total anxiety pay for variety

sicklove (you can see it in NY)

http://www.catherineslip.blogspot.com/

this week!

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reading The New Yorker, Feb 23, 2009

“Saved from Drowning: Barthelme Reconsidered”
by Louis Menand

p. 74 contrasting Robert Rauschenberg and Barthelme on found-material

The visual artist can deal with almost every kind of material, even sound, but the writer deals with only one kind of material: sentences. The solution, therefore, was to treat sentences as though they were found objects.
We rarely experience sentences this way, because we’re trying to look through them to the things they represent, just as, in traditional easel painting, we look through the canvas, as though it were a window, onto the world it represents. That’s the kind of looking and reading that modernism was committed to disrupting.

p.75

Barthelme believed just what Mallarmé believed, that the purpose of literature is to renew the language of the tribe.
He also believed that one of the things deadening our responses was mass culture. He used Hackneyed prose in his pieces all the time, and he was a connoisseur of the linguistically tired and poor. “Any sentence that begins with the phrase, ‘It is not clear that…’ is clearly clumsy but preparing itself for greatness of a kind,” he explained in an interview in Partisan Review “A way of backing into a story- of getting past the reader’s hardwon armor.” But he detested writing whose badness was unself-conscious, without irony. He complained that book publishers “publish an enormous number of things which look like books, sort of feel like books, but in reality are buckets of peanut butter with a layer of whipped cream on top.” He warned about “the ferocious appropriation of high culture by commercial culture,” and he complained about being compared with the Pop artists- he called the association “dismaying.”