April 9, 2020

INTERVIEWER

Don’t you write more about the mind than about the external world?

BARTHELME

In a commonsense way, you write about the impingement of one upon the other—my subjectivity bumping into other subjectivities, or into the Prime Rate. You exist for me in my perception of you (and in some rough, Raggedy Andy way, for yourself, of course). That’s what’s curious when people say, of writers, This one’s a realist, this one’s a surrealist, this one’s a super-realist, and so forth. In fact, everybody’s a realist offering true accounts of the activity of mind. There are only realists.

(Happy Birthday Donald Barthelme)

---

Previous post

barthelmepointillist 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

Next post

beautifulgeometry time is for dragonflies As much a work of art as a book about mathematics, Beautiful Geometry presents more than sixty exquisite color plates