Guilty Pleasures

...As for the political pieces in Guilty Pleasures, they seem to be inspired by socialist sentimentality ("The Palace") or antagonism to Richard Nixon and his Administration ("Swallowing," "The Young Visitirs," [sic] "The Dragon," "An Hesitation on the Bank of the Delaware," "The Royal Treatment," and "Mr...

...Another type of person that popular culture suggests we should be is a liberated woman, a woman who, in the words of an advertisement for Cosmopolitan in the New York Times, thinks that it's "silly to preserve old cliches when naturalness and freedom are so much better...

...One of Barthelme's pieces of "bastard reportage" is a description of an Ed Sullivan show...

...Then Barthelme parenthetically remarks: "Something memorable: early on Sunday morning a pornographic exhibition appeared mysteriously for eight minutes on television station KPLM, Palm Springs, California...

...He knows that, in "this world," which for all of us is the world of modern American popular culture, it is not just that we can't have what we really want...

...The Angry Young Man" and "The Teachings of Don B.: A Yankee Way of Knowledge" are somewhat heavy-handed...

...For Barthelme, Ames' song is "submemorable" and the "pornographic exhibition" is "something memorable...

...Here as elsewhere in Guilty Pleasures and in his other works, Barthelme's attitude is playful and his tone is ironic...

...And Barthelme's letters to the editor of an international art journal ("Letters to the Editore") are lesspretentious than the letters to the editor of Commentary and less illiterate or crazy than the letters to the editor of the Boston Herald-American...

...Ames closes his eyes, sings something something something something...

...But Barthelme does not proceed from there to cynicism or nihilism...

...But I do know that Barthelme's attitude is serious as well as playful and that his tone is sober as well as ironic...

...That it was unfortunate that it wasn't on a network...

...Barthelme does believe, in fact he knows, that "what we really want in this world, we can't have...

...I am going away, to the Australian archipelago, for although my pipe tobacco is of the type judged lowest in lead and arsenic in 1968 by the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, there is cyanide in my silver cleaner, and my oranges have been rouged with coal-tar dyes...

...If we, like a middle-level federal bureaucrat who has worked in the Bureau of Hatcheries for twenty-three years, don't know what we really want to do to achieve recognition, we should talk like the newsweeklies, where there is "a cacophony of crying and warning, and urging" ("Snap Snap...

...If we don't know what we really want to study, we should study "Alpha and Theta Brain Wave Training," "Belly Dance," "Divorce Before & After," "Happiness and Freedom," "Love," and "Tap Dancing" at an open university in San Francisco ("Heliotrope...

...Nothing: A Preliminary Account" is the last piece in Guilty Pleasures...

...Charles and Candace have taken the Consumer Bulletin Annual seriously, but now Charles says: "Let me confess it, I am tense, for this America is not the one I knew...

...So, in our confusion, despair, or mindlessness, we seek out the guilty pleasures of popular culture...

...What happens to such a woman...

...he loves us and our culture too much for that...

...Perhaps one reason why Barthelme characterizes "the new journalism" as "bastard reportage" is that he does not excel at it...

...it often is that we don't know what we really want or even who we are...

...On the page that precedes the title page and that contains a list of books by Donald Barthelme, and on the inside of the book jacket at the front of the book, Guilty Pleasures is characterized as Barthelme's first "non-fiction" book...

...It also is clear from "Nothing: A Preliminary Account," a wonderful piece in which Barthelme demonstrates the impossibility of nihilism...

...The piece has" a telegraphic style that reminds me of D. Keith Mano's pieces in National Review...

...Barthelme is describing the appearance of Ed Ames on the Sullivan show...

...Barthelme realizes that, in modern American popular culture, we attend to ourselves in ways that diminish us and we extend our collective experience in ways that limit the possibilities of individual experience...

