Is he based or cringe?
>>24706821Are they all different women?
Not a great loss
>>24706827Some are appear multiple times. 3 girlfriends and 1 model, I think.
So The Wind Won't Blow it All Away is a masterpiece.
>>24706821What do you read after Watermelon Sugar?
>>24706821looks like hippie drivel
>>24706821He's a good minor writer. He has a limited range but what he does he does very well and no-one else is quite doing it.People sometimes dismiss him as being just late 60s counterculture but he isn't really them. They did sort of adopt him as a figurehead and he overlaps with them a bit, but he's his own thing. You can like him even if you just find them annoying.
>>24708749From what I know he actually hated hippies for some reason
>>24708749it's actually really good. everyone should at least read trout fishing especially if you are american
>>24708926>>24708960ok i am wrongbut still>WHITE POWERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
>>24708960post an excerpt
>>24709037cringetake your meds
>>24708926In Watermelon Sugar got taken up by hippies who completely missed the point and plotfagged it into hippie agenda. It probably hurt his career some and it almost certainly affected his writing, But I don't think he was ever much for anything that reduced people to a movement and was always pushing against labels and slogans of all sorts. >>24708960Most people just see Trout Fishing as weird, which is a shame but not surprising. Not sure if I think everyone should read any of his work but I would like it if more people did. >>24709141Most of his novels can be read in an hour or two, his sort of minimalism makes Hemingway look verbose. No reason to excerpt him and his sort of minimalism generally means an excerpt strips away a great deal of subtext turning it into a banality or quirky. Just pick a novel and read it. But have a short story.https://www.tumblr.com/fuckyeahrichardbrautigan/23693496710/complicated-banking-problems
>>24709141I went off into the marsh. There the creek was soft and spread out in the grass like a beer belly. The fishing was difficult. Summer ducks were jumping up into flight. They were big mallards with their Rainier Ale-like offspring.I believe I saw a woodcock. He had a long bill like putting a fire hydrant into a pencil sharpener, then pasting it onto a bird and letting the bird fly away in front of me with this thing on its face for no other purpose than to amaze me.I worked my way slowly out of the marsh until the creek again became a muscular thing, the strongest Paradise Creek in the world. I was then close enough to see the sheep. There were hundreds of them.Everything smelled of sheep. The dandelions were suddenly more sheep than flower, each petal reflecting wool and the sound of a bell ringing off the yellow. But the thing that smelled the most like sheep, was the very sun itself. When the sun went behind a cloud, the smell of the sheep decreased, like standing on some old guy’s hearing aid, and when the sun ”“came back again, the smell of the sheep was loud, like a clap of thunder inside a cup of coffee.That afternoon the sheep crossed the creek in front of my hook. They were so close that their shadows fell across my bait. I practically caught trout up their assholes.
>>24709354thanks man not really my thing though it's weirdly wooden and pretentious in an off-putting way
>>24709733That is because all the subtext and symbolism is lost by it being excerpted, while this is a fairly direct passage it is not just what we get in an excerpt.
>>24706821Lemme guess, top right is the model?
Vonnegut is the GOAT German-American minimalist absurdistBukowski is the GOAT German-American minimalist realistBrautigan is the German-American minimalist bastard child of both
>>24709354How do you smell the sun wtf
>>24710252USED TROUT STREAM FOR SALE.MUST BE SEEN TO BE APPRECIATED.I went inside and looked at some ship’s lanterns that were for sale next to the door. Then a salesman came up to me and said in a pleasant voice, “Can I help you?”“Yes,” I said. “I’m curious about the trout stream you have for sale. Can you tell me something about it? How are you selling it?”“We’re selling it by the foot length. You can buy as little as you want or you can buy all we’ve got left. A man came in here this morning and bought 563 feet. He’s going to give it to his niece for a birthday present,” the salesman said.“We’re selling the waterfalls separately of course, and the trees and birds, flowers, grass and ferns we’re also selling extra. The insects we’re giving away free with a minimum purchase of ten feet of stream.”“How much are you selling the stream for?” I asked.“Six dollars and fifty-cents a foot,” he said. “That’s for the first hundred feet. After that it’s five dollars a foot.”“How much are the birds?” I asked.“Thirty-five cents apiece,” he said“Where’s the stream at?” I asked. “I’d like to take a look at it.”“It’s around in back,” he said. “You go straight through that door and then turn right until you’re outside. It’s stacked in lengths. You can’t miss it. The waterfalls are upstairs in the used plumbing department.”
