DONALD BARTHELME: ...I think there are two devices that have clearly had an enormous impact on language. One… — Donald Barthelme
DONALD BARTHELME: ...I think there are two devices that have clearly had an enormous impact on language. One is television. I don’t wish to blame television for all the faults of the world, but it has had a vulgarizing effect. The other is the telephone, because we don’t write letters anymore. I don’t write letters—I don’t even write business letters. I call up on the telephone. When people don’t write letters, language deteriorates.
JO BRANS: Do you keep a journal?
BARTHELME: I keep a workbook with stray pieces of paper with things written on them. A kind of mulch pile.
p. 297Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
BOBBIE ROE: Is the new generation of writers more concerned than their predecessors with politics, economics, and social class?
DONALD BARTHELME: I think that there are lowered expectations, not æsthetic expectations for the work, but lowered expectations in terms of life. My generation, perhaps foolishly, expected, even demanded, that life be wonderful and magical and then tried to make it so by writing in a rather complex way. It seems now quite an eccentric demand.
p. 319
Americans have political problems that they don’t recognize as political. The impoverishment of the country by the arms race is a good example. Money spent on arms is, among other things, useless money in terms of the economy because it’s stored. It’s in nerve gas, aircraft carriers, the Stealth bomber. I gave a reading at the University of Alabama a couple of years ago, and on the way to the campus we passed an airfield packed with military aircraft, trillions of dollars’ worth of planes stacked up there, National Guard stuff, not even first-line stuff. The cost, the weight of this, is not understood by most Americans. They don’t know where their money’s going. They know they’re pressed for money and that their school systems are being eighty-sixed by national accrediting organizations, but they don’t connect this to that National Guard elephant graveyard. Black people think that they’re poor because they’re black and the white folks control the money. This is true, but black folks are damaged more by lousy economic policy than by racism.
p. 317
When computers learn how to make jokes, artists will be in serious trouble.
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