shoes touching the rims of my shoes, our belt buckles not four inches distant, a completely unwarranted impingement upon my personal space. And so I went, as I say, into the next room and drank a glass of water, trying to remember who he was and why I was talking to him, not that he wasn’t friendly, if by “friendly” you mean standing aggressively close to people with an attentive air and smiling teeth, that’s not what I mean by “friendly”, and it was right then that I decided to lie to him, although what I had been telling him previously was true, to the best of my knowledge and belief. But, faced now with this “gap” in the story, I decided to offer him a good-quality lie in place of the part I couldn’t remember, a better strategy, I felt, than simply stopping, leaving him with a maimed, not-whole anecdote, violating his basic trust, simple faith, or personhood even, for all I knew. But the lie had to be a good one, because if your lie is badly done it makes everyone feel wretched, liar and lied-to alike plunged into the deepest lackadaisy, and everyone just feels like going into the other room and drinking a glass of water, or whatever is available there, whereas if you can lie really well then you get dynamic results, 35 percent report increased intellectual understanding, awareness, insight, 40 percent report more tolerance, acceptance of others, liking for self, 29 percent report they receive more personal and more confidentual information from people and that others become more warm and supportive toward them—all in consequence of a finely orchestrated, carefully developed untruth. And while I was thinking about this, counting my options, I noticed that he was a policeman, had in fact a dark-blue uniform, black shoes, a badge and a gun, a policeman’s hat, and I noticed also that my testicles were aching, as they sometimes do if you sit too long in a uncomfortable or strained position, but I had been standing and then I understood, in a flash, that what he wanted from me was not to hear the “next” part of my story, or anecdote, but that I give my harpsichord to his wife as a present.
  • —“And Then”, opening paragraph

• ...it is true that I was at the wedding, but only to raise my voice and object when the minister came to that part of the ceremony where he routinely asks for objections, “Yes!” I shouted, “she’s my mother. And although she is a widow, and legally free, she belongs to me in my dreams!” but I was quickly hushed up by a quartet of plainclothesmen, and the ceremony proceeded. But what is the good of a mother if she is another man’s wife, as they mostly are, and not around in the morning to fix your buckwheat cakes or Rice Krispies, as the case may be, and in the evening to argue with you about your vegetables, and in the middle of the day to iron your shirts and clean up your rooms, and at all times to provide intimations of ease and bliss (however misleading and ill-founded)...
  • —“And Then”

• Music from somewhere. It is Vivaldi’s great work, The Semesters.
  The students wandered among the exhibits. The Fisher King was there. We walked among the industrial achievements. A good-looking gas turbine, behind a velvet rope. The manufacturers described themselves in their literature as “patient and optimistic”. The students gazed, and gaped. Hitting them with ax handles is no longer permitted, hugging and kissing them is no longer permitted, speaking to them is permitted but only under extraordinary circumstances.
  • “The Educational Experience”, opening

• Here is a diode, learn what to do with it. Here is Du Guesclin, constable of France 1370–80—learn what to do with him. A divan is either a long cushioned seat or a council of state—figure out at which times it is what. Certainly you can have your dangerous drugs, but only for dessert—first you must chew your cauliflower, finish your fronds.
  • “The Educational Experience”

• “Do you think intelligent life exists outside this bed?” one student asked another, confused as to whether she was attending the performance, or part of it.
  • “The Educational Experience”

• And Sergeant Preston of the Yukon was there in his Sam Browne belt, he was copulating violently but copulating with no one, that’s always sad to see. Still it was a “nice try” and in that sense inspirational, a congratulation to the visible universe for being what it is.
  • “The Educational Experience”

• “The world is everything that was formerly the case,” the group leader said, “and now it is time to get back on the bus.” Then all of the guards rushed up and demanded their bribes. We paid them with soluble travelers checks and hoped for rain, hoped for rodomontade, braggadocio, blare, bray, fanfare, flourish, tucket.
  • “The Educational Experience”, conclusion

• “I’m depressed,” Kate said.
  Boots became worried. “Did I say something wrong?”
  “You don’t know how to say anything wrong.”
  “What?”
  “The thing about you is, you’re dull.”
  “I’m dull?”
  There was a silence. Then Fog said: “Anybody want to go over to Springs to the rodeo?”
  “Me?” Boots said. “Dull?”
  The Judge got up and went over and sat down next to Kate.
  “Now Kate, you oughtn’t to be goin’ ’round callin’ Boots dull to his face. That’s probably goin’ to make him feel bad. I know you didn’t mean it, really, and Boots knows it too, but he’s gonna feel bad anyhow—”
  “How ’bout the rodeo, over at Springs?” Fog asked again.
  The Judge gazed sternly at his friend, Fog.
  “—he’s gonna feel bad, anyhow,” the Judge continued, “just thinkin’ you mighta meant it. So why don’t you just tell him you didn’t mean it.”
  “I did mean it.”
  “Aw come on, Katie. I know you mean what you say, but why make trouble? You can mean what you say, but why not say something else? On a nice day like this?”
  The dry and lifeless air continued parching the concrete-like ground.
  • “The Discovery”, opening

• Rebecca Lizard was trying to change her ugly, reptilian, thoroughly unacceptable last name.
  “Lizard,” said the judge. “Lizard, Lizard, Lizard. Lizard. There’s nothing wrong with it if you say it enough times. You can’t clutter up the court’s calendar with trivial minor irritations. And there have been far too many people changing their names lately. Changing your name countervails the best interests of the telephone company, the electric company, and the United States government. Motion denied.”
  Lizard in tears.
  Lizard led from the courtroom. A chrysanthemum of Kleenex held under her nose.
  “Shaky lady,” said a man, “are you a schoolteacher?”
  Of course she’s a schoolteacher, you idiot. Can’t you see the poor woman’s all upset? Why don’t you leave her alone?
  “Are you a homosexual lesbian? Is that why you never married?”
  Christ, yes, she’s a homosexual lesbian, as you put it. Would you please shut your face?
  Rebecca went to the damned dermatologist (a new damned dermatologist), but he said the same thing the others had said. “Greenish,” he said, “slight greenishness, genetic anomaly, nothing to be done, I’m afraid, Mrs. Lizard.”
  “Miss Lizard.”
  “Nothing to be done, Miss Lizard.”
  “Thank you, Doctor. Can I give you a little something for your trouble?”
  “Fifty dollars.”
  When Rebecca got home the retroactive rent increase was waiting for her, coiled in her mailbox like a pupil about to strike.
  • “Rebecca”, opening

• Very often one “pushes away” the very thing that one most wants to grab, like a lover. This is a common, although distressing, psychological mechanism, having to do (in my opinion) with the fact that what is presented is not presented “purely”, that there is a little canker or grim place in it somewhere. However, worse things can happen.
  • “Rebecca”

• ...truth, as Bergson knew, is a hard apple, whether one is throwing it or catching it.
  • “Rebecca”

• Do I want to be loved in spite of? Do you? Does anyone? But aren’t we all, to some degree? Aren’t there important parts of all of us which must be, so to say, gazed past? I turn a blind eye to that aspect of you, and you turn a blind eye to that aspect of me, and with these blind eyes eyeball-toeyeball, to use an expression from the early 1960’s, we continue our starched and fragrant lives. Of course it’s also called “making the best of things”, which I have always considered a rather soggy idea for an American ideal. But my criticisms of this idea must be tested against those others—the late President McKinley, for example, who maintained that maintaining a good, if not necessarily sunny, disposition was the one valuable and proper course.
  • “Rebecca”

• Hilda placed her hands on Rebecca’s head.
  “The snow is coming,” she said. “Soon it will be snow time. Together then as in other snow times. Drinking busthead ’round the fire. Truth is a locked room that we knock the lock off from time to time, and then board up again. Tomorrow you will hurt me, and I will inform you that you have done so, and so on and so on. To hell with it. Come, viridian friend, come and sup with me.”
  • “Rebecca”

• “Warp.”
  “In the character?”
  “He warp ever’ which way.”
  “You don’t think we should consider him, then.”
  “My friend Shel McPartland whom I have known deeply and intimately and too well for more than twenty years, is, sir, a brilliant O.K. engineer-master builder cum-city and state planner. He’ll plan your whole cottonpickin’ state for you, if you don’t watch him. Right down to the flowers on the sideboard in the the governor’s mansion. He’ll choose marginalia.”
  “I sir am not familiar sir with that particular bloom sir.”
  “Didn’t think you would be, you bein’ from Arkansas and therefore likely less than literate. You are the Arkansas State Planning Commission, are you not?”
  “I am one of it. Mr. McPartland gave you as a reference.”
  “Well sir let me tell you sir that my friend Shel McPartland who has incautiously put me down as a reference has a wide-ranging knowledge of all modern techniques, theories, dodges, orthodoxies, heresies, new and old innovations, and scams of all kinds. The only thing about him is, he warp.”
  • “The Reference”, opening

• You eavesdrop in three languages. Has no one ever told you not to pet a leashed dog? We wash your bloody hand with Scotch from the restaurant.
  Children. I want one, you say, pointing to the mother pushing a pram. And there’s not much time. But the immense road-mending machine (yellow) cannot have children, even though it is a member of the family, it has siblings—the sheep’s-foot roller, the air hammer.
  You ask: Will there be fireworks?
  I would never pour lye in your eyes, you say.
  Where would you draw the line? I ask. Top Job?
  Shall we take a walk? Is there a trout stream? Can one rent a car? Is there dancing? Sailing? Dope? Do you know Saint-Exupéry? Wind? Sand? Stars? Night flight?
  You don’t offer to cook dinner for me again today.
  • “You Are as Brave as Vincent Van Gogh”, opening

Great Days (1979) [short stories]

• —On the dedication page of the rebellion, we see the words “To Clementine”. A fine sentiment, miscellaneous organ music next, and, turning several pages, massed orange flags at the head of the column. This will not be easy, but neither will it be hard. Good will is everywhere, and the lighthearted song of the gondoliers is heard in the distance.
  —Yes, success is everything. Morally important as well as useful in a practical way.
  —What have the rebels captured thus far? One zoo, not our best zoo, and a cemetery. The rebels have entered the cages of the tamer animals and are playing with them, gently.
  —Things can get better, and in my opinion will.
  —Their Graves Registration procedures are scrupulous—accurate and fair.
  —There’s more to it than playing guitars and clapping along. Although that frequently gets people in the mood.
  —Their methods are direct, not subtle. Dissolution, leaching, sandblasting, cracking and melting of fireproof doors, condemnation, water damage, slide presentations, clamps and buckles.
  —And skepticism, although absolutely necessary, leads to not very much.
  • “The Crisis”, opening

• The present goal of the individual in group enterprises is to avoid dominance; leadership is felt to be a character disorder.
  • “The Crisis”

