Word Garden Word List #16 (Donald Barthelme)

 

This week's word list is taken from the volume Forty Stories by post-modernist story writer Donald Barthelme. He was an odd duck, and so I naturally love him. When I was just a teenager and eager to get away from my relatives on a family trip to Denver, I went bowling and then to the book store, showing, I think, an admirable knack for prioritizing. 

In that book store, I found a paperback collection entitled Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts written by guess-who. The stories were all set in the present, with normal characters like husbands and wives, employees, and so on, but the situations they found themselves in, and/or their reactions to same were skewed, impossible, and often howlingly funny.  My eldest brother, whose taste runs to thrillers and Harry Potter, declared that I had wasted my money, further endearing Barthelme and his odd characters to me. (On a subsequent visit to Denver I bought my first Grateful Dead recording. That time, no one was there to pan my selection. Whee!)

The story I remember best from that first (for me) Barthelme collection was one about a man who felt he wasn't climbing the corporate ladder very expeditiously, and so to show his will and determination he became a Human Fly and began climbing a skyscraper using bathroom plungers to stick him to the glass sides of the building as friends and acquaintances shouted encouragement along the lines of "asshole!" Gosh knows why all that resonated for me.  As the years have gone by, I have continued to love both Barthelme and the Dead. A friend of the devil is a friend of mine, or something like that. 

What we do here is to use at least 3 of the 20 words provided in a new original poem--no haiku or haibun please--and then simply link, visit others, and enjoy. The prompt stays "live" through Friday.  

Spellcheck suggests I replace "haibun" with "halibut." Okay, no halibut either. 

And now, your word list:

actors

avoids

blackbirds

bodyguard

cops

fire

gaped

gowns

heroic

interview

Natasha

necessarily

peculiar

porcupines

saddened

shockingly

streamers

submarine

welter

wonderful