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Barthelme is neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin. He shields his blue eyes behind rimless glasses. He has red hair and a beard and dresses conservatively. He lives quietly in a floor-through walk-up on West 11th Street with his third wife, a Danish girl named Birgit, and his 4-year-old daughter, for whom he has made a most interesting pull-toy out of found objects. He is handy with carpenter’s tools. His manuscripts arrive at The New Yorker very neatly typed. He works in the morning and is often seen walking around the Village of an afternoon. His social life has been described as “incredibly commonplace”. ...He is known to grow quite restless confronted by the quiet of a country weekend. He is likely to become “aggressively silent” at large gatherings of literary people, but he is also a talkative and loyal intimate.
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Richard Schickel, “Freaked Out on Barthelme”, The New York Times Magazine, 16 August 1970

 

Donald Barthelme

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Restless sleep, twisted dreams
Moving targets, silent screams.
Restless city, restless street
Restless you, restless me.

 

Tom Petty

 

Yes, society must go on; it must breed, like rabbits. That is what we are here for. But then, I don't like society — much. I am that absurd figure, an American millionaire, who has bought one of the ancient haunts of English peace. I sit here, in Edward's gun-room, all day and all day in a house that is absolutely quiet. No one visits me, for I visit no one. No one is interested in me, for I have no interests. In twenty minutes or so I shall walk down to the village, beneath my own oaks, alongside my own clumps of gorse, to get the American mail. My tenants, the village boys and the tradesmen will touch their hats to me. So life peters out. I shall return to dine and Nancy will sit opposite me with the old nurse standing behind her. Enigmatic, silent, utterly well-behaved as far as her knife and fork go, Nancy will stare in front of her with the blue eyes that have over them strained, stretched brows. Once, or perhaps twice, during the meal her knife and fork will be suspended in mid-air as if she were trying to think of something that she had forgotten. Then she will say that she believes in an Omnipotent Deity or she will utter the one word "shuttle-cocks", perhaps. It is very extraordinary to see the perfect flush of health on her cheeks, to see the lustre of her coiled black hair, the poise of the head upon the neck, the grace of the white hands — and to think that it all means nothing — that it is a picture without a meaning. Yes, it is queer.

 

Ford Madox Ford

 

It all goes back to Neil Gaiman. In the foreword to “Fragile Things,” he wrote that his short story “Sunbird” was his way of trying to write his own R.A. Lafferty story. So I found “Nine Hundred Grandmothers,” and it’s like nothing I’ve ever read before. It’s very blue-collar science fiction – all the familiar tropes of people going to outer space and to other planets. It’s hilarious, incredibly funny and at the same time it’s insanely dark. You get the feeling like it’s a guy just writing to amuse himself: “I don’t care if any of this makes sense, but I want to see weird stuff happen.” One of his stories starts off, “He began by breaking things that morning.” There’s a short story called “Ginny Wrapped in the Sun,” and it’s just about this little girl who’s super strong, running around, picking things up. You get such a sense of joy and boundless imagination in every sentence – even if the story doesn’t totally cohere, you feel like it’s about something. It’s so incredibly Tulsa. You get that feeling when you see a Flaming Lips show. It’s not like we’re dark and hurt and twisted. It’s like, "I’ve got blood on my face – come on, y’all, this is awesome."

 

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She was tall and pleasantly slender, without angularity anywhere. Her body was erect and high-breasted, her legs long, her hands and feet narrow. She wore two shades of blue that had been selected because of her eyes. The hair curling from under her blue hat was darkly red, her full lips more brightly red. White teeth glistened in the crescent her timid smile made.

 

Dashiell Hammett

 

One morning in a recent year, a year not too long ago—the year 1887, to be precise—a young girl named Mathilda awoke, stretched, yawned, scratched, and got out of bed.
“What shall I do this morning?” she asked herself. “I think I shall go hooping. This looks like good hooping weather.”
When she went out into the back yard, hoop in hand, she was amazed to discover that a mysterious Chinese house, only six feet high, had grown there overnight.
Mathilda was disappointed. She had wanted a fire engine. Even though it wasn’t Christmas or her birthday or the day after a day on which she had been particularly good, she had hoped—just a faint, hazy hope—that when she went outside this morning a sparkling red fire engine would be standing there.
“Well, a mysterious Chinese house is better than nothing,” she said to herself. “I suppose I’d better go inside and see what strange things happen to me there. Of course this house is rather small. I’m not even sure I can get inside the door.”
At these words the mysterious Chinese house began to grow and grow. It grew and grew until it was nine feet tall, and sprouted a Chinese weather vane on top. And there was plenty of room to go through the door.
“Plenty of room to go through the door now,” Mathilda reflected. “There’s absolutely nothing to prevent me from going inside. Nothing except those strange noises I hear there.”
From inside the Chinese house came strange noises indeed—growls, howls, the whispering of elephants, the trumpeting of djinn.
“I’m not scared,” Mathilda said. “Very few people are as brave as me.” And she walked through the door.

 

Donald Barthelme