Donald Barthelme's use of the list

[Matthew Cissell]

Well said, sir,

 We are all the poorer for his absence; let's hope we keep some of his friends around a bit longer.

I for one would not dismiss the list completely as a device in writing although it can easily be found in bad writing. Moreover I would caution one against such dismisal by pointing out Bakhtin's work on lists as well as some excellent examples of lists in work from Homer to Joyce.

And of course there is the P-list. Who could do without it?

Misc. MC
On Tuesday, April 8, 2014 12:14 PM, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:
 
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/
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
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