In the Fall of 1972, I enrolled in the Ph.D. program in English at SUNY Buffalo, where I spent one anarchic year — in the Student Union I accidently stepped on a couple copulating on the floor — then fled. I’d come to Buffalo hoping to work with John Barth, a luminary there, and a leading figure in American post-modernist fiction. (I couldn’t have told you then, in any satisfactory way, what “post-modernist” meant.) When I applied, I didn’t know that Barth had decided to leave Buffalo for Johns Hopkins (via Boston University). I went to Buffalo expecting Barth, and got Barthelme, whose post-modernist light was not a watt less luminous. In each of my two semesters at Buffalo, I took a graduate fiction writing seminar with Barthelme. In each seminar I produced two stories. For me an impressive output never to be repeated.

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