Sadness

...Next square, Mr...

...I agree, Donald...

...But your best stories Donald, these are your animal fables...

...So much for your triangles, Donald...

...Along with his Dreiser sherds, the Genius possesses the most important tool of genius today: rubber cement, plus four cases of Teacher's Highland Cream, historical forces, subincised genitals, a subscription to Harper's Bazaar a failure to win the Nobel Prize this year, and - a gift from the good people of Cincinnati - the complete works of the Venerable Bede...

...But the stories "Traumerei," "Daumier," "The Catechist" - lists upon Lazsts in your Homerical catalogue of ships style...

...Do you mean to argue that all our sadness comes mainly from the contemplation of capitalism...

...But Donald, when it comes to your political stories, and even the title of your collection, what are you trying to tell us in "The Rise of Capitalism...

...Just a little too much kooky-chic...

...As good a starting point as any is "The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace," with its nineteenth century decoupage style illustration of "My Father Concerned About His Over" - in which a story-high bust peers reflectively into a palace arcade at his equally gigantic inner organs...

...By the elephant god you swear on, Donald, this must stop...

...And your dog Charles in the fiction titled "Subpoena" - a dog who is 44 percent metal, a dog with whom everything is all right: even his own disassembly (did you want us at times to spell his name backwards...

...Here I inhaled the acrid odor of marital quarreling, perhaps the most pungent among his fifty-seven flavors...

...Back to the point...

...The Doc can't seem to realize that Susan's piano is more valuable to her than analysis...

...Perpetua," on the other hand, tires of talking about the revolution, plays her fourth-chair trumpet in the New World Symphony Orchestra, and concludes after leaving her TV watching husband, "An Irish setter is what I do not need...

...Perhaps my own reaction was unique, but after a first reading, I concluded I had had a dizzying, wonderful, intermittently painful experience with these stories, somehow reminiscent of my encounter long ago with an old-timey laughing gas dentist...

...John Ashmead...

...Then some near misses, Donald, where fictional cutesey may make some cotton-tailed readers fwow up...

...Let's start with your fiction about "The Genius," who may or may not contain within himself a false man of genius, but certainly is rattling around ironical sherds of Dreiser's The "Genius" (I hope, Donald, you're saying touche to yourself as you see the correct form of the title...

...Watch out, or the NAACP may get you for acknowledging your debt to Kafka, but not to that oldest of black fictional geniuses...

...Just a moment...

...What a gift - you're a marvelous fabulist, a new Aesop...

...Now for your squares...

...A story full of Wanda, a slovenly bitch, who ends up studying Marxist sociology at Nan-terre, no doubt after seeing Godard's La Chinoise too many times...

...And your own light fantastic trip, Donald, perhaps is the better answer, as in your supreme fiction, "Engineer-Private Paul Klee Misplaces an Aircraft between Milbertshofen and Cambrai, March, 1916...

...At least in the story "Departures" you borrowed a good subplot from that ole black writer Chestnutt (but why no credit line - Donald...

...And as for your collection, Sadness, as a whole, fantastic, Donald...

...Oh to have a dog, a wife, a mistress, a congressman, like Charles...

...As Mark Twain would say, it's too many for me, or for what you, yes I mean you Donald, call myself, my misplaced self, my self-abuse, my self-love...

...And dare I count among my squares, Donald, that illustrated one in the story mentioned above, "The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace...

...What a childish, Kafkaesque, expressionistic, original jewel of a story...

...Strauss, and Giroux, $5.95 In the sixteen short stories of his second collection titled Sadness Donald Barthelme presents us with a new perspective into his wildly growing talent...

...Hy Marx, Low Nixonomics, Sacred Mao Cows - especially Krishna Socialism...

...And, in "The Temptation of St...

...First, let's - in Donald's free-wheeling manner - stick it to "Critique de la Vie Quotidienne...

...In Donald's phrase, chocolates and paintings forever...

...Right on, Donald...

...Phillips of "A City of Churches," who needs only Cecilia and her branch office of a car-rental agency to make his bell-ridden city complete, even though she threatens to dream things he won't like, such as the Secret...

...This is an interesting phenomenon and should be investigated...

...Hop scotch on to a story called "The Sandman," dear kiddies of a larger growth, in which the real enemy is Susan's shrink, Doctor Hodder...

...With your story of King Kong revived to go to "The Party" as adjunct professor of art at Rutgers...

...And those Godard questions...

...A perhaps imaginary green Railway Express truck, very much in the manner of Barthelme, seems to be delivering me a message about his style - a stainless steel field studded with scissors and paste pots, courtesy of his models, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Kafka, Simon Suggs, George Washington Harris, and Mark Twain himself...

...Anthony," the Saint himself, strangely reminiscent of that bowing saint good old Mark Twain once hitched to a sewing machine for a seven year stint of sacred shirts...

...And the reader will be strongly drawn to a rereading, as I was, almost hypnotically in the power of these disjointed cubistic flashes of Donald's fictional genius - tormented by Barthelme's deliberately grotesque axioms, such as, "A Steinway is a known quantity, whereas an analysis can succeed or fail...

...Get set, on your Mark Twain, go, gentle reader...