Welcome to the Summer of Proust.
You have to write all the time. And when you’re not you need to be thinking about it.
INTERVIEWER
You’re often linked with Barth, Pynchon, Vonnegut, and others of that ilk. Does this seem to you inhuman bondage or is there reason in it?
BARTHELME
They’re all people I admire. I wouldn’t say we were alike as parking tickets. Some years ago the Times was fond of dividing writers into teams; there was an implication that the Times wanted to see gladiatorial combat, or at least a soccer game. I was always pleased with the team I was assigned to.
Donald Barthelme, who was born on this day in 1931, talked with The Paris Review in issue #66 about his work and comparisons of him to other writers we really love.
Ernest Hemingway was a sporty dude: via Poetry in Motion: Ernest Hemingway, Drunk Sportsman (On Bullfighting, Motor Racing, and Mountain Climbing) | Vol. 1 Brooklyn
Firmly rooted in the stream of consciousness tradition, he still creates his own style: a purer, chaotic raging river than the more mellifluous Woolf, or Proust, and even Joyce. Tsypkin writes so that memories collide with dreams and desires meld with reality. At first, it takes some time to center yourself within his style but once you settle in the prose turns electric, on fire with the expansiveness of life. Tsypkin floats through time often in the same paragraph, or even the same sentence, as memories of childhood bleed into adulthood and vice versa. (via “Memories Collide With Dreams”: A Review of Leonid Tyspkin’s “The Bridge Over The Neroch and Other Works” | Vol. 1 Brooklyn)
Zines have been super-important to both of us in our lives. We both, in different capacities, work on the internet, so the idea of it being this tangible thing — and something we could spend time on… All of the essays, including our own, went through multiple rounds of editing. We worked on it the way you would work on a book. I think the fact that it was a print publication added to our seriousness of coming out with a real finished product.
Okay. I would say this. Stories don’t work that way really. They’re like jokes. They follow a secret pattern of the person telling them. For instance this joke… (I will now tell this joke.) There is a man. He is drinking at a bar. A voice inside his head says, “Quit drinking.” So he quits drinking. The next day the voice says, “Quit your job and sell your house.” So he quits his job and sells his house. He feels free and changed for the first time in his life. The voice returns a few days later and says, “Go to Vegas. Bet all your money on red 17.” He goes to Vegas, bets the money. The wheel spins, the ball bounces, the ball does not fall on the number specified. He has lost everything. The voice whispers, “Ah fuck.” That’s how you tell stories.
There’s no question that mystical music has always been part of youth counterculture. From Fleetwood Mac to Black Sabbath, we all grew up around music that dealt in the dark, the transcendent or the magical. In this age of supposed irony it’s easy to write off our more pronounced recent fascination with spookiness as just another tongue-in-cheek nod to the corniness of the past… (via New Age Now | Vol. 1 Brooklyn)
At the end of last semester, one of my students wrote in his final essay, “As soon as I saw ‘Video Games’ in the title of the course, I thought that the class would just be playing video games. Once the course started, I realized just how wrong I was.” And I think it’s that idea that applies to both the course I teach and the book. Many people assume that because video games are still a relatively new media, and one so firmly rooted in pop culture, that they can’t offer anything in the way of either analysis or art. My goal, as a teacher and as a poet, is often to ask someone to look more closely at something they might look at every day. There can be beauty or terror or all sorts of other complex ideas in things we presume are so simple as to be unworthy of consideration.
(via The Real Subjects: An Interview with BJ Best | Vol. 1 Brooklyn)