• As a magician works with the unique compressibility of doves, finding some, losing others in the same silk foulard, so the rebels fold scratchy, relaxed meanings into their smallest actions.
  • “The Crisis”

• Self-criticism sessions were held, but these produced more criticism than could usefully be absorbed or accomodated.
  • “The Crisis”

• William I’m sorry I let my brother hoist you up the mast in that crappy jury-rigged bosun’s chair while everybody laughed! William I’m sorry I could build better fires than you could! I’m sorry my stack of Christmas cards was always bigger than yours! ... William I’m sorry I invented bop jogging which you couldn’t do! I’m sorry I loved Antigua! I’m sorry my mind wandered when you talked about the army! I’m sorry I was superior in argument! I’m sorry you slit open my bicycle tires looking for incriminating letters that you didn’t find! You’ll never find them! ... William! I’m sorry I looked at Sam but he was so handsome, so handsome, who could not! I’m sorry I slept with Sam! I’m sorry about the library books! I’m sorry about Pete! I’m sorry I never played the guitar you gave me! I’m sorry I married you and I’ll never so it again!
  • “The Apology”

• —What did you do today?
  —Went to the grocery store and Xeroxed a box of English muffins, two pounds of ground veal and an apple. In flagrant violation of the Copyright Act.
  —You had your nap, I remember that—
  —I had my nap.
  —Lunch, I remember that, there was lunch, slept with Susie after lunch, then your nap, woke up, right?, went Xeroxing, right?, read a book not a whole book but part of a book—
  —Talked to Happy on the telephone saw the seven o’clock news did not wash dishes want to clean up some of this mess?
  —If one does nothing but listen to the new music, everything else drifts, frays. Did Odysseus feel this way when he and Diomedes decided to steal Athene’s statue from the Trojans, so that they would become dejected and lose the war? I don’t think so, but who is to know what effect the new music of that remote time had on its hearers?
  —Or how it compares to the new music of this time?
  —One can only conjecture.
  • “The New Music”, opening

• —Is it permitted to differ with Kierkegaard?
  —Not only permitted but necessary. If you love him.
  • “The Leap”

• —There’s a thing the children say.
  —What do the children say?
  —They say: Will you always love me?
  —Always.
  —Will you always remember me?
  —Always.
  —Will you remember me a year from now?
  —Yes, I will.
  —Will you remember me two years from now?
  —Yes, I will.
  —Will you remember me five years from now?
  —Yes, I will.
  —Knock, knock.
  —Who’s there?
  —You see?
  • “Great Days”, conclusion

Sixty Stories (1981)

featuring nine stories previously uncollected

• Do they lie? Fervently. Do they steal? Only silver and gold. Do they remember? I am in constant touch. Hardly a day passes. The children. Some can’t spell, still. Took a walk in the light-manufacturing district, where everything’s been converted. Lots of little shops, wine bars. Saw some strange things. Saw a group of square steel plates arranged on a floor. Very interesting. Saw a Man Mountain Dean dressed in heavenly blue. Wild, chewing children. They were small. Petite. Out of scale. They came and went. Doors banging. They were of different sexes but wore similar clothes. Wandered away, then they wandered back. They’re vague, you know, they tell you things in a vague way. Asked me to leave, said they’d had enough. Enough what? I asked. Enough of my lip, they said. Although the truth was that I had visited upon them only the palest of apothegms—the one about the salt losing its savor, the one about the fowls of the air. Went for a walk, whistling. Saw a throne in a window. I said: What chair is this? Is it the one great Ferdinand sat in, when he sent the ships to find the Indies? The seat is frayed. Hardly a day passes without an announcement of some kind of marriage, a pregnancy, a cancer, a rebirth. Sometimes they drift in from the Yukon and other far places, come in and sit down at the kitchen table, want a glass of milk and a peanut-butter-and-jelly, I oblige, for old times’ sake. Sent me the schedule for the Little League soccer teams, they’re all named after cars, the Mustangs vs. the Mavericks, the Chargers vs. the Impalas. Something funny about that. My son. Slept with What’s-Her-Name, they said, while she was asleep, I don’t think that’s fair. Prone and helpless in the glare of the headlights. They went away, then they came back, at Christmas and Eastertide, had quite a full table, maybe a dozen in all including all the little...partners they’d picked up on their travels.... Snatch them baldheaded, slap their teeth out. Little starved faces four feet from the screen, you’d speak to them in a loud, commanding voice, get not even a twitch. Use of the peemptive splint, not everyone knows about it. The world reminds us of its power, again and again and again. Going along minding yoiur own business, and suddenly an act of God, right there in front of you. Great falls of snow and bursting birds. Getting guilty, letting it all slide. Sown here and there like little...petunias, one planted in Old Lyme, one in Fairbanks, one in Tempe. Alleged that he slept with her while she was asleep, I can see it, under certain circumstances. You may wink, but not at another person. You may wink only at pigeons. You may pound in your tent pegs, pitch your tent, gather wood for the fire, form the hush puppies. They seek to return? Back to the nest? The warm arms? The ineffable smells? Not on your tintype. Well, I think that’s a little harsh. Think that’s a little harsh do you? Yes, harsh. Harsh. Well that’s a sketch, that is, that’s a tin-plated sketch— They write and telephone. Short of cash? Give us a call, all inquiries handled with the utmost confidentiality. They call constantly, they’re calling still, saying williwaw, williwaw—
  • “Aria”, first paragraph of two

• Naked girls with the heads of Marx and Malraux prone and helpless in the glare of the headlights, tried to give them a little joie de vivre but maybe it didn’t take, their constant bickering and smallness, it’s like a stroke of lightning, the world reminds you of its power, tracheotomies right and left, I am spinning, my pretty child, don’t scratch, pick up your feet, the long nights, spent most of my time listening, this is a test of the system, this is only a test.
  • “Aria”, conclusion

• Where is my daddy? asked the emerald. My da?
  Moll dropped a glass, which shattered.
  Your father.
  Yes, said the emerald, amn’t I supposed to have one?
  He’s not here.
  Noticed that, said the emerald.
  I’m never sure what you know and what you don’t know.
  I ask in true perplexity.
  He was Deus Lunus. The moon god. Sometimes thought of as the man in the moon.
  Bosh! said the emerald. I don’t believe it.
  Do you believe I’m your mother?
  I do.
  Do you believe you’re an emerald?
  I am an emerald.
  Used to be, said Moll, women wouldn’t drink from a glass into which the moon had shone. For fear of getting knocked up.
  Surely this is a superstition?
  Hoo, hoo, said Moll. I like superstition.
  I thought the moon was female.
  Don’t be culture-bound. It’s been female in some cultures at some times, and in others, not.
  What did it feel like? The experience.
  Not a proper subject for discussion with a child.
  The emerald sulking. Green looks here and there.
  Well it wasn’t the worst. Wasn’t the worst. I had an orgasm that lasted three hours. I judge that not the worst.
  • “The Emerald”

• Tell me, said the emerald, what are diamonds like?
  I know little of diamonds, said Moll.
  Is a diamond better than an emerald?
  Apples and oranges I would say.
  Would you have preferred a diamond?
  Nope.
  Diamond-hard, said the emerald, that’s an expression I’ve encountered.
  Diamonds are a little ordinary. Decent, yes. Quiet, yes. But gray. Give me step-cut zircons, square-shaped spodumenes, jasper, sardonyx, bloodstones, Baltic amber, cursed opals, peridots of your own hue, the padparadscha sapphire, yellow chrysoberyls, the shifty tourmaline, cabochons... But best of all, an emerald.
  But what is the meaning of the emerald? asked Lily. I mean overall? If you can say.
  I have some notions, said Moll. You may credit them or not.
  Try me.
  It means, one, that the gods are not yet done with us.
  Gods not yet done with us.
  The gods are still trafficking with us and making interventions of this kind and that kind and are not dormant or dead as has often been proclaimed by dummies.
  Still trafficking. Not dead.
  Just as in former times a demon might enter a nun on a piece of lettuce she was eating so even in these times a simple Mailgram might be the thin edge of the wedge.
  Thin edge of the wedge.
  Two, the world may congratulate itself that desire can still be raised in the dulled hearts of the citizens by the rumor of an emerald.
  Desire or cupidity?
  I do not distinguish among the desires, we have referees for that, but he who covets not at all is a lump and I do not wish to have him to dinner.
  Positive attitude toward desire.
  Yes. Three, I do not know what this Stone portends, whether it portends for the better or portends for the worse or merely portends a bubbling of the in-between but you are in any case rescued from the sickliness of same and a small offering in the hat on the hall table would not be ill regarded.
  And what now? said the emerald. What now, beautiful mother?
  We resume the scrabble for existence, said Moll. We resume the scrabble for existence, in the sweet of the here and now.
  • “The Emerald”, conclusion

Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1983) [short stories]

• They called for more structure, then, so we brought in some big hairy four-by-fours from the back shed and nailed them into place with railroad spikes. This new city, they said, was going to be just jim-dandy, would make architects stutter, would make Chambers of Commerce burst into flame. We would have our own witch doctors, and strange gods aplenty, and site-specific sins, and humuhumunukunukuapuaa in the public fish bowls. We workers listened with our mouths agape. We had never heard anything like it. But we trusted our instincts and our paychecks, so we pressed on, bringing in color-coated steel from the back shed and anodized aluminum from the shed behind that. Oh radiant city! we said to ourselves, how we want you to be built! Workplace democracy was practiced on the job, and the clerk-of-the-works (who had known Wiwi Lönn in Finland) wore a little cap with a little feather, very jaunty. There was never any question of hanging back (although we noticed that our ID cards were of a color different from their ID cards); the exercise of our skills, and the promise of the city, were enough. By the light of the moon we counted our chisels and told stories of other building feats we had been involved in: Babel, Chandigarh, Brasília, Taliesin.
  • “They called for more structure...”

