TPPM Barthelme: "Psychological California"

[Dave Monroe]

   "There are also pieces too free of form to be
parody, too funny to be simple invective, that express
Barthelme's deep annoyance with any number of selected
offenders -- the federal government, Thanksgiving,
just about anything from California, not perhaps
geographical so much as psychological California, with
its reputation for granting asylum to, call them
wishful thinkers, seeking to deny, in mostly
unorthodox ways, the passage of time, and what time
brings in the way of aging, the evils of history, the
turns of Fortune. Like most writers who are serious
about what they do, Barthelme could not afford any
such luxuries, and so had little patience with anyone
who appeared to him to be indulging them."

http://www.vheissu.org/bio/eng_barthelme.htm

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/barthelme.html

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_barthelme.htm


"psychological California"

Rickels, Laurence A.  The Case of California.
   Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991.
   Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001.

A cult classic that explores the concept of
"California"-now back in print!

Focusing on the changing image of the West Coast
through such varied social and cultural artifacts as
bodybuilding, group therapy, suicide cults,
milk-carton images of missing children, teenage slang,
and surf music, Laurence Rickels offers a dizzying
psychohistory of the twentieth century as crystallized
in the symbolic configuration called California and
considered in relation to German modernism, national
socialism, and Freudian psychoanalysis....

http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/r/rickels_case.html

http://www.popmatters.com/books/reviews/c/case-of-california.shtmll

http://www.cult-media.com/issue1/Rgelder.htm

http://static.highbeam.com/a/artforuminternational/october011993/diggingfreudfromcaliforniatogermanytheoristlaurenc/


"wishful thinkers"

"wishful thinking" here = ahistorical, gnostic ...


"writers who are serious"

"When we speak of 'seriousness' in fiction ultimately
we are talking about an attitude toward death ...."
(SL, "Intro," p. 5)


		
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