“Patterns of silver light and so forth.”
—”City Life,” Donald Barthelme, from City Life
I stole this for use as the name of my blog: because I love its relaxed economy; because I love how it won’t let go of what is dismissed.
Scott Garson is the author of American Gymnopédies.
Just spotted a first edition of this for sale at a local bookstore. It’s a beautiful shape for a book, much wider than average, and given Barthelme’s own attunement to shape, this seems absolutely fitting.
That is a beautiful cover for a Barthelme book. I have the old (now) pengiun editions of his stories, 60 Stories and 40 Stories that have a kind of neon wall paper design. Actually 60 stories or even 40 stories are too many stories for a book. It’s hard to read all of those stories. I always find it very difficult to read “collected stories” for this reason, and yet it seems that is always the final resting place of a short story writers work. I have Stephen Dixon’s collected stories (a massive slab of his stories up to the mid-1990s) and it is a great thing to have them all nicely typeset and in one spot, but exhausting to read.
I just did a search on YouTube trying to find adaptions and there just aren’t every many YouTube Barthelme things. There is a bit of Russell Edson. A quarter ton of Lydia Davis. Something like six YouTube videos of Barthelme. Something must be done.
I did find this:
What do you make of it?
[...] Bell,Andrew Borgstrom, Paula Bomer, Alexandra Chasin, Thomas Cooper, Luca Dipierro, John Domini, Scott Garson, Barry Graham, Chris Heavener, Christopher Higgs, Steve Himmer, Lily Hoang, Tim Horvath, Jamie [...]