>>24710314On my second that is the chapter it finally clicked for me and I figured out what Brautigan was doing, immediately started over from the beginning.
>>24709354>I practically caught trout up their assholes.i love this line so much, bros
>>24710314I don't get it
>>24710485On the simple surface level, trout fishing has become a business and removed from people's life and when they do fish, they are sport fishing and how everything eventually gets packaged up and shipped off so you can skip the fishing buisness and just buy a trout from the grocery store. But the 'trout' in Trout Fishing in America is not a littleral trout, it is a symbol and as you work through the novel it accumulates contexts and meanings we don't normally connect to trout. In unobfuscated terms, the title would be Life in America and the novel examines how it has changed over the years and more importantly how our relationship with it has changed.
>>24710577Oh I see thanks
I thought All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace was good when I read it because it seemed ironic. Then I found how he actually meant it and I decided he was a retard.
>>24709037>>24708749total /pol/nigger death
>>24706821I placed an hold on In Watermelon sugar a year ago in the library and they still won't send it to me.
>>24711769it was probably lost in iDEATH
>>24706821Teenage me liked The Hawkline Monster. I don't have my copy to hand, no girlfriend on hte cover unless she's on the back?.
>>24706821I think hes good and his style is cool but it wouldn't surprise me if he catches hate because hipsters like him or something
>>24711860>if he catches hate because hipsters like him or somethingWhy would that matter to anyone reading him now. Hipsters are all literally dead.
>>24710577Have you ever readed koans, my lord?
>>24711235
>>24711234You missed the point, again. There are no machines of loving grace, he was pointing out that the ideal being chasing was just an ideal, not saying there are machines of loving grace or that we should strive for having them. Really it is him saying that it must be nice to be an unthinking normie unbothered by the world and just enjoying life, going with the flow of things and making the best out of what life gives you. In much of his writing he takes the position of the outsider looking in who is trying to figure out what it is in life he is missing and that is sort of who he was but not to the extreme he often employed in his writing. On some level, Brautigan would be jealous of you. >>24711781Forgotten Works, did you even read it?>>24711798OP pic is actually the only books which go with those covers and if memory serves either Confederate General or Trout Fishing had a tiny essentially forgotten first edition of like 100 copies which also did not follow it, pretty sure it was Trout Fishing.
>>24712039>tiny essentially forgotten first edition of like 100 copiesmust be worth a fortune
>>24706821I was unimpressed with In Watermelon Sugar and I don't see how anyone could think otherwise
>>24712078What didn't you like about it?
>>24712058>must be worth a fortunenah he wasn't good enough to be popularly collected
>>24710314Meh. This is rather obvious in it's treatment of the so-called modern predicament. I just imagine a bunch of vacant-eyed NPR listeners softly chuckling and then softly applauding at the end of that drivel.
>>24708926Hippies weren't the "movement" we think of them today. At the time, they were just a bunch of kids running around wearing strange clothes and talking nonsense.
>>24706821This super cute girl I had a oneitis thing for recommended him to me. He's like burroughs without as much pedarasty or vulgarity. I like him, separate from that torch I used to carry.
>>24712263>treatment of the so-called modern predicament.why are you guys always reading stuff into his work? can't you just enjoy some surreal nonsense? or do you have to find some symbolic meaning in something like magritte's painting of the train coming out of the fireplace?
>>24712815So we should ignore all the hard work the author put into this stuff and reduce it to "woah, weird?" That anon is a retard, but so are you.