...The emergence of new literary forms such as "the new journalism," the transformation of old literary forms such as the novel and the short story, and the bizarre nature of modern American popular culture, a culture in which "fiction" often seems to be inadequate reportage and "non-fiction" often seems to be a running account of conceits and nightmares—all these phenomena frequently render the distinction between "fiction" and "non-fiction" unsatisfactory...

...Ames is singing a "sublovely" song in a "very comfortable, easy" way...

...Still, sentimentality and antagonism apparently do not inspire Barthelme to write as well as he can...

...In Barthelme's parody ("That Cosmopolitan Girl"), she is mistreated by her boyfriend, who finally rejects her in favor of a woman named Elberta...

...Not all of Barthelme's parodies are so successful...

...A naked man and woman did vile and imaginative things to each other for that length of time, then disappeared into the history of electricity...

...she reads ,S'eientilic American...

...Foolfarm's Journal...

...That what they did to each other was "imaginative...

...If that's "non-fiction," what isn't...

...I think that, whether Barthelme intends it or not, the piece serves as a warning not to misinterpret all the pieces that precede it...

...One type of person that popular culture suggests we should be is an "intelligent and informed buyer of goods and services," a person who takes the Consumer Bulletin Annual seriously, who perhaps takes nothing else seriously ("Down the Line with the Annual...

...I do not want, however, to dwell on those few pieces in which Barthelme is weak or mediocre, for Barthelme is a strong and distinctive writer...

...And that's all right, for not all writers need to or should mind the store...

...We are guilty over thosepleasures not because we know that those pleasures are bad or evil—we know that most of them are not—but because we realize, however imperfectly or incompletely, that we are willing, even eager, to want what popular culture suggests we should want and to be what popular culture suggests we should be...

...It is clear from the pieces in Guilty Pleasures that Barthelme characterizes as "pretexts for the pleasure of cutting up and pasting together pictures," particularly "A Nation of Wheels...

...He is too intelligent for that...

...What we really want in this world, we can't have...

...Barthelme is better at taking off from an event, situation, or phenomenon than staying with it...

...Does Barthelme actually believe that what the naked man and woman did to each other was "vile...

...in the preface to the book, he characterizes them as "parodies," "political satire directed against a particular Administration" (guess whose), "hrokeback fables," "bastard reportage" (which I take to be the phrase Barthelme uses to designate and depreciate "the new journalism"), and "pretexts for the pleasure of cutting up and pasting together pictures...

...the song is submemorable...

...We would be even bigger fools than we are if we were to believe that, in our culture, we can have innocent joys...

...Barthelme himself does not characterize the pieces collected in Guilty Pleasures as "non-fiction...

...But we can have guilty pleasures, and maybe that's enough...

...For example, if we don't know what we really want to read, we should read not a novel but a digest of a novel (Barthelme's parody of a digest of Balzac's Eugenie Grande/ is hilarious...

...Unfortunately, the exhibition wasn't on the network...

...I don't know...

...I would let it go at that if it were not for a particular passage in the piece...

...Its position may be accidental, but I doubt it...

...Elberta does not read Cosmopolitan...

...That is clear from most of the parodies in Guilty Pleasures...

...If we don't know what we really want to do to entertain ourselves, we should go to see an abstruse and tedious foreign film, whose protagonists might be "Marcello, a wealthy film critic who has enriched himself by writing attacks on Akira Kurosawa for the American Legion Magazine, and Anna, a lengthy, elegant beauty, blond, whose extreme nervousness is exteriorized in thumb-sucking" ("L'Lapse...

...But the pieces in this book are no more examples of "non-fiction," and they are no less creations of Barthelme's extraordinary imagination, than his other works...

...I find nothing pernicious about sentimentality itself, and I think there are good reasons (but not as many as some persons think) for antagonism to Richard Nixon and his Administration...

...If we don't know what we really want, we can take suggestions from popular culture on what we should want...

...That is clear from the works that preceded Guilty Pleasures...