Richard Brautigan

TFIAB Oklahoma City

But I'd also like to counter something here: I don't think Brautigan is anyone's AA Milne, not unless I've missed the Eeyore-gets-genital warts episode. There might be a child-like feel to some of the prose, but it certainly doesn't extend to the subject matter of the books. And although its the most famous book, I wouldn't actually recommend anyone trying Brautigan to start with Trout Fishing, because it really is a little... random.

Oh bother!

Makes no sense, but sounds great. That's Brautigan for me. I, can, however, see how it would drive others potty.

A Confederate General from Big Sur

I am that which begins
but has no beginning.
I am also full of shit
right up to my ears.

From An Unfortmate Woman

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
Richard Brautigan 1967

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Perhaps this greyhound-phobia is the reason gareth instictively abhors RB.

I am not a fan, and was ambivalent at best, even at the time.

(then in college I wrote a piece called "Fear and Loathing in Watermelon Sugar" to try to get onto the humor magazine and Conan O'Brien insulted me for messing with Hunter Thompson like that)

What should i read next of his? anything? nothing?

FUCK ME LIKE FRIED POTATOES

Fuck me like fried potatoes
on the most beautifully hungry
morning of my God-damn life.

I still like the Brautigan and read all his books every year. People who don't are spazzy gays.

Reading his books I always wonder why he got so depressed. He seemed to view the world through such comical glasses. Then blew his head off.

Haven't yet read through So the Wind... - have lent my copy to a few friends, prolly that's why.

I thought he hanged himself.
I don't know a whole lot about his actual life outside of his writing, but I think he was desperately lonely. Didn't several weeks, if not months, pass before his body was discovered?

June 30th, June 30th is crushingly lonely.

We stopped at perfect days
and got out of the car.
The wind glanced at her hair.
It was as simple as that.
I turned to say something-

Sept. 14
Brautigan reportedly last seen alive when he left San Francisco for his home in Bolinas, California. While in San Francisco he accidentally met his former wife Akiko. They had divorced four years earlier. Brautigan seemed shocked to see her and in some accounts, ran away. He also met Marcia Clay, a former girlfriend with whom he had broken off from also four years earlier when she sided with Akiko in the divorce. Several accounts say Brautigan then went to Cho-Cho, a popular San Francisco Japanese restaurant (now defunct) on Montgomery between Broadway and Pacific, where he allegedly borrowed a handgun from owner Jimmy Sakata. He drank heavily in the afternoon and evening and returned to his house in Bolinas. Clay called Brautigan later that night, shortly after 11:00 pm, in Bolinas. Brautigan said he wanted to read something to her. She hung up so he could find the piece of writing he wanted to read. When she called back Brautigan did not answer. She called repeatedly, each time getting only the answering machine. As she and other concerned friends called over the next days the batteries in the answering machine ran down. Brautigan's recorded voice took on a surreal quality (Lawrence Wright 59-60). It is possible that Brautigan killed himself just after Clay's initial telephone call, sometime after 11:00 pm.

Oct. 25
Becky Fonda, wife of Peter Fonda, after not hearing from Brautigan for weeks, asked David Fechheimer, a private investigator in San Francisco, to check on Brautigan. Fechheimer allegedly called a friend in Bolinas. Robert Yench, of Bolinas, found Brautigan's badly-decomposed body in the second-story living room, near the walk-in fireplace, of Brautigan's home at 6 Terrrace Avenue. A .44 caliber Smith and Wesson handgun was found nearby with one fired bullet under the hammer. A gunshot wound to the head was the determined cause of death. It is believed Brautigan committed suicide some weeks earlier standing up, facing the ocean. He was 49. Many obituaries, memoirs, and tributes were written about and for Richard Brautigan.

If anyone is interested in rare Brautigan books / records / poetry collections, Red Snapper in Cecil Court (off Charing Cross Road) has about 15 Brautigan titles. Mostly US and UK first editions and signed paraphenalia, you need a deep wallet if you wish to purchase. One book was going for £1400.

I bought a little numbered limited edition booklet of one of the Edna Webster stories.