• Walking down West Broadway on a Saturday afternoon. Barking art caged in the high white galleries, don’t go inside or it’ll get you, leap into your lap and cover your face with kisses. Some goes to the other extreme, snarls and shows its brilliant teeth. O art I won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt me. Citizens parading, plump-faced and bone-faced, lightly clad. A young black boy toting a Board of Education trombone case. A fellow with oddly-cut hair the color of marigolds and a roll of roofing felt over his shoulder.
  Bishop in the crowd, thirty dollars in his pocket in case he has to buy a pal a drink.
  Into a gallery because it must be done. The artist’s hung twenty EVERLAST heavy bags in rows of four, you’re invited to have a bash. People are giving the bags every kind of trouble. Bishop, unable to resist, bangs one with his fabled left, and hurts his hand.
  Bloody artists.
  • “Visitors”

• “Actually I can’t stand artists,” she says.
  “Like who in particular?”
  “Like that woman who puts chewing gum on her stomach—”
  “She doesn’t do that anymore. And the chewing gum was not poorly placed.”
  “And that other one who cuts off parts of himself, whittles on himself, that fries my ass.”
  “It’s supposed to.”
  “Yeah,” she says, shaking the ice in her glass. “I’m reacting like a bozo.”
  • “Visitors”

• Connors decided that “Shall we get married?” was an inappropriate second remark to make to one newly met, but it was a very tough decision.
  • “Lightning”

• November 13, 1823
  I was walking home from the theatre with Goethe this evening when we saw a small boy in a plum-colored waistcoat. Youth, Goethe said, is the silky apple butter on the good brown bread of possibility.
  • “Conversations with Goethe”, opening

• Food, said Goethe, is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence.
  • “Conversations with Goethe”

• Music, said Goethe, is the frozen tapioca in the ice sheet of History.
  • “Conversations with Goethe”

• The English, Goethe said in parting, are the shining brown varnish on the sad chiffonier of civilization.
  • “Conversations with Goethe”

• Art, Goethe said, is the four percent interest on the municipal bond of life. He was very pleased with this remark and repeated it several times.
  • "Conversations with Goethe"

• Goethe had been having great difficulties with a particular actress at the theatre, a person who conceived that her own notion of how her role was to be played was superior to Goethe’s. “It is not enough,” he said, sighing, “that I have mimed every gesture for the poor creature, that nothing has been left unexplored in this character I myself have created, willed into being. She persists in what she terms her ‘interpretation’, which is ruining the play.” He went on to discuss the sorrows of managing a theatre, even the finest, and the exhausting detail that must be attended to, every jot and tittle, if the performances are to be fit for a discriminating public. Actors, he said, are the Scotch weevils in the salt pork of honest effort. I loved him more than ever, and we parted with an affectionate handshake.
  • “Conversations with Goethe”

• September 1, 1824
  Today Goethe inveighed against certain critics who had, he said, completely misunderstood Lessing. He spoke movingly about how such obtuseness had partially embittered Lessing’s last years, and speculated that it was because Lessing was both critic and dramatist that the attacks had been of more than usual ferocity. Critics, Goethe said, are the cracked mirror in the grand ballroom of the creative spirit. No, I said, they were rather, the extra baggage on the great cabriolet of conceptual progress. “Eckermann,” said Goethe, “shut up.”
  • “Conversations with Goethe”, conclusion

• Alexandra was reading Henrietta’s manuscript.
  “This”, she said, pointing with her finger, “is inane.”
  Henrietta got up and looked over Alexandra’s shoulder at the sentence.
  “Yes”, she said, “I prefer the inane, sometimes. The ane is often inutile to the artist.”
  There was a moment of contemplation.
  “I have been offered a thousand florins for it,” Henrietta said. “The Dutch rights.”
  “How much is that in our money?”
  “Two hundred sixty-six dollars.”
  “Bless Babel,” Alexandra said, and took her friend in her arms.
  • “Henrietta and Alexandra”, opening

• Henrietta stood up and, with a heaving motion, threw the manuscript of her novel into the fire. The manuscript of the novel she had been working on ceaselessly, night and day, for the last ten years.
  “Alexandra! Aren’t you going to rush to the fire and pull the manuscript of my novel out of it?”
  “No.”
  Henrietta rushed to the fire and pulled the manuscript out of it. Only the first and last pages were fully burned, and luckily, she remembered what was written there.
  Henrietta decided that Alexandra did not love her enough. And how could nuances of despair be expressed if you couldn’t throw your novel into the fire safely?
  • “Henrietta and Alexandra”

• Speaking of the human body, Klee said: One bone alone achieves nothing.
  Pondering this, the people placed lamps on all of the street corners, and sofas next to the lamps. People sat on the sofas and read Spinoza there, an interesting glare cast on the pages by the dithering inconstant traffic lights. At other points, on the street, four-poster beds were planted, and loving couples slept or watched television together, the sets connected to the empty houses behind them by long black cables. Elsewhere, on the street, conversation pits were chipped out of the concrete, floored with Adams rugs, and lengthy discussions were held. Do we really need a War College? was a popular subject. Favorite paintings were lashed to the iron railings bordering the sidewalks, a Gainsborough, a van Dongen, a perfervid evocation of Umbrian mental states, an important dark-brown bruising of Arches paper by a printer of modern life.
  • “Speaking of the human body...”, opening

• Inside the abandoned houses subway trains rushed in both directions and genuine nameless animals ate each other with ghastly fervor—
  • “Speaking of the human body...”

• This morning in the mail I received an abusive letter from a woman in Prague
  Dear Greasy Thomas:
  You cannot understand what a pig you are. You are a pig, you idiot. You think you understand things but there is nothing you understand, nothing, idiot pig-swine. You have not wisdom and you have not discretion and nothing can be done without wisdom and discretion. How did a pig-cretin like yourself ever wriggle into life? Why do you still exist, vulgar swine? If you don’t think I am going to inform the government of your inapproprite continued existence, a stain on the country’s face... You can expect Federal Marshals in clouds very soon, cretin-hideous-swine, and I will laugh as they haul you away in their green vans, ugly toad. You know nothing about anything, garbage-face, and the idea that you would dare “think” for others (I know you are not capable of “feeling”) is so wildly outrageous that I would laugh out loud if I were not sick of your importunate posturing, egregious fraud-pig. You are not even an honest pig which is at least of some use in the world, you are rather an ocean of pig-dip poisoning everything you touch. I do not like you at all.
  Love,
  Jinka
  • “The Sea of Hesitation”

• I left Francesca and walked in the park, where I am afraid to walk, after dark. One must let people do what they want to do, but what if they want to slap you upside the head with a Stillson wrench and take the credit cards out of your pockets? A problem.
  The poor are getting poorer. I saw a poor man and asked him if he had any money.
  “Money?” he said. “Money thinks I died a long time ago.”
  We have moved from the Age of Anxiety to the Age of Fear. This is of course progress, psychologically speaking. I intend no irony.
  • “The Sea of Hesitation”

• Wittgenstein was I think wrong when he said that about that which we do not know, we should not speak. He closed by fiat a great amusement park, there. Nothing gives me more pleasure than speaking about that which I do not know. I am not sure whether my ideas about various matters are correct or incorrect, but speak about them I must.
  • “The Sea of Hesitation”

• There is no moment that exceeds in beauty that moment when one looks at a woman and finds that she is looking at you in the same way that you are looking at her. The moment in which she bestows that look that says, “Proceed with your evil plan, sumbitch.” The initial smash of glance on glance. Then, the drawing near. This takes a long time, it seems like months, although only minutes pass, in fact. Languor is the word that describes this part of the process. Your persona floats toward her persona, over the Sea of Hesitation. Many weeks pass before they meet, but the weeks are days, or seconds. Still, everything is decided. You have slept together in the glance.
  She takes your arm and you leave the newspaper stand, walking very close together, so that your side brushes her side slightly. Desire is here a very strong factor, because you are weak with it, and the woman is too, if she has any sense at all (but of course she is a sensible woman, and brilliant and witty and hungry as well). So, on the sidewalk outside the newstand, you stand for a moment thinking about where to go, at eleven o’clock in the morning, and here it is, in the sunlight, that you take your first good look at her, and she at you, to see if ether one has any hideous blemish that has been overlooked, in the first rush of good feeling. There are none. None. No blemishes (exept those spiritual blemishes that will be discovered later, after extended acquaintance, and which none of us are without, but which are low latent? dormant? in any case, not visible on the surface, at this time). Everyuthing is fine. And so, with renewed confidence, you begin to walk, and to seek a place where you might sit down, and have a drink, and talk a bit, and fall into each other’s eyes, temporarily, and find some pretzels, and have what is called a conversation, and tell each other what you think is true about he world, and speak of the strange places where each of you has been (Surinam, in her case, where she bought the belt she is wearing, Lima in your case, where you contracted telegraph fever), and make arrangements for your next meeting (both of you drinking Scotch and water, at eleven in the morning, and you warm to her because of her willingness to leave her natural mid-morning track, for you), and make, as I say, arrangements for your next meeting, which must be this very night! or you both will die—
  • “The Sea of Hesitation”

• The funniest thing in the world is a general trying on a nickname.
  • “Overnight to Many Distant Cities”

• On another evening, as we were on our way to dinner, I kicked the kid with carefully calibrated force as we were crossing the Pont Mirabeau, she had been pissy all day, driving us crazy, her character improved instantly, wonderfully, this is a tactic that can be used exactly once.
  • “Overnight to Many Distant Cities”

• Show me a man who has not married a hundred times and I’ll show you a wretch who does not deserve God’s good world.
  • “Overnight to Many Distant Cities”

Paradise (1986) [novel]

• After the women had gone Simon began dreaming with new intensity. He dreamed that he was a slave on a leper island, required to clean the latrines and pile up dirty-white shell for the roads, wheelbarrow after wheelbarrowful, then rake the shell smooth and jump uo and down on it until it was packed solid. The lepers did not allow him to wear shoes, only white athletic socks, and he had a difficult time finding a pair that matched. The head leper, a man who seemed to be named Al, embraced him repeatedly and tried repeatedly to spit in his mouth. He dreamed that wife, Carol, had driven a large bus, a Metro bus filled with people, into the front of his building. It was not her fault, she told him, a Japanese man who had not had correct change when he got on the bus, in fact had asked her to change a fify-dollar bill and had, moreover, insisted that she stuff nine fives into little envelopes printed with colorful out-of-register scenes from the Bible for his First Presbyterian contributions over the next nine Sundays, was the true culprit. Simon woke early, five o’clock and six o’clock, cracked new bottles of white wine and smoked tasteless Marlboro Light 100s and wondered what to do next.
  He put all the extra beds in one room, the room Anne had had toward the front of the house. Stacked on top of one another they looked like a means test for a princess. He bought a new plant, a gold-flecked acuba, and a pot for it at Conran’s, a glazed off-white ceramic number. He cleaned the refrigerator, throwing out seven half-full containers of Dannon Strawberry and Dannon Blueberry as well as four daikon in various stages of reduction. They did love salads. He added the remains of an osso buco, capers and red wine, to his dark roiling sauce base. He found a red wrinkled bra hanging like a cut throat over the shower rail and not knowing what else to do with it, threw that out too. He shifted four thousand dollars from sticks into his Keogh account to help upholster his enfeebled retirement years. He called his wife in Philadelphia but got no answer—still, he’d called. He trimmed his toenails, the monstrous left and the even more frightening right big toes knocked back into civility. He inspected his prick and said, “My you’re looking fresh and pretty this morning.”
  • opening, pp. 9–10

• “Anyone who sees Parsifal twice is a blithering idiot.”
  “You mean the movie.”
  “In any form. Land, sea, or in the air.”
  “Well I won’t take you. You have my word.”
  • p. 22

