Donald Barthelme's use of the list

[jochen stremmel]

And here, for instance, another list:


http://biblioklept.org/2014/04/07/donald-barthelmes-book-recommendations/

2014-04-08 11:34 GMT+02:00 alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com>:
> Realism for Everyone
>
> by Dan Piepenbring
>
> Donald Barthelme would've been, and should be, eighty-three today. It
> would be an exaggeration to say that I feel the absence of someone
> whom I never met--someone who died when I was three--but I do wonder,
> with something more than mere curiosity, what Barthelme would have
> made of the past twenty-odd years. These are decades I feel we've
> processed less acutely because he wasn't there to fictionalize them:
> their surreal political flareups, their new technologies, their
> various zeitgeists and intellectual fads and dumb advertisements. Part
> of what I love about Barthelme's stories is the way they traffic in
> cultural commentary without losing their intimacy, their humanity.
> They feel something like channel-surfing with your favorite uncle;
> he's running his mouth the whole time, but he's running it
> brilliantly, he's interlarding his commentary with sad, sharp stories
> from his own life, and you're learning, you're laughing, you're
> feeling, because he's putting the show on for you, lovingly, his dear
> nephew.
>
> But I'm losing the thread. My point is not to reveal a secret wish
> that Barthelme was my uncle.
>
> I wanted to say something about lists. Barthelme was a master of many
> things, but one of them was, of course, the list--the man could make a
> prodigious inventory. I don't mean to be glib when I say that.
> List-making is often dismissed as sloppy writing, but in Barthelme's
> hands, a list never functions as an elision or a cheap workaround; he
> makes marvelous profusions of nouns, testaments to the power of
> juxtaposition. His lists feel noetic--they capture the motion of a mind
> delighting in how many things there are, and how rampantly they're
> proliferating, and how strangely they collide in life, when they do.
> Here, for instance, is
>
> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/04/07/realism-for-everyone/
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