1. Get enough food to eat,
and eat it.

2. Find a place to sleep where it is quiet,
and sleep there.

3. Reduce intellectual and emotional noise
until you arrive at the silence of yourself,
and listen to it.

4.

I don't know what it is,
but I distrust myself
when I start to like a girl
a lot.

It makes me nervous.
I don't say the right things
or perhaps I start
to examine,
evaluate,
compute
what I am saying.

If I say, "Do you think it's going to rain?"
and she says, "I don't know,"
I start thinking: Does she really like me?

In other words
I get a little creepy.

A friend of mine once said,
"It's twenty times better to be friends
with someone
than it is to be in love with them."

I think he's right and besides,
it's raining somewhere, programming flowers
and keeping snails happy.
That's all taken care of.

BUT

if a girl likes me a lot
and starts getting real nervous
and suddenly begins asking me funny questions
and looks sad if I give the wrong answers
and she says things like,
"Do you think it's going to rain?"
and I say, "It beats me,"
and she says, "Oh,"
and looks a little sad
at the clear blue California sky,
I think: Thank God, it's you, baby, this time
instead of me.

-- Richard Brautigan

just read sombrero fallout holy shit

never really thought anything I had previously read of his (trout fishing, watermelon sugar) really went anywhere or anything, but they were amusing to read and pretty incredible in places, but sombrero fallout blows a lot of what I've read in a while away

I can't believe no one has mentioned his Shatner-ish solo album "Listening in with Richard Brautigan" which has him reading excerpts from his books over weird "natural" sounds. There's one track where he goes "here are some sounds of my life" and then proceeds to like eat breakfast and clean the dishes.

― Michael F Gill (Michael F Gill), Saturday, April 30, 2005 11:34 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark

His poetry & short stories are my favorite.

I Feel Horrible. She Doesn’t

I feel horrible. She doesn’t
love me and I wander around
the house like a sewing machine
that’s just finished sewing
a turd to a garbage can lid.

I wish I could remember the name of the story (bad paraphrase ahead) where a man never got tired of his lover because he thought of her as a movie theater that played a different woman every night. I think about that one a lot. It's the kind of short story that if you try to paraphrase to a man in the middle of sex, he gets worried and unhappy.

At the time I started this thread, I was trying pretty hard to ape Brautigan. Not so much in writing style but in fashion and general life ways. I wanted to be the dude.

In a Cafe

I watched a man in a cafe fold a slice of bread
as if he were folding a birth certificate or looking
at the photograph of a dead lover.

Lint

I'm haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary and events that should be explained in dimensions of lint rather than words.

I've been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happened like lint.

my fav of brautigan's, from in watermelon sugar:

She Was

Finally I stopped thinking about the tigers and started back to Pauline's shack. I would think about the tigers another day. There would be many.

I wanted to stay the night with Pauline. I knew that she would be beautiful in her sleep, waiting for me to return. She was.

karma repair kit posted upthread is soo zen

The Necessity of Appearing in Your Own Face

There are days when that is the last place
in the world where you want to be but you
have to be there, like a movie, because it
features you.

It's the kind of short story that if you try to paraphrase to a man in the middle of sex, he gets worried and unhappy.

haha. I half understand this, half feel that I'd know I'd found the right woman.

I love Richard Brautigan and I don't know why. So slight, so simple, but so beautiful.

I've only read The Abortion (because there was a Philip Jose Farmer connection and I was a huge PJF nerd at the time) but I remember liking it. Would "sort of a Beat/hippie Hemingway" be totally off the mark?

My friend gets back to me about a Pill v. Springfield Mining Disaster, which I gave her many years ago: "I still have that poetry book you gave me :) When I first moved out to Chico, my father saw me reading the book and started laughing. When I asked him why, he said, 'I gave Richard Brautigan a ride home from a party once. He threw up in the back of my Mercedes.'"

Just got an alert about an ebook deal on Trout Fishing in America. With an introduction by Billy Collins. Doctor, my eyes!

The Tokyo-Montana Express has some of the most beautiful and sad passages I have ever read. Truly mystified as to why it never gets reissued

I’m fascinated by The Hawkline Monster’s development as a feature film at multiple times. Hal Ashby wanted to make it in 1986, and Tim Burton was developing his own take in 1995