Donald Barthelme's Syllabus

I've read 8 or 9. (I can't remember if I actually read one of the Frisch books, but I think I might have.)

-- who knew the dodgy Man U defender was such a renaissance man?

1. Check.
2. Check! Hey, this is gonna be easy!
3. No, but then everyone's bound to miss one or two.
4. Read half of it without getting too much of it, but hey, check it!
5 onwards, no, no, uhhhhm, no, what's that? always meant to read THAT one, no, nope, never heard of it, till, at last,
20. Yay!!!!
then, many, too many no's to count later,
80. Yes, but so what?

Feeling utterly and functionally illiterate PuzzleMonkey swings over to the bar thread. Good God! Too late, too late! he eeped. This list has made its wicked way over there as well. Think I'll just pull out a copy of Jose Cuervo's latest bodice ripper and work through that.

I am not quite sure whether I finished it.

Believe it or not, when I was 16 I found it depressingly sexist.

Some others I have dipped into - such as the surprise Kenner inclusion, the Flaubert, the whole of Beckett (what a silly request).

I am not reading the rest until Barthelme agrees to read all of my list.

Tragic Magic - Wesley Brown
-- who knew the dodgy Man U defender was such a renaissance man?

And that he could get his stream-of-consciousness tale of his 3/14/04 game against Man U out to the academics so fast. If he could that pace back on the pitch, it would be a definite improvement.

I mean, maybe the handful of books there that I don't recognize are paraliterary in some way, and if so I take it back.

Or: The last thing I'd suggest to budding writers (and I assume that's what this list is for) is that their reading habits be primarily (or totally!) of literary works.

I have still never read any barthelme and don't intend to because I know I'd love him.

I've liked 'em all pretty much without exception, so yeah I'd want to read more from this list.

I can totally see how they're all barthelmeesqe too, or at least fit with his ethos.

the third is the listing for reading it i started on 43things.com!

A syllabus for you would be slightly different.

Also perhaps you should read one from column A and then one from column B?

http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/bernstein/syllabi/periper.html

chris: uh: the john cage lecture, 'the tennis court oath', 'pcoet' and that's it.

i started reading this about a month ago - again, not remembering that it was on this list - and had absolutely no interest in finishing it. and it's not long at all! i dunno, maybe i'll try again sometime. it just seemed so dated and obvious. nothing revolutionary or even very entertaining. apparently, she is big with writing teachers.

Did a bit wikiing around w/this. Of the writers I do not know a thing about I'd be v interested in Max Frisch and Kobo Abe? Anyone read 'em? ('Woman of the Dunes' the fillum is a favourite for me)

as far as abe i remember liking secret rendezvous and disliking the kangaroo notebook - its pretty far out shifting stream of consciousness action - kinda a way way less disciplined calvino

9

Max Frisch's 'Homo Faber' is a specious bit of nonsense.
Abe's 'Woman in the Dunes' is, frankly, pretty daft, but quite a lot of fun anyway.

There's a surprising amount of stuff on that list with plot and characters, not what I would have expected Barthelme to be a fan of (don't get me wrong, I like Barthelme; I just like polot and characters too).

Wayne C. Booth! This reminds me when I was still in the habit of reading the readings my sister got assigned for her lit classes. She always had the better teachers.

15 -- almost all read just-post-college in my early/mid 20s. was this list drawn in the early 80s?

Henderson The Rain King - Bellow
28. The Coup - John Updike

these are weird, atypical, really perverse choices from these guys. and both these books would be decried as racist if they were published today.

"Abe's 'Woman in the Dunes' is, frankly, pretty daft, but quite a lot of fun anyway."

i didn't think it was fun! i thought it was scary! (i liked it a bunch too)

i'm a big bellow fan and henderson is easily my least favorite novel.

I have read only six, and parts of two others. Love the look of this list, though. It gives me things to look for during my next library/bookstore visit that I'd never have thought of before (Sexual Perversity in Chicago...and some mischievous part of me wants to read the Collected Stories of John Cheever, Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor concurrently).

"Fun" I guess I meant in the sense that it's an intriguing idea well done--just that it's also quite daft when you step back and think about it. But I really did like it. I've got Abe's 'Face of Another' which I haven't yet read. The blurb makes it sound as though the story was nicked for that Mel Gibson movie about (Man Without a Face or something like that), but with added Frankensteinisms.

http://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2015/09/borgess-picks-an-eclectic-library-for-you-a-list-of-74-must-reads/