• “When I got married,” she says, “I married this guy who was a Catholic. So we had to get a priest to do the job. So I called this priest and explained the situation. I said I was not a Catholic. And the priest says, ‘Well, we can work with you on that.’ Then I told him I was still married to another guy, the guy I was married to before I met this guy. And the priest says, ‘Well, we can work with you on that.’ So I just thought I’d tell him that I was born without a vagina, that I just had this sort of marble insert where the vagina was supposed to be, to see if he would say, ‘Well, we can work with you on that.’ ”
  • p. 40

• Something to be said for being fifty-three, you could enjoy the turning of the wheel. He feels every additional day a great boon. He doesn’t understand people who have futures, palpable futures. He takes an interest in the obituary pages of the newspapers, the summations, tidy packages, So-and-so gets three inches whereas Tra-la-la gets seven. He has a pain where his liver is presumed to be and is vomiting rather too much. He’s paid $35,107 in Federal taxes for the last year and has before him a request from the IRS for an additional $41.09. These people are wonderful, he thinks, they want the last forty-one bucks and nine cents. You’d think with the thirty-five thou they’d say let’s have a beer and forget about it.
  • p. 42

• “What are you going to do after we leave?” she asks.
  “Go back to work, I guess.”
  “That what you want to do?”
  “Work is God’s best invention. Keeps you all seized up and interested.”
  “I wish I could do something.”
  “You could always go to school.”
  “I don’t like standing in lines.”
  “I know what you mean. The Army used up most of my standing-in-line capacity.”
  “But suppose you’re at a reception and you’re going to meet the President and there’s a long line of very well-dressed people—”
  “I’m not in a hurry to meet the President. If he wants to come over and have a drink and a little guacamole dip, that’s fine. My door is always open.”
  • p. 56

• Getting old, Simon. Not so limber, dear friend, time for the bone factory? The little blue van. Your hands are covered with tiny pepperoni. Your knees predict your face. Your back stabs you, on the left side, twice a day. The belly’s been discussed. The soul’s shrinking to a microdot. We’re ordering your rocking chair, size 42. Would you like something in Southern pine? Loblolly? Send the women away. They’re too good for you. Also, not good for you. Are you King Solomon? Your kingdom a scant two hundred fifty-nine thousand, two hundred square inches. Annual tearfall, three and one-quarter inches. You feedeth among the lilies, Simon. There are garter snakes among the lilies, Simon, garter belts too. Your garden is over-cultivated, it needs weeds. How’s your skiwear, Simon? Done any demolition derbies lately? You run the mile in, what, a year and a half? We’re sending you an electric treadmill, a solid steel barbell curl bar, a digital pedometer. Use them. And send the women away.
  When he asked himself what he was doing, living in a bare elegant almost unfurnished New York apartment with three young and beautiful women, Simon had to admit that he did not know what he was doing. He was, he supposed, listening. These women were taciturn as cowboys, spoke only to the immediate question, probably did not know in which century the Second World War had taken place. No, too hard; it was, rather, that what they knew was so wildly various, ragout of Spinoza and Cyndi Lauper with a William Buckley sherbet floating in the middle of it. He’d come in one evening to find all three of them kneeling on the dining room table with their rumps pointing at him. Obviously, he was supposed to strip off his gentlemanly khakis and attend to all three at once, just as obviously an impossibility. He had placed a friendly hand on each cul in turn and said, “Okay, guys, you’ve had your fun, now get back to the barracks and polish the Renoirs.” That boy has no talent, muttered Manet to Monet one afternoon in the garden, about Renoir. “Out, out, out,” he’d shouted, and they’d scattered, giggling. One night on his back in bed he’d had six breasts to suck, swaying above him, he was poor tattered Romulus. When they couldn’t get a part of him they’d play with each other.
  • pp. 59–60

• The walls of the architecture labs at Penn had been covered with graffiti. “This is hell, nor are we out of it.” “Hell is other architects.” “The road to hell is paved with naugahyde.”
  • p. 80; "This is hell, nor are we out of it."—Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus; "Hell is others."— Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

• Dore is angry. She’s holding the box that the frozen pizza came in.
  “You’re actually going to feed us this pizza?”
  “What’s the matter with it?”
  “This frozen pizza?”
  “So it’s frozen.”
  “Do you know what it’s got in it? Enriched flour.”
  “What’s the matter with enriched flour?”
  “The enriched flour has in it flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate, and riboflavin.”
  “All great stuff. I remember riboflavin from my childhood. They put it in Wheaties or something.”
  “We’re just getting started. We’re just going into our windup here. We get water, hydrogenated soybean oil, yeast, salt, and something called dough conditioner. The dough conditioner’s got sodium stearoyl lactylate, calcium sulfate and sodium sulfite.”
  “Soybeans are good. Invented by Martin Luther King.”
  “Moving right along, we get cooked pork and mozzarella cheese substitute. The mozzarella cheese substitute contains water, casein, hydrogenated soybean oil—you notice the soybean is doing a lot of work here—salt, sodium aluminum phosphate, lactic acid, natural flavor whatever that is, modified cornstarch, sodium citrate, sorbic acid, sodium phosphate, artificial color, guar gum, magnesium oxide, ferric orthophosphate, zinc oxide, B-12, folic acid, B-6 hydrochloride, niacinamide, vitamin A palmitate, xanthan gum, thiamine mononitrate—I ask you.”
  “What?”
  “Is this food or a chemistry set?”
  “Doesn’t taste too bad.”
  “I could make a nuclear weapon with less stuff than this pizza has in it.”
  • pp. 91–92

• It’s an architectural problem, marriage. If we could live in separate houses, and visit each other when we feel particularly gay— It would be expensive, yes. But as it was she had to endure me in all my worst manifestations, early in the morning and late at night and in the nutsy obsessed noontimes. When I wake up from my nap you don’t get the laughing cavalier, you get a rank pigfooted belching blunderer. I knew this one guy who built a wall down the middle of his apartment. An impenetrable wall. He had a very big apartment. Concrete block, basically, with a fiberglass insulation on top of that and sheetrock on top of that.
  • pp. 97–98

• Carol, when they were twenty-five and twenty-six, had been a smart-ass, an admirable smart-ass. “I love you but it’s only temporary,” she had said. She was fond of saying to people, “Here’s wishing you a happy and successful first marriage.”
  • p. 109

• “I once heard [Buckminster] Fuller speak for seven straight hours. I only understood a tenth of what he was saying. By the end of the evening there were only five people left in the audience. He’d started with three hundred. I went home and began to make tetrahedrons with Play-Doh and toothpicks at two o’clock in the morning. ...”
  • p. 117

• Q: When I was first married, when I was twenty, I didn’t know where the clitoris was. I didn’t know there was such a thing. Shouldn’t somebody have told me?
  A: Perhaps your wife?
  Q: Of course she was too shy. In those days people didn’t go around saying, This is the clitoris and this is what its proper function is and this is what you can do to help out. I finally found it. In a book.
  A: German?
  Q: Dutch.
  • p. 129

• He lost nine pounds (a great blessing) during the eight months they lived in the apartment. They had not been slow to criticize his toes, teeth, belly, hair, or politics. “It seems to me,” Veronica had said one day, “that you have no social responsibility.” “My first social responsibilty,” he had said, “is that the building doesn’t collapse.” “Right right right,” she said, “but you are after all a creature of the power structure. You work for the power structure.” This was true enough, revolutionaries don’t build buildings, needed only closets to oil their Uzis in, no work for architects there. On the other hand Veronica and the others derived their own politics from a K-Mart of sources, Thomas Aquinas marching shoulder-to-shoulder with Simone de Beauvoir and the weatherbeaten troops of Sixty Minutes. They were often left and right during the same conversation, sometimes the same sentence.
  • pp. 132–133

Forty Stories (1987)

featuring nine stories previously uncollected

• My wife wants a dog. She already has a baby. The baby’s almost two. My wife says that the baby wants the dog.
  My wife has been wanting a dog for a long time. I have had to be the one to tell her that she couldn’t have one. But now the baby wants a dog, my wife says. This may be true. The baby is very close to my wife. They go around together all the time, clutching each other tightly. I ask the baby, who is a girl, “Whose girl are you? Are you Daddy’s girl?” The baby says, “Momma,” and she doesn’t just say it once, she says it repeatedly, “Momma momma momma.” I don’t see why I should buy a hundred-dollar dog for that damn baby.
  • “Chablis”, opening

• I didn’t go to church because I was a black sheep. There were five children in my family and the males rotated the position of black sheep among us, the oldest one being the black sheep for a while while he was in his DWI period or whatever and then getting grayer as he maybe got a job or was in the service and then finally becoming a white sheep when he got married and had a grandchild. My sister was never a black sheep because she was a girl.
  • “Chablis”

• The actors feel that the music played before the curtain rises will put the audience in the wrong mood. The playwright suggests that the (purposefully lugubrious) music be played at twice-speed. This peps it up somewhat while retaining its essentially dark and gloomy character. The actors listen carefully, and are pleased.
  • “Opening", opening

• People always like to hear that they’re under stress, makes them feel better. You can imagine what they’d feel if they were told they weren’t under stress.
  • “Jaws”

The King (1990) [novel]

• “See there! It’s Launcelot!”
  “Riding, riding—”
  “How swiftly he goes!”
  “As if enchafed by a fiend!”
  “The splendid muscles of his horse move rhythmically under the drenchèd skin of same!”
  “By Jesu, he is in a vast hurry!”
  But now he pulls up the horse and sits for a moment, lost in thought!”
  “Now he wags his great head in daffish fashion!”
  “He reins the horse about and puts the golden spurs to her!”
  But that is the direction from which he larely came with such excess of speed!”
  “No, it’s slightly different! It’s at an angle of about fifteen degrees to the first!”
  “This breakbone pace will soon unhorse him!”
  “Not Launcelot! Launcelot is the greatest horseman in the realm!”
  “Look you! Launcelot and his horse have plunged into a deep mire!”
  “He’s thrown! The horse is down!”
  “Now the horse struggles to his feet! But Launcelot’s still on the ground! Perhaps he’s broken something!”
  “No, he’s up, he inspects his horse, he leaps into the saddle, he reins about once again— Now he rides off furiously in still another way!”
  “He burns the ground in his careening!”
  “It’s as if he hears beams a-bugling from every quarter of the compass!”
  “His responsibilities are grave and many!”
  “Look here, there is another knight in Launcelot’s path the twain have fewtered their spears they hurtle fast together the knight who is not Sir Launcelot is shocked out of the saddle he rises in the air turning end over end—”
  “Launcelot wallops on doesn’t even stop to smite the fellow’s head off but pounds ever more fiercely toward a distant goal—”
  “I’m losing sight of him, his figure dwindles and grows small!”
  “I can see him still, getting smaller and smaller in the remote distance!”
  “Riding, riding—”
  • pp. 1–2

