doorstoppers

[Michael Bailey]

>  > I read that Barth did a lot of his early writing behind speed.
>
>
> I've never heard that before.  Any chance you could chase down the reference?
>


I bought used copies of Tidewater, Somebody the Sailor, Letters and
Sabbatical earlier this year and browsed them all in no particular
order but with a lot of pleasure.  Having left them in Kansas
unfortunately I can only tell you this:

it was prescription amphetamine, and the details are in one of them.
Probably Sabbatical or Tidewater - they are like 50 times as
autobiographical as Letters and Somebody

They're all good though.  I was so glad to have all four that I never
did sit down and read one all the way thru!  Ya gotta love Barth,
early or later.  Is what I think.  Not flashy but it's all there.
He transcended flashy as of Letters.

If Stephenson is a monster truck, Pynchon is an exquisite early
Corvette o-or maybe a Lotus, Kerouac a 57 Chevy, Gibson a Maybank,
Gaddis a Duesenberg, Delillo a white van filled with surveillance
equipment, Grace Paley your friend's VW microbus, JM Coetzee a Hearse
Phaeton (at least in MoP), Joyce Carol Oates a Crown Vic, Doris
Lessing a Wolseley Wasp...

then Barth is a Studebaker, class like you can't find anymore.

-- 
--
"Certainly this cookbook is for people who are not so neurotically
antiauthoritarian as I am - to whom one can say, "Take the juice of
one lemon," without the furious response: "Is that a direct order?" -
Grace Paley