1. Stories by Julio Cortázar (not sure if this refers to Hopscotch, Blow-Up and Other Stories, or neither)
2. & 3. The Apocryphal Gospels
4. Amerika and The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka
5. The Blue Cross: A Father Brown Mystery by G.K. Chesterton
6. & 7. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
8. The Intelligence of Flowers by Maurice Maeterlinck
9. The Desert of the Tartars by Dino Buzzati
10. Peer Gynt and Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
11. The Mandarin: And Other Stories by Eça de Queirós
12. The Jesuit Empire by Leopoldo Lugones
13. The Counterfeiters by André Gide
14. The Time Machine and The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
15. The Greek Myths by Robert Graves
16. & 17. Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
18. Mathematics and the Imagination by Edward Kasner
19. The Great God Brown and Other Plays, Strange Interlude, and Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O’Neill
20. Tales of Ise by Ariwara no Narihara
21. Benito Cereno, Billy Budd, and Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville
22. The Tragic Everyday, The Blind Pilot, and Words and Blood by Giovanni Papini
23. The Three Impostors
24. Songs of Songs tr. by Fray Luis de León
25. An Explanation of the Book of Job tr. by Fray Luis de León
26. The End of the Tether and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
27. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
28. Essays & Dialogues by Oscar Wilde
29. Barbarian in Asia by Henri Michaux
30. The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
31. Buried Alive by Arnold Bennett
32. On the Nature of Animals by Claudius Elianus
33. The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen
34. The Temptation of St. Antony by Gustave Flaubert
35. Travels by Marco Polo
36. Imaginary Lives by Marcel Schwob
37. Caesar and Cleopatra, Major Barbara, and Candide by George Bernard Shaw
38. Macus Brutus and The Hour of All by Francisco de Quevedo
39. The Red Redmaynes by Eden Phillpotts
40. Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard
41. The Golem by Gustav Meyrink
42. The Lesson of the Master, The Figure in the Carpet, and The Private Life by Henry James
43. & 44. The Nine Books of the History of Herodotus by Herodotus
45. Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
46. Tales by Rudyard Kipling
47. Vathek by William Beckford
48. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
49. The Professional Secret & Other Texts by Jean Cocteau
50. The Last Days of Emmanuel Kant and Other Stories by Thomas de Quincey
51. Prologue to the Work of Silverio Lanza by Ramon Gomez de la Serna
52. The Thousand and One Nights
53. New Arabian Nights and Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson
54. Salvation of the Jews, The Blood of the Poor, and In the Darkness by Léon Bloy
55. The Bhagavad Gita and The Epic of Gilgamesh
56. Fantastic Stories by Juan José Arreola
57. Lady into Fox, A Man in the Zoo, and The Sailor’s Return by David Garnett
58. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
59. Literary Criticism by Paul Groussac
60. The Idols by Manuel Mujica Láinez
61. The Book of Good Love by Juan Ruiz
62. Complete Poetry by William Blake
63. Above the Dark Circus by Hugh Walpole
64. Poetical Works by Ezequiel Martinez Estrada
65. Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
66. The Aeneid by Virgil
67. Stories by Voltaire
68. An Experiment with Time by J.W. Dunne
69. An Essay on Orlando Furioso by Atilio Momigliano
70. & 71. The Varieties of Religious Experience and The Study of Human Nature by William James
72. Egil’s Saga by Snorri Sturluson
73. The Book of the Dead
74. & 75. The Problem of Time by J. Alexander Gunn

now i'm trying to remember if i already posted this list somewhere else a million years ago...oh well...

Heh timely revive, just the other day I was thinking to myself I wonder if there's any footage of Dapper Don extant, and discovered this on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjokr7W1ixk

I was amazed by how unTexan Don B sounds.

Borges' fav movie was west side story

great choice!

i wonder if he was a fan of The Warriors.

42. The Lesson of the Master, The Figure in the Carpet, and The Private Life by Henry James

Love what Borges says in his Paris Review interview: "I think that the whole world of Kafka is to be found in a far more complex way in the stories of Henry James"

I think I saw that list, or a very similar list, somewhere before, and along with it came someone's mention that there were zero women on the list, and that comment sparked a series of other comments that demonstrated that Borges didn't respect women at all. Probably common knowledge to most, but it was news to me, knocking him down from godlike genius to genius with terrible flaws.

He was a big promoter of his friend Silvina Ocampo, but perhaps she was the only one he liked? Or the fact they knew each other meant he couldnt ignore her.

Googling "Borges Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz" doesn't bring anything unfortunately - would've thought Borges was into her poetry (they are similarly voracious readers/live in libraries etc)

are there any syllabi of exclusively women's writing? can prob crowdsource one here, I guess wd contain at least 1 of didion, jean rhys, moore, spark, jansson, elizabeth bowen, highsmith, ferrante, le guin, munro, elizabeth bishop, mccullers, woolf, comyns, murdoch, o'connor, adler

i should read some woolf someday. probably. i should, right? i probably should.

i think i did read a room of one's own.

when all is said and done, i'm a pretty trad dad. katherine mansfield 4 lyfe.

btw scott, do I remember you like Thea Astley? If so, you might well like Elizabeth Harrower and Jessica Anderson, two other Australian writers of similar sensibility and style and sporadic bad-temperedness

are there any syllabi of exclusively women's writing?

yeah, i think i remembered where i first saw borges' list, which prompted this:

http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/74-books-curated-by-female-creatives.html

Reminder that in The Name of the Rose Eco made the blind venerable Jorge of Burgos the villain