“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.
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John Madera is the author of Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024). His other fiction is published in Conjunctions, Salt Hill, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His nonfiction is published in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, New York State Council on the Arts awardee John Madera lives in New York City, Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.
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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:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNAFCwG2BdM&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
What do you make of it?