• “True dragons are Danish and speak Danish, a tongue that the Danes themselves describe as less a language than a throat disease. To attract a dragon, one chains a naked maiden to a rock. The maiden must be chained to the rock in such a way that every part of her is visible to the dragon. Many famous paintings demonstrate the technique; Ingres’s Angelica Saved by Ruggiero is an example. After the dragon has inspected your maiden to its heart’s content, you issue one of the conventional formal challenges, in Danish—’Jeg udfordre dig til ridderlig camp’ is the way one usually puts it—and then the fight begins.”
  • p. 39

• “Why, if I may ask, are you called the Blue Knight?”
  “I am thought to be melancholy.”
  “On what evidence?”
  “Just my temperament, I suppose. I’ve always been rather melancholy, even as a child. Spent a lot of time plucking at the counterpane, as it were. It grew worse as I grew older. Also, I published a book. It was called On the Impossibility of Paradise.”
  “What was the argument?”
  “I argued that the idea of a former paradise, which had been lost and might be regained either in this world or in the next, did not square with my experience.”
  “Personal experience.”
  “Yes. I wasn’t happy even in the womb. The womb, for me, was far from a paradise. I remember distinctly. My mother was a very modern person—advanced, don’t you know. Fond of Alban Berg, the Wozzeck man. Not only was I forced repeatedly to listen to Wozzeck, in the womb, but also to Lulu, which is even worse, from the fetal point of view. These horrors aside, there was the poetry of Wyndham Lewis, proprietor of Blast. Blast was the name of his magazine. Can you imagine calling your magazine Blast? Going to crack consciousness wide open, he was. These tidderly-push artists and their conceits—the poetry was of a piece. I had to listen to it. In the womb. In addition, there were certain odd substances entering the bloodstream—do you know what Kif is?”
  “No idea.”
  “Better thus. In sum, my womb time was quite hellish, and upon being expelled I found the larger arena not much of an improvement. I don’t mean to complain, of course,I’m just trying to suggest—”
  “No, no,” said Sir Roger. “Say on. Isupposen we should be doing search-and-destroy, but your remarks are of the greatest interest to me.”
  “Good of you,” said the Blue Knight. “The basic contradiction I located or felt I had located was in terms of dramatic values. Paradise, the Fall, and the return to Paradise—it’s not a story. It’s too symmetrical. There are no twists. Just Paradise, zip, Fall, zip, and Paradise again, zip. And I had a very strong feeling, an intuition if you will, that even if Paradise were regained it would have music by Milhaud and frescoes by the Italian Futurists.”
  • pp. 77–78

• “My readers,” said Pillsbury, “need, nay, require reassurance as to whether the throne is, in this century, still a viable institution.”
  “King,” said Arthur, “king, king, king. Fundamentally an absurd idea, that one chap has better blood than another chap. Has to do with dogs, dog breeding, really, dogs and horses. Oh, it’s no great thing to be a king. On the other hand, I’ve never not been a king, so I’ve no idea what that’s like. Might be quite grand. The pleasure of being inconspicuous, a fudge in the crowd. Can’t imagine it.
  “Can’t imagine what it would be like to be a churl. The country’s full of them, yet I have no idea how they think. It’s not good for a king to have no idea how people think. By the same token, the people have no idea how I think. When I address them, it’s in the language of a proclamation, isn’t it? And the language of a proclamation is hardly cozy, is it? I could even be witty, and the people would never know. Pity.
  “In the same universe of discourse,” said Arthur, “the question of leadership, with accompanying subsections, such as statesmanship, generalship, gamesmanship, rabble-rousing, and the like. The king’s sceptre, the marshal’s baton, the conductor’s baton, the physician’s caduceus, the magician’s wand—a stick of some kind, with which one must animate a mass. In your case, Mr. Pillsbury, a pencil. But one must know how to operate the stick, eh? One can’t just wave the damned thing around to no purpose. All in the wrist, eh, Mr. Pillsbury?”
  • pp. 81–82

• “In this connection, mention must be made of the burden of taxation. I mean the burden on the king. One has to decide some very tricky things. How much a chap’s income should one take, morally speaking? Of course one’s first inclination is to take it all and be done with it. But studies have shown that if you take every last groat—and I’m not saying it isn’t a neat solution and that the individual’s not grateful, more or less, for not having to fill out all those tedious forms—you deincentivize him. He stacks arms, to use a military figure, and you lose in the long run. The amount of taxation you can get away with must be nicely judged.
  “Not entirely irrelevant in this context is the problem of ermine. Do you know how dear ermine is? One poor devil’s taxes for a whole year will hardly buy one ermine tail, and one rich devil’s taxes for a whole year won’t get you a fully trimmed robe. I wonder that one sees ermine at all nowadays. Yet if you appear in public on a state occasion with nutria or something trimming your robe, they say that you’re skimping on the pomp, the public’s bought-and-paid-for pomp. Well, enough about ermine. It’s crossed my mind to start up a flock or whatever it is of my own, but one can’t do everything, and I’ve never got around to it.
  “Next, one must ensure that the population is properly intoxicated,” said Arthur. “Anciently, the cry was Mead for my men! Nowadays it’s more a matter of seeing to it that there are sufficient licensed premises and that such are adequately supplied by the breweries, that the movement of grain and hops to these from the farmers is unimpeded, and that the flow of revenues to the crown from each of the points at which we take our little nip is not lost to us through inspectatorial ineptitude. I never touch the stuff myself, except perhaps in the heat of battle, when a hogshead of brandy might be broached under especially trying circumstances, but your average walking-about citizen becomes extremely churlish when denied his booze, and it’s a thing the ruler does well to keep in view.”
  • pp. 83–84

• “I smell fennel,” Launcelot said. “That reminds me, I should tell you I have discovered a specific for maims. You take salt, good-quality river mud, and bee urine, and slather it on the maim and hold it there for two days. Works like a charm. Gathering the bee urine is a bit of a bore.”
  • p. 94

• “Shouldness is being flouted here,” said Launcelot. “Shouldness is perhaps self-explanatory, but I have never seen it adequately dealt with, either in print or in the lecture hall. When that huntress got me in the bum with an arrow, it was an offense to shouldness. It shouldn’t have gone that way. I told the story to Sir Roger, and now he never tires of telling it, tells it to everyone who comes down the pike. That a knight of the Round Table could be pierced in that way by a female has a significance quite apart from the ludicrous. It’s in the realm of those things which should not happen—a category which holds much philosophical interest, as anyone who has ever looked into anomaletics will recognize. The insult to my dignity was not nearly so grave as the insult to shouldness.”
  • p. 106

The Teachings of Don. B: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992)

edited by Kim Herzinger; introduction by Thomas Pynchon

• “How does one conquer fear, Don B.?”
  “One takes a frog and sews it to one’s shoe,” he said.
  “The left or the right?”
  Don B. gave me a pitying look.
  “Well, you’d look mighty funny going down the street with only one frog sewed to your shoes, wouldn’t you?" he said. “One frog on each shoe.”
  • “The Teachings of Don B.: A Yankee Way of Knowledge”, pp. 7–8

• My deranged mother has written another book. This one is called The Bough and is even worse that the others. I refer not to its quality—it exhibits the usual “coruscating wit” and “penetrating social observation”—but to the extent to which it utilizes, as a kind of mulch pile, the lives of her children.
  • “The Author”, opening; p. 45

• When I was hired they showed me my desk, an old beat-up scarred wooden desk, and they told me that it had been O. Henry’s desk when O. Henry worked for the paper, as he had at one time. And I readily believed it. I could see the place where O. Henry had savagely stabbed the desk with his pen in pursuit of a slimy adjective just out of reach, and a kind of bashed-in-looking place where O. Henry had beaten his poor genius head on the desk in frustration over not being able to capture the noun leaping like a fawn just out of reach... So I sat down at the desk and I too began to chase those devils, the dancy nouns and come-hither adjectives, what joy.
  • “Return”, p. 55

• At last it is time to speak the truth about Thanksgiving. The truth is this: it is not a really great holiday. Consider the imagery. Dried cornhusks hanging on the door! Terrible wine! Cranberry jelly in little bowls of extremely doubtful provenance which everyone is required to handle with the greatest of care! Consider the participants, the merrymakers. Men and women (also children) who have survived passably well through the years, mainly as a result of living at considerable distances from their dear parents and beloved siblings, who on this feast of feasts must apparently forgather (as if beckoned by an aberrant Fairy Godmother), usually by circuitous routes, through heavy traffic, at a common meeting place, where the very moods, distempers, and obtrusive personal habits that have kept them happily apart since adulthood are then and there encouraged to slowly ferment beneath the cornhusks, and gradually rise with the aid of the terrible wine, and finally burst forth out of control under the stimulus of the cranberry jelly! No, it is a mockery of a holiday. For instance: Thank You, O Lord, for what we are about to receive. This is surely not a gala concept. There are no presents, unless one counts Aunt Bertha’s sweet rolls a present, which no one does. There is precious little in the way of costumery: miniature plastic turkeys and those witless Pilgrim hats. There is no sex. Indeed, Thanksgiving is the one day of the year (a fact known to everybody) when all thoughts of sex completely vanish, evaporating from apartments, houses, condominiums, and mobile homes like steam from a bathroom mirror.
  • “At Last, It Is Time...”, opening; pp. 58–59

• “These games are marvelous,” Amanda said. “I like them especially because they are so meaningless and boring, and trivial. These qualities, once regarded as less than desirable, are now everywhere enthroned as the key elements in our psychological lives, as reflected in the art of the period as well as—”
  • “Games Are the Enemies of Beauty, Truth, and Sleep, Amanda Said”, p. 77

• “The Continental Congress resolved that your famous plainneff and modefty would be ill ferved were it known that a houfe for your horfe was paid for from the public purfe.”
  • “An Hesitation on the Bank of the Delaware”, p. 80

• We had a conversation the other day with Ming the Merciless, one of the preeminent villains of modern times, whose half-century-long struggle with his opposite number, Flash Gordon, has helped generations of Americans conceptualize the fearsome enchantments of space. We caught up with the veteran malefactor at the Volney, where he greeted us in a turquise-and-gold dressing gown, a black skullcap setting off his striking yellowish pallor. We immediately put our foot in it by addressing him as ”Mr. Ming”
  “I don’t want to be stuffy,” he said pleasantly, “but that’s Emperor Ming, if you don’t mind. ...”
  • “Ming”, p. 93, opening

