Stories by Donald Barthelme (3)
CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/11/stories-by-donald-barthelme-2/
Gradual alphabetical listing of my Barthelme reviews: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/15/my-reviews-of-stories-by-donald-barthelme/
Previous reviews of older or classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
When I read these stories, my thoughts will appear in comment stream below…
Nemonymous Night 
PORCUPINES AT THE UNIVERSITY
Four to five thousand of them with their head wrangler porcupine but faced by a gatling gun when arriving at the university.
“Are they significant?”
Cross-referenced here with Leonora Carrington: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/leonora-carrington/#comment-2464
THE DEATH OF EDWARD LEAR
We gather by invitation for an enactment of the eponymous death, no nonsense and no frills, as he acts petulantly. We all behave thus when seen to be dying, as none of us are at all rewarded for the lives we have lived. As old men ourselves, we scorn mouldy Tennyson for what he is quoted saying in this story.
The Death of Edward LEAR is REAL.
I BOUGHT A LITTLE CITY
“I hate bongo drums. I started to tell him to stop playing those goddamn bongo drums but then I said to myself, No, that’s not right. You got to let him play his goddamn bongo drums if he feels like it, it’s part of the misery of
democracy, to which I subscribe.”
A city that grows under this Wizard of Oz (see my Jackson story reviewed by chance half an hour ago HERE) like a jigsaw of the Mona Lisa. He kills off six thousand dogs, thank all the gods! Irony or not.
I have read something like the following passage in the last few days in Barthelme or elsewhere (S. Jackson or L. Carrington?) but I can’t find it, and, until I do, I may not read any more Barthelme… You see, who, is ‘she’? And can any city be pretty?
“If each piece of ground was like a piece of this-here puzzle, and the tree line on each piece of property followed the outline of a piece of the puzzle — well, there you have it, QED and that’s all she wrote.” My italics.
Found it…
“Morning, noon, and night. Of course when they’re rung you have to be pretty quick at getting out of the way. You get hit in the head by one of these babies and that’s all she wrote.”
Quoted in my CITY OF CHURCHES review here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/02/09/work-by-the-comte-de-lautreamont-donald-barthelme-and-shirley-jackson/#comment-28136
AT THE TOLSTOY MUSEUM
An interface between words and artwork that made me think of Magritte mixed with an AI black and white sketcher, although it is neither. Oh, a smidgin of Warhol, too. Tolstoy’s story of the Bishop and the three hermits was inspiring within such an image-text installation as Tall Story.
Cf my review of ‘The Three Hunters’ by Leonora Carrington yesterday.
There will now be an indefinite interval in my reading of Barthelme.