ellauri069.html on line 71: He was an adept of irony and deflection in person as well as on the page, a lonely and, at some level, unhappy man who needed humor and companionship. But he had, his friend Pynchon told Daugherty, “a hopeful and unbitter heart.” Women seem to have found him easy to like. He married four times and had at least two long-term relationships between the marriages. He was dependent on alcohol, and he was dependent on work. He wrote every morning and had his first drink around noon.
ellauri069.html on line 78: What was he doing? Daugherty is right to claim that Barthelme conceived of himself as an heir of the modernist tradition—in particular, of Beckett. He encountered Beckett’s work for the first time in 1956, when he picked up a copy of Theatre Arts at Guy’s Newsstand, in Houston, and read the text of “Waiting for Godot.” “It seemed that from the day he discovered ‘Godot,’ Don believed he could write the fiction he imagined,” the woman who was his wife at the time, Helen Moore Barthelme, says in her memoir, “Donald Barthelme: The Genesis of a Cool Sound” (2001).
ellauri069.html on line 87: Barthelme vietti elämänsä 8 viimeistä vuotta kurkkusyöpäsenä takas Houstonissa saatuaan potkut New Yorkerista kai. Sen elämäkerturi Daugherty oli sen luovan kirjoituxen kurssin oppilaita siellä. Se kuoli 58-vuotiaana 1989. Varmaan poltti piippua. Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
ellauri069.html on line 89: Barthelme believed himself to be working in the tradition of Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and that his appropriation of popular, commercial, and other sub-artistic elements (instruction manuals, travel guides, advertisements, sentences from newspaper articles, and so on) in his writing was done as a means of making literature, not subverting it or announcing its obsolescence. Daugherty thinks that many people have got Barthelme wrong.
ellauri069.html on line 93: It can certainly look, in short, as though Barthelme, like Warhol, were simply dropping the question of whether something counts as literature or not, since markers of the literary are impossible to find in his writing. The high-art traditionalist has no place to hang his beret. Daugherty’s purpose is to convince us that this was not Barthelme’s intention.
ellauri069.html on line 111: He also believed that one of the things deadening our responses was mass culture. “I believe that’s the place artists are trying to get to, and I further believe that when they are successful, they reach it... an area somewhere probably between mathematics and religion, in which what may fairly be called truth exists.” He was an enemy of television. He was a serious jazz buff. It took him a while to become interested in rock. Daugherty is right. He was a postmodernist in the first sense.
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