December 24th, 2009 / 10:26 am
Author Spotlight
Richard Brautigan Day at Coop’s Place!
Utter delight. Thanks, Dennis! & kudos to his guest-poster, Winter Rates.
PS- if WR’s rad day isn’t quite enough Brautigan for you, you wish to check out this essay I wrote on In Watermelon Sugar for LOST Magazine a while back.
Tags: Dennis Cooper, richard brautigan
I am teaching Brautigan this year in my flash class. Always interesting to see how a class responds. Thanks for this resource. Will send students here.
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His poetry is a bit fey, but it meant a lot to me when I was a kid living in a prose home in a prose town and going to a prose school and yearning to be a poet.
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Yippy! -Larry aka Winter Rates….
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Btw, I recommend his daughter’s 2000 memoir, “You Can’t Catch Death.”
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RB is great. The Abortion was one of the first books I ever read. And Willard and His Bowling Trophies is, I think, a perverse little sleeper classic.
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December 24th, 2009 / 3:43 pmJustin Taylor—
Yes, I read Willard because you told me to, back whenever. It’s pretty great. I think Sombrero Fallout is another underrated one. Houghton-Mifflin should do another one of those threefer omnibuses of his- it could be these two books plus Tokyo-Montana Express, which I’ve never read because I’ve never seen a copy.
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Great essay Justin, I can’t believe I didn’t include that quote on DC’s: “There is nothing like Richard Brautigan anywhere. Perhaps, when we are very old, people will write ‘Brautigans,’ just as we now write novels. This man has invented a genre, a whole new shot, a thing needed, delightful, and right.”
and now when I see iDEATH… how can I not think of iPod and iPhone… what did RB know about the new millennium? -WR
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December 24th, 2009 / 3:42 pmJustin Taylor—
Maybe that’s what the Apple folks were thinking of when they made the iPod up? It’s entirely possible some crafty hippie-turned-techie at a marketing meeting was like “hey, what about a small i attached to the front of the word…” Not sure RB would be much of a tech guy himself, but I could see him getting down with the idea of a white box the size of a deck of cards (originally, anyway) that holds a roomful of music in it. It almost sounds like something he might make up, so I guess it’s a fitting tribute–assuming it was one, which I think I will from now on. Anyway, glad you liked my essay. Your day was great. Cheers!
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December 24th, 2009 / 10:34 pmreynard—
it’s always struck me as the most likely scenario. many of the apple dudes are former sf hippies-hipsters.
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December 25th, 2009 / 12:55 amLincoln—
I doubt apple thought the iStuff up at all. Back in the day when the internet was starting, everything was e(for electronic)-blank, or i(for internet)-blank. not sure at what point apple decided to slap the i for internet tag on every goddamn product or software they put out though…
December 25th, 2009 / 1:02 ammimi—
The hippie-to-hipster spectrum, in chronology and character, is one of the things I love best about the Bay Area. Or maybe I should say NoCal, as I’m including, in my head, SF, East Bay, Marin, the Peninsula, Silicon Valley, and all the way down the coast, past Santa Cruz to, maybe, Big Sur. Non-conformity and “thinking creatively, thinking outside the box” are honored and encouraged.
The other thing I love is the diversity. I think I love that even better.
December 25th, 2009 / 1:42 amLincoln—
what on earth does creativity or thinking outside the box have to do with hipsters?
December 25th, 2009 / 2:05 ammimi—
I think I was speaking more to a particular NoCal “state of mind”, in everything from street-style (way before hippies even, let alone hipsters…. Levi Strauss catering to the gold miners….) to the high-tech industry, that I have experienced having lived here most of my life. This post started out with Brautigan (SF) and segued to Apple (on the Peninsula).
I don’t mean to imply that creativity and “totb” can’t happen anywhere to anyone.
December 25th, 2009 / 2:11 amLincoln—
Heh, considering it is Xmas even I probably should just step back on this one. let’s just say we have never different conceptions of California, hipsters and west coast hippies.
December 25th, 2009 / 2:11 amLincoln—
Brautigan is cool though!
that is what book covers should do
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a good day.
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a beautiful book. the second line always kills me: “i’ll tell you about it because i am here and you are distant.”
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