I Found John Barth

Eureka!

You know the feeling. I’m sure you’ve felt it.

That weightless feeling where, somewhere between your stomach and your nethers, twinkles and butterflies flit about and there’s a weightless brevity inside of your twined guts somewhere. It makes little sense to try to explain it, but it’s the nexus of falling and standing upward too quickly. Joyful and carefree.

I think Archimedes must have felt this in his tub and trembled a little, corresponding to the thought flying through him while he soaked. That fleeting idea he hadn’t considered before but as the water spilled over it hit him lightning-like, and so, weightless, breathless, and naked, he ran into the street shouting, “Eureka!”

That was what it was like to read this by John Barth:

IN THE LAST Years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.

As poet, this Ebenezer was not better nor worse than this fellows, none of whom left behind him anything nobler than his own posterity; but four things marked him off from them. The first was his appearance: pale-haired and pale-eyed, raw-boned and gaunt-cheeked, he stood—nay, angled—nineteen hands high. His clothes were good stuff well tailored, but they hung on his frame like luffed sails on long spars.

Heron of a man, lean-limbed and long-billed, he walked and sat with loose-jointed poise; his every stance was angular surprise, his each gesture half flail. Moreover there was a discomposure about his face, as though his features got on ill together: heron’s beak, wolf-hound’s fore-head, pointed chin, lantern jaw, wash-blue eyes, and bony blond brows had minds of their own, went their own ways, and took up odd postures, which often as not had no relation to what one took as his mood of the moment. And these configurations were short-lived, for like restless mallards the features of his face no sooner were settled than ha! they’d be flushed, and hi! how they’d flutter, and no man could say what lay behind them.

—The first page of John Barth’s book, The Sot-Weed Factor

Off to go buy some books.

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