I Just Read About That…

[LISTENED TO: November 20, 2013] “Urban Planning” podcast

In the third New Yorker fiction podcast, Donald Antrim reads Donald Barthelme.  I know both writers, but neither one all that well.

The story is absurdist and very funny.  In it, the narrator buys “a little city,”Galveston, Texas.  He keeps things pretty much the way they are–he doesn’t want anything too imaginative going on.  He tears down several houses and builds new developments (cut in the shape of puzzle pieces).  But he’s a little bored so he goes out and shoots 6,000 dogs, and then makes a front page announcement that he had done it.  This causes some upset (naturally), and he’s appreciative for the excitement.

But overall he is unsatisfied because he is in love with a married woman.  And she won’t leave her husband (and may not even know who the narrator is–except that he owns the city).  Eventually he had to sell the city back (and he took a real soaking financially on that deal).

The story has many many funny lines–laugh out loud funny–and (dog killing aside) it is a funny and delightfully weird story that retains its voice no matter how odd it seems.

Donald Antrim is a great reader for this story.  He apparently has used Barthelme as something of an inspiration for his own works (I don’t know enough about either to comment).  He also introduces a lot of great ideas about the story that I didn’t really notice on first listen.  The interview is quite funny (with them talking about how despite the absurdity of Barthelme’s premises, things that he wrote about actually seem to happen–like Kim Basinger buying a town).

This story makes me want to read more of both Antrim and Barthelme.