Donald Barthelme

If you're the kind of person that always wants to get McSweeney's Quarterly but can't quite stomach the price, this is the month to take the plunge. Why now? Because this issue has an excellent section devoted to none other than Donald Barthelme!


Donald Barthelme, for those that aren't aware, was considered one of the greatest writers of the second half of the 20th century. He's primarily known for the anthologies 60 Stories and 40 Stories, both of which have some of the funniest and most bizarre stories I've ever read. Reading Barthelme, who before his death was frequently found in the New Yorker and other major magazines, is a reminder of a time when the word "experimental literature" didn't make every non-graduate student want to flee the room. With a casual style that belied the weightiness of his subject matter and themes, Barthelme was able to draw in the sort of readers that would be just fine avoiding for the rest of their lives any fiction that could be referred to as "challenging."

Additionally, there's a great page dedicated to him, complete with stories and essays that is well worth checking out. In order to get you started, here are a few of the best stories from the site that you should print out and read tonight on the subway home (or, sans subway, perhaps by a roaring fire in your den?):

Rebecca: Possibly my favorite Barthelme story. I find it hard to describe appropriately, other than to say that (a) it is about a slightly green woman with the last name "Lizard" and (b) that the story has one of the most hilarious and unusual narrators you'll ever find. Also, it has one of my all time favorite closing lines:

The story ends. It was written for several reasons. Nine of them are secrets. The tenth is that one should never cease considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever, no matter what it tattooed upon the warm tympanic page.

The School: A perennial Barthelme favorite. Very funny, then horrifying, then sort of funny again, then decidedly horrifying.

Me and Miss Mandible: A 35 year-old man find himself enrolled in an elementary school. Needless to say, office politics and sex ensue.

Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby: After a friend "goes to far," what do you do? What any sane group of friends would: hang him.

So, there's a start. Although I've found Donald Barthelme to be an incredibly polarizing author, I hope that you find something to enjoy in these funny, strange, and (in their way) "experimental" stories.

Comedy Row

Comedy Row comprises the second row of the far left bookshelf of my apartment. I never really intended to create a "row of comedy," it just sort of started happening as I filled up my new bookshelves last spring. I discovered that I had unwittingly collected 6 or 7 P.G. Wodehouse books in the time that I had been in New York, not counting the 5-10 books I still have back in Michigan. Some people collect James Brown bootlegs, I apparently collect Wodehouse.

Even stranger, I realized that in under two years, I had picked up some more books James Thurber (my first comedic love), some Evelyn Waugh (whom I still don't really get), Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, Steve Martin, Benjamin Franklin and Nicholson Baker (who don't get the credit they deserve for being laugh-out-loud funny), 3 (!) copies of My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell, and more.

This was it for me. I realized I had a chance to create my ideal row of books! If I could only bring one book with me to a desert island, it wouldn't be the Bible or Remembrances of Things Past, it would be Fierce Pajamas, the New Yorker humor anthology. While I could possibly stumble through a half hour conversation about Modernism, I could easily spend an entire night trying to articulate how Mark Twain stays so funny after a century and a half or why there's really nothing quite as uniquely hilarious as one of James Thurber's dog drawings. Comedy, especially written comedy, seems like a mystic art to me, equally as hard as any dramatic work. And, for whatever reason, I've always been more intrigued by comedic questions than dramatic ones.

I guess there's an element of attainability there that I find very attractive; while I find James Joyce's genius inscrutable, I feel as though I could maybe, if I tried hard enough, figure out what makes a piece of writing laugh-out-loud funny. Granted, I don't know that you really can; anybody who's tried to read any sort of academic writing on comedy knows how dry and ultimately unilluminating that proves to be. I don't know that I think "funny" can be taught or learned and there's absolutely nothing worse than meeting someone that tries to tell "jokes." Mark Twain captures this dilemma well...

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3250/3250.txt

Still, trying to crack the mystery has always been a big part of the fun of reading comedic writing for me. It hasn't really worked out, but, much like solving crossword puzzles, I just can't resist the challenge.