• “Being merciless, while not exactly easy, is finally a job like any other. It’s theater. It’s got nothing to do with my private life. Still, sometimes when I used to yell at my kids, I wondered if I was maybe...putting a little too much into it. They’re grown now, so the question is moot. They seem OK. Roderick is at Harvard and Betsy is married and has a couple of kids of her own.”
  • “Ming”, p. 94

• Who among us is not thinking about divorce, except for a few tiny-minded stick-in-the-muds who don’t count?
  • “Heliotrope”, p. 106

• The ultimate meaning of the angry young man is not known. What is known is the shape of his greatest fear—that all of his efforts, from learning to speak to learning to write, to write well, to write badly, to write angrily, from learning to despise to learning to abominate, to abominate well, to abominate badly, to abominate abominably, to rant, to fulminate, to shout down the sea, to age, to age graefully, to age awkwardly, to age at all, to think, to regret, to list himself in the newspapers under “Lost and Found”, might culminate precisely in this: a roaring, raging, crazy mad passionate bibliography.
  • “The Angry Young Man”, p. 111

• People who had, in the past, suffered from technophobia suffered even more. Others took other positions. Things were not so bad. Things could be worse. Worse things could be imagined. Worse things had been endured and triumphed over, in the past. This was not the worst. The worst was yet to come.
  • “A Nation of Wheels”, p. 131

• Poignance is all.
  • “Wasteland! (Mr. Lionel Bart’s Notes in Exegesis of His Latest Musical Project)”, p. 206

• At that moment, a Colonel of Sanitation came striding by, in his green uniform. “You there!” he cried. “Ho, dragon, stop and patter for a bit. Quickly, quickly—haven’t got all day! There are Mr. Goodbar wrappers in the streets still, after all my efforts, and the efforts of my men, day in day out—people, people, if we could just do something about the people, then perhaps an end to the endlessness. One could go home of a Friday night, and wipe the brow, and doff the uniform, and thank God for a day well squandered. But you—you have a strange aspect. What kind of a thing are you? Are you disposable? Biodegradable? Ordinary citizen out for a stroll? Looking for work? Member of a conspiracy? Vegetable? Mineral? Two-valued? Hostile to the national interest of the Department of Sanitation? Thrill-crazed kid? Objet d’art? Circus in town?”
  • “The Dragon”, p. 216

• MAGGIE: Did you have a good time?
  HILDA: The affair ran the usual course. Fever, boredom, trapped.
  MAGGIE: Hot, rinse, spin dry.
  • “The Conservatory” [play], p. 292

• HENRY: Now it is necessary to court her, and win her, and put on this clean dressing gown, and cut my various nails, and drink something that will kill the millions of germs in my mouth, and say something flattering, and be witty and bonny, and hale and kinky, all just to ease this wrinkle in the groin. It seems a high price.
  • “Snow White” [play], p. 309

• BILL: ... We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.
  • “Snow White” [play], p. 324

Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews (1997)

edited by Kim Herzinger; introduction by John Barth

essays

• The question so often asked of modern painting, “What is it?”, contains more than the dull skepticism of the man who is not going to have the wool pulled over his eyes. It speaks of a fundamental placement in relation to the work, that of a voyager in the world coming upon a strange object. The reader reconstitutes the work by his active participation, by approaching the object, tapping it, shaking it, holding it to his ear to hear the roaring within. It is characteristic of the object that it does not declare itself all at once, in a rush of pleasant naïveté. Joyce enforces the way in which Finnegans Wake is to be read. He conceived the reading to be a lifetime project, the book remaining always there, like the landscape surrounding the reader’s home or the buildings bounding the reader’s apartment. The book remains problematic, unexhausted.
  • “After Joyce” (1964), p. 4

• I do not think it fanciful...to say that Governor Rockefeller, standing among his Míros and de Koonings, is worked upon by them, and if they do not make a Democrat or a Socialist of him they at least alter the character of his Republicanism. Considered in this light, Soviet hostility to “formalist” art becomes more intelligible, as does the antipathy of senators, mayors, and chairmen of building committees. In the same way, Joyce’s book works its radicalizing will upon all men in all countries, even upon those who do not read it and will never read it.
  • “After Joyce” (1964), p. 5

• Finnegans Wake is not a work which encourages emulation. Ezra Pound announced early on that in those portions of it that he had read, the rewards were not worth the decipherment. Writers borrow Joyce’s myth-patterning or stream-of-consciousness and regard Wake as a monument or an obsession, in any case something that does not have to be repeated.
  • “After Joyce” (1964), p. 6

• Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be, in his work, simple, honest, and straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, and straightforward, nothing much happens: he speaks the speakable, whereas what we are looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken.
  • “Not-Knowing” ( 1987), p. 15

• When computers learn how to make jokes, artists will be in serious trouble.
  • “Not-Knowing” (1987), p. 22

• The Women’s House of Detention was the place where they used to store women arrested for prostitution, mostly. The thing I remember about it best, aside from its social inutility and hideousness, is that one time a pal of mine [Grace Paley] who was in the anti-war activist business got situated there because she had sat down in front of an Armed Forces Day parade. And stopped it, for a while. Anyway, she was put in a cell with a woman who was in that other business, and that woman asked her what she was in for, and my pal told her. And the other woman immediately rushed to the cell door and yelled at the turnkey, “Get these fucking housewives outta here!”
  • “Here in the Village”, p. 28

• ...St. Vincent’s emergency room is one of my favorite emergency rooms in the whole world. I know it well, from the time I accidentally stabbed myself in the chest with an X-Acto knife (paltry two stitches), and the time our former babysitter got raped, and the time my daughter ate the roach poison and I went down there, carrying kid and can, and the Poison Control Center there said, “Mister, that stuff don’t even bother the roaches—they just get high on it, is all.”
  • “Here in the Village”, p. 29

• Every writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence, or a hundred. What I am interested in is the ugly sentence that is also somehow beautiful. I agree that this is a highly specialized enterprise, akin to the manufacture of merkins, say—but it’s what I do. Probably I have missed the point of the literature business entirely.
  • “ On ‘Paraguay’ ”, p. 57

• ...there is a realm of possible knowledge which can be reached by artists, which is not susceptible of mathematical verification but which is true. This is sometimes spoken as the ineffable. If there is any word I detest in the language, this would be it, but the fact that it exists, the word ineffable, is suspicious in that it suggests that there might be something that is ineffable. And I believe that that’s the place artists are trying to get to, and I further believe that when they are successful, they reach it...
  • “A Symposium on Fiction”, p. 65

• To say that the publishing world is not interested in literature is to overstate it. They are extremely interested in it, they just don’t want to publish it, you see. Publishers are brave, as brave as the famous diving horses of Atlantic City, but they’re increasingly owned by conglomerates, businesses which have nothing to do with publishing, and these companies demand a certain profit out of their publishing divisions. They take very few risks and they publish an enormous number of things which look like books, sort of feel like books, but in reality are buckets of peanut butter with a layer of whipped cream on top.
  • “A Symposium on Fiction”, pp. 67–68

• ...one of the funny things about experimentalism in regard to language is that most of it has not been done yet. Take “mothball” and “vagina” and put them together and see if they mean anything together; maybe you’re not happy with the combination and you throw that on the floor and pick up the next two and so on. There’s a lot of basic research which hasn’t been done because of the enormous resources from the past which have precluded this way of investigating language. I wrote a story once called “Bone Bubbles” which did just this—put together unlike things—and everyone who has ever read it has loathed it. The editor of the book in which it appears didn’t want it in there. I insisted that it should be in there. I am still interested in that story and intend to work more on this rather simple-minded principle of putting together more or less random phrases—but not so random as all that. This particular piece—which is only about eight pages long—was not easily written, was not whacked out, it was rewritten and rewritten and rewritten, and in one sense it still is as nonsensical at the end of this rather arduous process as it was in the beginning except that to me it seemed right. The writer in the twentieth century who went farthest in this direction is of course Gertrude Stein, for perhaps other motives, but it’s part of her enterprise—she’s a greatly misunderstood writer, and that’s where I would locate experimentalism.
  • "A Symposium on Fiction", p. 74; "Bone Bubbles" followed "Sentence" in City Life (1970), and reappeared in Forty Stories (1987)

• I have said this too many times to make it interesting even to myself, but the principle of collage is one of the central principles of art in this century and it seems also to me to be one of the central principles of literature.
  • “A Symposium on Fiction”, p. 76

• Beckett’s pessimism makes Greene’s pessimism look amateurish.
  • “The Tired Terror of Graham Greene” [a review of The Comedians], p. 89

• ...he wouldn’t know what to do with a moral if handed one by the archangel Michael on a flaming sword.
  • “The Earth as an Overturned Bowl”, p. 105

• Charm, as Goethe said, is the dead green bug on the golden leaf of occasion.
  • “Parachutes in the Trees” [a review of the film Soldier of Orange], p. 111; cf. “Conversations with Goethe” in Overnight to Many Distant Cities

• We are all engaged in looting the past. (Only the greatest geniuses manage to steal from the future.)
  • “The Emerging Figure”, p. 168

• Any fool can cry wolf; to cry sheep is inspired, the work of a subtle, contradancing mind.
  • “Jim Love Up to Now: An Introduction”, p. 173

• “Humor is the great alternative to psychosis,” Gregory Bateson has remarked. It is clear that there was no comedy before the Fall, no one cracking jokes in Eden; there was no need. Holy books, Baudelaire points out, never laugh. The perfection they envision, should the Way be followed exquisitely and completely, robs humor of its necessity, its ground. In the earthly paradise, Baudelaire writes, “as no trouble afflicted him, man’s countenance was simple and smooth, and the laughter that now shakes the nations never distorted the features of his face.” Less perfect times are likely to produce a great many jokes, variously inflected; thus, the Twentieth Century staggers toward its close in a blizzard of one-liners.
  • “Jim Love Up to Now: An Introduction”, p. 173

• Like all artists, Love has a multiplicity of fathers, including those fathers who nip in for a night and are never heard from again, leaving a half-remembered image with no name to put to it.
  • “Jim Love Up to Now: An Introduction”, p. 174

• In the contemplation of nudes, we congratulate ourselves upon the beauty of which human beings are capable. They reassure us about ourselves, about Being. We are a little lower than the angels, true, but notice that we can get along without that suspect radiance, equal parts paint and literature, on which the angels lean so heavily. The human body is, or can be, a sufficiency.
  • “Nudes: An Introduction to Exquisite Creatures”, opening; p. 178

• Rauschenberg’s problem ...is how to be bad for thirty years or more. To sustain a high level of misbehavior over a third of a century is not the easiest of tasks. The German writer Heimeto von Doderer put it this way: “One begins by breaking windows. Then one comes a window oneself.”
  • “Being Bad”, p. 184

• MTV has severely compromised surrealism, perhaps ruined it forever...
  • “Being Bad”, p. 184

