BARTHELME

I�m talking about a pointillist technique, where what you get is not adjacent dots of yellow and blue, which optically merge to give you green, but merged meanings, whether from words placed side by side in a seemingly arbitrary way or phrases similarly arrayed, bushels of them.

INTERVIEWER

An example?

BARTHELME

�Petronius mothballs.� Of course you can do this all day long and the results will be fully as poor as the specimen furnished. Still it�s a North Sea to be explored.

INTERVIEWER

A computer could make that sort of combination.

BARTHELME

But the lovable computer doesn�t know when it�s made a joke. The worm in the apple.

….

Computer people have a phrase, �garbage in, garbage out,� which reflects the kind of thinking necessary to their work; artists on the other hand occasionally refer to the �happy accident��a different style of thinking.

INTERVIEWER

But this is not problem-solving thinking.

BARTHELME

No, it�s not. But the task is not so much to solve problems as to propose questions. To quote Karl Kraus, �A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.� There�s also an element of reportage, the description of new situations or conditions, but that�s pretty much a matter of identifying them rather than talking about solutions. Baudelaire noticing that the boulevards of Paris were no longer a means of getting from here to there but had become more like theater lobbies, places to be, and writing about that. The search is for a question that will generate light and heat.