Word: caligaris
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Barthelme is a quiet, scholarly young Texan-former philosophy student, former art-museum director-who writes the most disturbing and inventive short stories around. Taken together with his earlier books, Come Back, Dr. Caligari and Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, the 14 stories of City Life establish him as the master experimentalist of his genre. He is a writer who may well be changing the definition of a short story the way Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter have changed the definition of a play...
...greater than Pop Art. Richard Lester is in the tradition. Bob Dylan is part of it; the Bob Dylan that Joan Baez called the Dada King. (Everybody Must Get Stoned.) It includes writers like Nabokov, (or, in another way) Donald Barthelme (Snow White, Come Back Dr. Caligari, Unnatural Practices, Unspeakable Acts), and several New York School Poets (Koch, Ashberry, O'Hara). It includes such Zen masters as Joshu, who was given to putting his shoes on his head in reply to weighty theological questions. And it includes my spiritual advisors, the starts of Help, sgt. Pepper's, and The Authorized...
...minnows or adoring her own reflection." It is easier to imagine the author of six novels -among them God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Cat's Cradle-as a zany but moral mod scientist at the controls of a literary time machine. He is George Orwell, Dr. Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one 45-year-old writer exploring the inner and outer spaces of the man-against-machine perplex. In his hands the Silly Putty of contemporary aspirations becomes the exploding plastic that symbolizes civilization's future. He seems to be saying with a near-confidential tone...
...confusingly like a Marx Brother and the only well-known Italian is Al Capone. But judging from an earlier Chicago gallery showing of Red Grooms's work, they will leave delighted. And why not? The whole construction is a cross between a set from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Disneyland. Is it art? Directors of museums and owners of art galleries insist that it, and similar installations, are. The general term for them is "environments"; their aim is to box the spectator within a micro-universe and bombard him from all sides with wacky sights, weirdo sounds...
...somewhat different version of the story, with a few four-letter words chastely omitted, appeared recently in The New Yorker. Author Barthelme, 36, qualified high among the zanier practitioners of what might be called aleatory fiction when he published his 1964 collection of short stories, Come Back, Dr. Caligari...