• The difficulty here is not producing mere run-of-the-mill outrageousnous, but the nature of the transformational process by which aspects of the world are made over into art. How to prevent the ugly (what we have agreed to call ugly) from becoming, in some sense, beautiful (what we now agree to call beautiful) over time, thus losing the electrical charge which made the artist choose it in the first place? You can’t. But there are strategies of delay. Céline, with the aid of some truly revolting politics, managed to remain a monster almost to the end.
  • “Being Bad”, p. 184

• One of the pleasures of art is that it enables the mind to move in unanticipated directions, to make connections that may be in some sense errors but are fruitful nonetheless.
  • “Reifications”, p. 188

• Originality is the last refuge of a hero...
  • “On the Level of Desire”, p. 190

• Art is always aimed (like a rifle, if you wish) at the middle class. The working class has its own culture and will have no truck with fanciness of any kind. The upper class owns the world and thus needs know no more about the world than is necessary for its orderly exploitation. The notion that art cuts across class boundaries to stir the hearts of hoe hand and Morgan alike is, at best, a fiction useful to the artist, his Hail Mary. It is the poor puzzled bourgeoisie that is sufficiently uncertain, sufficiently hopeful, to pay attention to art. It follows (as the night the day) that the bourgeoisie should get it in the neck.
  • “On the Level of Desire”, p. 194

• [Sherrie] Levine is an artist for a dreadfully confused time. (We are always congratulating ourselves on our madness.)
  • "On the Level of Desire", p. 195

interviews

• JEROME KLINKOWITZ [posing a question suggested by Carl Krampf]: When you improvise, do you think of the chord changes or the melody?
  DONALD BARTHELME: Both. This is an interesting question which I’m unable to answer adequately. If the melody is the skeleton of the particular object, then the chord changes are its wardrobe, its changes of clothes. I tend to pay rather more attention to the latter than to the former. All I want is just a trace of skeleton—three bones from which the rest may be reasoned out.
  • “Interview with Jerome Klinkowitz”, p. 200

• There were five children. In the late thirties my father built a house for us, something not too dissimilar to Mies’s Tugendhat house. It was wonderful to live in but strange to see on the Texas prairie. On Sundays people used to park their cars out on the street and stare. We had a routine, the family, on Sundays. We used to get up from Sunday dinner, if enough cars had parked, and run out in front of the house in a sort of chorus line, doing high kicks.
  • “Interview with Jerome Klinkowitz”, p. 200

• I enjoy doing layout—problems of design. I could very cheerfully be a typographer.
  • “Interview with Jerome Klinkowitz”, p. 201

• JEROME KLINKOWITZ: In Richard Schickel’s New York Times Magazine piece last year [“Freaked Out on Barthelme,” 16 August 1970], you were reported as saying that “The principle of collage is the central principle of all art in the twentieth century in all media.” Would you care to expand and perhaps tell me how it specifically applies to fiction?
  DONALD BARTHELME: I was probably wrong, or too general. I point out however that New York City is or can be regarded as a collage, as opposed to, say, a tribal village in which all the huts (or yurts, or whatever) are the same hut, duplicated. The point of collage is that unlike things are stuck together to make, in the best case, a new reality. This new reality, in the best case, may be or imply a comment on the other reality from which it came, and may be also much else. It’s an itself, if it’s successful: Harold Rosenberg’s “anxious object”, which does not know whether it’s a work of art or a pile of junk. (Maybe I should have said that anxiety is the central principle of all art in the etc., etc.?)
  KLINKOWITZ: Schickel also reported that you are “easily bored” and in fact “fear boredom”. Is this simply a personal idiosyncrasy, or do you think it reflects a larger truth about the rôle of fiction—maybe all art—in our times?
  BARTHELME: I doubt that this is a condition peculiar to me. For example, I have trouble reading, in these days. I would rather drink, talk, or listen to music. The difficulties the painters are now having—the problem of keeping themselves interested—are I think instructive. Earthworks, conceptual art, etc. seem to me last resorts. Now there is a certain virtue in finding the absolutely last resort—being a Columbus of the last resort—but I don’t think I’d enjoy the rôle. I do a lot of failing and that keeps me interested.
  • “Interview with Jerome Klinkowitz”, pp. 204–205

• JEROME KLINKOWITZ: Do you have any favorite comedians, and reasons for liking them?
  DONALD BARTHELME: The government.
  • “Interview with Jerome Klinkowitz”, p. 205

• JEROME KLINKOWITZ [question posed by Barthelme himself]: In your story “See the Moon” one of the characters has the line, “Fragments are the only forms I trust.” This has been quoted as a statemnt of your æsthetic. Is it?
  DONALD BARTHELME: No. It’s a statement by the character about what he is feeling at that particular moment. I hope that whatever I think about æsthetics would be a shade more complicated than that. Beause that particular line has been richly misunderstood so often...I have thought of making a public recantation. I can see the story in, say, Women’s Wear Daily:
  WRITER CONFESSES
  THAT HE NO LONGER
  TRUSTS FRAGMENTS
  TRUST “MISPLACED”,
  AUTHOR DECLARES
  DISCUSSES DECISION
  WITH DAUGHTER
  WILL SEEK “WHOLES”
  IN FUTURE, HE SAYS
  CLOSING TIME IN
  GARDENS OF WEST
  WILL BE EXTENDED,
  SCRIVENER STATES
  New York, June 24 (A&P)—Donald Barthelme, 41-year-old writer and well-known fragmatist, said today that he no longer trusted fragments. He added that although he had once been “very fond” of fragments, he had found them to be “finally untrustworthy”.
  The author, looking tense and drawn after what was decribed as “considerable thought”, made his dramatic late-night announcement at a Sixth Avenue laundromat press conference, from which the press was excluded.
  Sources close to the soap machine said, however, that the agonizing reappraisal, which took place before their eyes, required only four minutes.
  “Fragments fall apart a lot,” Barthelme said. Use of antelope blood as a bonding agent had not proved...
  • “Interview with Jerome Klinkowitz”, pp. 205–206

• ...as one reads more and more and more you get more fathers in your hierarchy of fathers. And then, after summoning twenty or thirty fathers, perhaps you are born, or perhaps you are not born.
  • “Interview with Charles Ruas and Judith Sherman”, p. 212

• I certainly don’t write to exclude anyone.
  • "Interview with Charles Ruas and Judith Sherman”, p. 213

• I think that the effort is to reach a realm of meaning that is not quite sayable. You stay away from what can be said and you try to reach what can’t quite be said. Yet it is nevertheless meaningful. And there is such a realm and it is very difficult to talk about. It’s not quite nonverbal, but that comes fairly close.
  • “Interview with Charles Ruas and Judith Sherman”, p. 214

• One of the beautiful things about words is that you can put words together which in isolation mean nothing, or mean only what the dictionary says they mean, and you put them together and you get extraordinary effects.
  • “Interview with Charles Ruas and Judith Sherman”, p. 214

• It is well to be simple once in a while.
  • “Interview with Charles Ruas and Judith Sherman”, p. 234

• I look for a particular kind of sentence, perhaps more often the awkward than the beautiful. A broke-back sentence is interesting. Any sentence that begins with the phrase, “It is not clear that...” is clearly clumsy but preparing itself for greatness of a kind. A way of backing into a story—of getting past the reader’s hardwon armor.
  • “Interview with Larry McCaferry”, p. 262

• LARRY MCCAFERRY: Like a lot of painters in this century, you seem to enjoy lifting things out of the world, in this case words or phrases, and then...
  DONALD BARTHELME: And then, sung to and Simonized, they’re thrown into the mesh.
  • “Interview with Larry McCaffery”, p. 265

• LARRY MCCAFFERY: Do you recall the germinating idea for The Dead Father?
  DONALD BARTHELME: A matter of having a father and being a father.
  MCCAFFERY: In some basic sense the book deals with the notion that we’re all dragging around behind us the corpses of our fathers, as well as the past in general.
  BARTHELME: Worse—dragging these ahead of us. I have several younger brothers, among them my brother Frederick, who is also a writer. After The Dead Father came out, he telephoned and said, “I’m working on a new novel.” I said, “What’s it called?” and he said “The Dead Brother.” You have to admire the generational wit there.
  • “Interview with Larry McCaffery”, p. 270

• There’s always the tension between losing an audience and doing the odd things you might want to try. The effort is always to make what you write nourishing or useful to readers. You do cut out some readers by idiosyncrasies of form. I regret this.
  • “Interview with Larry McCaffery”, p. 271

• J.D. O’HARA: You don’t...believe in entropy?
  DONALD BARTHELME: Entropy belongs to Pynchon. I read recently that somebody had come forward with evidence that the process is not irreversible. There is abroad a distinct feeling that everything’s getting worse... I don’t think we have the sociological index that would allow us to measure this in any meaningful way, but the feeling is there as a cultural fact. I feel entropy—Kraus on backache is a favorite text around here.
  O’HARA: Do you see anything getting better—art, for instance?
  BARTHELME: I don’t think you can talk about progress in art—improvement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it’s a horizontal line, not a vertical one. Similarly the notion of an avant-garde is a bit off. The function of the advance guard in military terms is exactly that of the rear guard, to protect the main body, which translates as the status quo. You can speak of political progress, social progress, of course—you may not see much of it, but it can be talked about.
  • “Interview with J.D. O’Hara”, pp. 276–277

• In this century there’s been much stress placed not upon what we know but on knowing that our methods are themselves questionable—our Song of Songs is the Uncertainty Principle.
  • “Interview with J.D. O’Hara”, p. 285

• Beckett’s work is an embarrassment to the Void.
  • “Interview with J.D. O’Hara”, p. 286

• DONALD BARTHELME: Kidding Father was an activity that took seven of us to do, and there were only six of us. Putting Father down was the main family sport.
  JO BRANS: Is there any particular reason for the number of fathers in your work who are being done away with in one form or another? I’m thinking of The Dead Father. Using a father and beating him—is there anything autobiographical...?
  BARTHELME: Well, not directly. The relation is the universal problem. You remember, I think in Gertrude Stein there’s a story about the guy who seizes his father by the hair and drags him out of the house into the orchard, and a certain point the father who is being dragged says, “Stop, stop. In my time I did not drag my father beyond this tree.”
  • “Interview with Jo Brans”, p. 294

• DONALD BARTHELME: ...I think there are two devices that have clearly had an enormous impact on language. One is television. I don’t wish to blame television for all the faults of the world, but it has had a vulgarizing effect. The other is the telephone, because we don’t write letters anymore. I don’t write letters—I don’t even write business letters. I call up on the telephone. When people don’t write letters, language deteriorates.
  JO BRANS: Do you keep a journal?
  BARTHELME: I keep a workbook with stray pieces of paper with things written on them. A kind of mulch pile.
  • “Interview with Jo Brans”, p. 297

