Barth Bag

I tried to prepare for John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor by reading the poem it seeks to explain. Thanks to Google books and the Harvard College library, I was able to check out an interweb version for the low, low cost of free. It's a good thing too, because after about 15 pages of lower case f's instead of s's, I gave up.

I didn't give up on the actual book though. I enjoyed it. I think Barth pulled off the "big, long joke" better than Sterne did in Tristram Shandy (granted he had a couple hundred more years of literary technique to draw from). I guess Barth was bigger in the 60's and 70's because his internet presence is seriously lacking when compared to his post modern buddies like Pynchon, who, as noted in my Gravity's Rainbow posts, has his own wiki site to explain all his crazy crap. Barth's crazy crap is a little more focused but still involves a ton of characters (who are often disguised as other characters) and some kind of cast list would have been helpful.

The book also taught me some (probably inaccurate) things about Maryland history, namely that it was full of Catholic-hating whores in the 1600's, so I'm glad I finished it before the upcoming Maryland Day. Barth was born in Cambridge and taught at Hopkins, so to paraphrase Brendan, "his Maryland roots are true." I first read him (Barth, not Brendan) in a "Maryland in Literature and Film" class as a freshman in college. I remember hating the assigned stories in Lost in the Funhouse, but that probably had little to do with the writing and something more to do with: (1) being a freshman in college, (2) more eagerly awaiting the part of the class that dealt with Homicide: Life on the Street, (3) probably not actually reading the stories, and (4) the fact that the class was taught by a bowling pin shaped professor from the Spanish Dept. Barth himself has been know to hang at my alma mater as seen in the photo below featuring his turkey neck and Billy Crystal's favorite author.Note: Pete will be the only one who understands most of this. Sorry to the other 5 readers.