Barthelme is a fellow New Yorker writer whom I read faithfully and have learned a fair amount from. I think Barthelme’s stories of the sixties were really very liberating as far as what one could do with a short story, and I know that my own short stories have been influenced by his. Also, like Hemingway, he’s a great simplifier or stripper away of verbal nonsense. After reading enough Barthelme, your own stories tend to become a little shorter and cleaner and more spasmodic. John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don’t think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I’m saying. His last novel, Chimera, which is really a series of novellas, was essentially about the kind of marital breakup and re-synthesis that I have written about. Pynchon I do feel more alien to; I really find it not easy to read him; I don’t like the funny names and I don’t like the leaden feeling of the cosmos that he sets for us. I believe that life is frightening and tragic, but I think that it is other things, too. Temperamentally, I just have not been able to read enough Pynchon to pronounce intelligently upon him. Clearly, the man is the darling of literary criticism in America now, especially of collegiate criticism. I am just no expert but all I can say is I have not much enjoyed the Pynchon I have tried to read.
Still from Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, dir. Stanley Kubrick)
The first sentence of “The Voices of Time” (1960) is the first of many great opening sentences from the author of perhaps more great opening sentences than any other author in the field. As far as the chronological ladder of Complete is concerned, it all comes from nowhere: Later Powers often thought of Whitby, and the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool. We could unpack the cargo of this sentence for days; the heart of its burden, for me, of course lies in its assertion of a world that has already been spent. It is a sentence in which the passage of time is as detached as a loose retina, for its first word refers to a recollection that will either come later in the tale, or maybe not until the tale, which is about re-enacting the past, has been told. Belatedness piles on belatedness, under the eye of an implied author who is clearly omniscient but (like god) lets us guess. Then there is the empty swimming pool: an artifact of 20th-century Lonely Crowd culture that cannot any more hold water. And there are the strange grooves, runes as unheimlich as the carved faces that shout out the vacancy of Easter Island, in dead silence. And then, for the first time in the chronology of stories here assembled, we are given to understand that the protagonist is a becalmed professional—a doctor or a scientist of some sort, there will be dozens of him in later Ballard stories, the kind of man who, like a shark, must swim constantly to keep from choking in the obsolescence of his skills kit—and we suspect that his deepest gesture in “The Voices of Time” will reiterate the insectile obedience of Whitby: that both men carve glyphs as ultimately unreadable as termite droppings. (via 98 stories! 1,216 pages! Is the complete J.G. Ballard worth it? | SCI FI Wire by John Clute)
You MUST read this. It is by far my favorite thing ever written about the show.
Ingmar Bergman on the set of Jaws
“Personally, I think if a woman hasn’t met the right man by the time she’s 24, she may be lucky.”
-Deborah Kerr (via snap)
“The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all we must dare to fail. You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all.”
-John Cassavetes (1959, via corbis)