• DONALD BARTHELME: ...I was trying to make fiction that was like certain kinds of modern painting. You know, tending toward the abstract. But it’s really very dicey in fiction, because if you get too abstract it just looks like fog, for example.
  JO BRANS: Words, after all, have referents. They mean something—colors don’t.
  BARTHELME: Not in the same way. So, the project is next to impossible, which is what makes it interesting. There’s nothing so beautiful as having a very difficult problem. It gives purpose to life. And to work. I’m still worrying with it.
  • “Interview with Jo Brans”, p. 298

• ...I haven’t seen a government I’ve liked yet.
  • “Interview with Jo Brans”, p. 304

• DONALD BARTHELME [of “post-modernist” fiction]: I say it’s realism, bearing on mind Harold Rosenberg’s wicked remark that realism is one of fifty-seven varieties of decoration.
  BOBBIE ROE: What about the term “experimental”, which is often applied to your work?
  BARTHELME: It’s not quite a hostile remark, but it does contain within it the notion of the failed experiment. Something like “Bone Bubbles” was, yes, an experiment and although I wouldn’t suggest it was wholly successful, I thought it worth publishing. It’s something I do along with a number of other things.
  • “Interview with Bobbie Roe”, p. 316

• BOBBIE ROE: A few years ago, you seemed worried that perhaps a lack of emotion was a weakness in your stories.
  DONALD BARTHELME: A constant worry. I’m still worried. I tell my students that one of the things readers want, and deserve, is a certain amount of blood on the floor. I don’t always produce it. Probably a function of being more interested in other parts of the process.
  • “Interview with Bobbie Roe”, p. 317

• Americans have political problems that they don’t recognize as political. The impoverishment of the country by the arms race is a good example. Money spent on arms is, among other things, useless money in terms of the economy because it’s stored. It’s in nerve gas, aircraft carriers, the Stealth bomber. I gave a reading at the University of Alabama a couple of years ago, and on the way to the campus we passed an airfield packed with military aircraft, trillions of dollars’ worth of planes stacked up there, National Guard stuff, not even first-line stuff. The cost, the weight of this, is not understood by most Americans. They don’t know where their money’s going. They know they’re pressed for money and that their school systems are being eighty-sixed by national accrediting organizations, but they don’t connect this to that National Guard elephant graveyard. Black people think that they’re poor because they’re black and the white folks control the money. This is true, but black folks are damaged more by lousy economic policy than by racism.
  • “Interview with Bobbie Roe”, pp. 317–318

• BOBBIE ROE: Is the new generation of writers more concerned than their predecessors with politics, economics, and social class?
  DONALD BARTHELME: I think that there are lowered expectations, not æsthetic expectations for the work, but lowered expectations in terms of life. My generation, perhaps foolishly, expected, even demanded, that life be wonderful and magical and then tried to make it so by writing in a rather complex way. It seems now quite an eccentric demand.
  • “Interview with Bobbie Roe”, p. 319

Flying to America: 45 More Stories (2007)

featuring twelve stories previously uncollected and three stories previously unpublished; edited by Kim Herzinger

• Then I Thomas son of Titus took thought with myself about what measures might be taken against the threat. I devised then in my mind many fine punishments of the first water for anyone who might dare trifle with our enterprise in any way great or small. On the first day the trifler will be hung well wrapped with strong cords upside down from a flagpole at a height of twenty stories. On the second day the trifler will be turned right side up and rehung from the same syaff, so as to empty the blood from his head and prepare him for the third day. On the third day the trifler will be unwrapped and attended by a licensed D.D.S., who will extract every other tooth from the top part of his jaw and every other tooth from the bottom part of his jaw, the extractions to be mismatching according to the blueprints supplied. On the fourth day the trifler will be given hard things to eat. On the fifth day the trifler will be comforted with soft fine garments and flagons and the love of lithesome women so as to make the shock of the sixth day the more severe. On the sixth day the trifler will be confined alone in a small room with the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. On the seventh day the trifler will be pricked with nettles. On the eight day the trifler will be slid naked down a thousand-foot razor blade to the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. On the ninth day the trifler will be sewn together by children. On the tenth day...
  • “Flying to America”

• I keep wondering if, say, there is intelligent life on other planets, the scientists argue that something like two percent of the other planets have the conditions, the physical conditions, to support life in the way it happened here, did Christ visit each and every planet, go through the same routine, the Agony in the Garden, the Crucifixion, and so on...
  • “Basil From Her Garden”

• I obey the Commandments, the sensible ones. Where they don’t know what they’re talking about I ignore them. I keep thinking about the story of the two old women in church listening to the priest discoursing on the dynamics of the married state. At the end of the sermon one turns to the other and says, “I wish I knew as little about it as he does.”
  • “Basil From Her Garden”

• Instant gratification is not as good as that gratification which comes dripping slow, over the sere seasons.
  • “The Bed”

• Out for a walk I was, wanted to clear my head, I’d been drinking the night before, tequila mostly, a bit of lime juice, one lime per bottle, or four limes in all, by the end of the evening. I was feeling poorly, I had asked for help with the tequila, but no one came, all sent regrets, busy elsewhere, prior engagement, don’t go out after dark anymore, that sort of thing, allergic to rats, that sort of thing. I could not blame them. My brother sent regrets, from his room behind the kitchen, stuffy bastard, nose in a book probably, or playing his drums, the jackass, fraternity is not among his talents.
  So I wandered out, in the cool of the morning, fell down a time or two, that was to be expected, reached the whorehouse district without other difficulty but they’d all gone to bed, banged my head on a door or two but no one answered, that was to be expected, it was 7 or thereabouts, fresh, cool, and golden. And I said why not the graveyard? and could think of no compelling contrary argument, and went there, and tumbled into an open grave, and broke a leg.
  It was a new grave, having been readied the previous day for a 10 A.M. ceremonial, I say 10 A.M. because that was the hour at which they discovered me. They fished me out and took me in a van to a hospital where a young man cut straight up my trouser leg with shears, not knowing I suppose that I had no other trousers, and then did the necessary with the plaster and canvas or whatever it is, and hung the finished product from a sort of slingshot affair above the bed. Double spiral break, he said, very nasty, and asked the date of my birth and what authority I belonged to, city, county, state or federal, and I told him, as best as I could remember. And thus I found myself, for three months and ten days, at the mercy of my brother Manfred, for whom pig is perhaps too soft, or sweet, a word.
  • “Manfred”, opening; Kim Herzinger, p. 329: “In February 1976, The New York Times Magazine ran the beginning of a yet-unnamed story written by Barthelme. Readers were invited, in Barthelme’s own words, ‘to complete it in no more than 750 words...as an experiment in literary collaboration.’ Barthelme hoped that the entries would be ‘serious, rather than parodies or burlesques.’ He added, ‘I have done the easiest part, the beginning; you are asked to provide the terrifying middle and the subtle, uncomparably beautiful ending. God be with you.’ The ‘terrifying middle’ and ‘incomparably beautiful ending’ were provided by Karen Shaw, for which she won $250. ... ...the final version was published in The New York Times Magazine on April 18, 1976.”

• As Jules Renard said, no matter how much care an author takes to write as few books as possible, there will be people who haven’t heard of some of them.
  • “You Are Cordially Invited”

other

• I am never needlessly obscure—I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.
  • as quoted by Tracy Daugherty in an interview, Splice Today, 2 Sept 2009

• It is not true that Kafka wanted Brod to burn his manuscripts after his death. Rather it is the case that Kafka was on fire to be published...rushed to the postbox day after day...ate with editors...intrigued for favorable notices...read the Writer’s Digest...consorted with critics...autographed napkins...made himself available to librarians...spoke on the radio...
  • praragraph deleted from “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel”, in Tracy Daugherty’s Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme (2009), p. 335

quotations about Barthelme

• One of the U.S.'s most stylish and original satirists. He translates the chipped teacups, navel lint, prattle and random states of life into even rows of words that twitter, bong, flash, and glow...
  • Time, blurbed on the back cover of the paperback of The Dead Father (1976)

• Donald Barthelme has accomplished the work that the New Journalists are not competent to do. In a single story he is able to include more of the taste of the times than there is in the collected works of Wolfe, Breslin, Talese & Co. The difference lies in Barthelme’s ability to compress, almost to transistorize the world, and then make his miniatures real again by virtue of his talent for language.
  • Earl Shorris, “Donald Barthelme’s Illustrated Wordy-Gurdy”, Harper’s, January 1973, p. 92.

• Barthelme isn’t easy, and he frequently fails, but he’s written some of the best stories of the last twenty years.
  • Walter Clemons reviewing Sixty Stories, “Barthelme the Scrivener”, Newsweek, 12 Oct 1981, p. 100.

• "The Balloon" is a Donald Barthelme story. ... In a 1996 Salon interview, David [Foster Wallace] told Laura Miller it was "the first story I ever read that made me want to be a writer."
  • David Lipsky, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace (2010), p. 313

• In The New York Times Book Review, John Romano recalled “the excitement caused among readers” at the appearance of Don’s first stories in the 1960s. “There just weren’t then, as there aren’t now, very many stories published that you wanted to call your friends up and read aloud from; and Barthelme gave us more than a few.”
  • Tracy Daugherty, Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme (2009), p. 441

• “How come you write the way you do?” an apprentice writer in my Johns Hopkins workshop once disingenuously asked Donald Barthelme, who was visiting. Without missing a beat, Donald replied, “Because Samuel Beckett was already writing the way he does.”
  Asked another, likewise disingenuosly, “How can we become better writers than we are?”
  “For starters," DB advised, “read through the whole history of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics up through last semester. That might help.”
  “But Coach Barth has already advised us to read all of literature, from Gilgamesh up through last semester....”
  “That, too,” Donald affirmed, and turned on that shrewd Amish-farmer-from-West-Eleventh-Street twinkle of his. “You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping. Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature. Also art. Plus politics and a few other things. The history of everything.”
  • John Barth, introduction to Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews (1997), p. xi

• Barthelme is neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin. He shields his blue eyes behind rimless glasses. He has red hair and a beard and dresses conservatively. He lives quietly in a floor-through walk-up on West 11th Street with his third wife, a Danish girl named Birgit, and his 4-year-old daughter, for whom he has made a most interesting pull-toy out of found objects. He is handy with carpenter’s tools. His manuscripts arrive at The New Yorker very neatly typed. He works in the morning and is often seen walking around the Village of an afternoon. His social life has been described as “incredibly commonplace”. ...He is known to grow quite restless confronted by the quiet of a country weekend. He is likely to become “aggressively silent” at large gatherings of literary people, but he is also a talkative and loyal intimate.
  • Richard Schickel, “Freaked Out on Barthelme”, The New York Times Magazine, 16 August 1970