“That’s what you think happened up there?” I said.“Partly,” he said. “Yes, that’s part of it.”He took out his pipe and filled it with tobacco and lit it.“Do you want me to tell you what else happened up there?” he said.“Go ahead.”“You crossed the border into Mexico,” he said. “You rode your horse into a small town. The people knew who you were and they were afraid of you. They knew you had killed many men with that gun you wore at your side. The town itself was so small that it didn’t have a priest.“When the rurales saw you, they left the town. Tough as they were, they did not want to have anything to do with you. The rurales left.“You became the most powerful man in town.“You were seduced by a thirteen-year-old girl, and you and she lived together in an adobe hut, and practically all you did was make love.”“She was slender and had long dark hair. You made love standing, sitting, lying on the dirt floor with pigs and chickens around you. The walls, the floor and even the roof of the hut were coated with your sperm and her come.“You slept on the floor at night and used your sperm for a pillow and her come for a blanket.“The people in the town were so afraid of you that they could do nothing.”
“Neither of you lived to be twenty-one. It was not necessary.“See, I do know what happened upstairs,” he said. He smiled at me kindly. His eyes were like the shoelaces of a harpsichord.I thought about what happened upstairs.“You know what I say is the truth,” he said. “For you saw it with your own eyes and traveled it with your own body. Finish the book you were reading before you were interrupted. I’m glad you got laid.”Once resumed, the pages of the book began to speed up and turn faster and faster until they were spinning like wheels in the sea.”
>>24712821If you think think Trout Fishing has some great symbolic significance, what is it then? I bet you couldn't even explain it.
>>24712839It's about, like, America, maaaan.
>>24712839Me, no, but the one anon who has been posting in these threads for the past few weeks has explained it and I from what I remember about it, he is probably not wrong. Going to reread next chance I have the time to do it in one go.Reread In Watermelon Sugar after his recent posts and I can't find any fault with them. I used to reduce Brautigan to "weird" and enjoyed it, but feeling kind of retarded for doing that and not putting in any real effort to understand. In Watermelon Sugar is probably one of my favorites now, before the reread it was a fun and enjoyable book that I mostly forgot about.
>>24711234I like to think (andthe sooner the better!)of a cybernetic meadowwhere mammels and computerslive together in mutuallyprogramming harmonylike pure watertouching clear sky.I like to think(right now, please!)of a cybernetic forestfilled with pines and electronicswhere deer stroll peacefullypast computersas if they were flowerswith spinning blossoms.I like to think(it has to be!)of a cybernetic ecologywhere we are free of our laborsand joined back to nature,returned to our mammalbrothers and sisters,and all watched overby machines of loving grace.
IN WATERMELON SUGAR the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. I'll, tell you about it because I am here and you are distant. Wherever you are, we must do the best we can. It is so far to travel, and we have nothing here to travel, except watermelon sugar. I hope this works out. I live in a shack near iDEATH. I can see iDEATH out the window. It is beautiful. I can also see it with my eyes closed and touch it. Right now it is cold and turns like something in the hand of a child. I do not know what that thing could be. There is a delicate balance in iDEATH. It suits us. The shack is small but pleasing and comfortable as my life and made from pine, watermelon sugar and stones as just about everything here is.Our lives' we have carefully constructed from watermelon sugar and then travelled to the length of our dreams, along roads lined with pines and stones. I have a bed, a chair, a table and a large chest that I keep my things in. I have a lantern that burns watermelontrout oil at night. That is something else. I'll tell you about it later. I have a gentle life. I go to the window and look out again. The sun is shining at the long edge of a cloud. It is Tuesday and the sun is golden. I can see piney woods and the rivers that flow from those piney woods. The rivers are cold and clear and there are trout in the rivers. Some of the rivers are only a few inches wide. I know a river that is half-an-inch wide. I know because I measured it and sat beside it for a whole day. It started raining in the middle of the afternoon. We call everything a river here. We're that kind of people. I can see fields of watermelons and the rivers that flow through them. There are many bridges in the piney woods and in the fields of watermelons. There is a bridge in front of this shack. Some of the bridges' are made of wood, old and stained silver like rain, and some of the bridges are made of stone gathered from a great distance and built in the order of that distance, and some of the bridges are made of watermelon sugar. I like those bridges best. We make a great many things out of watermelon sugar here—I'll tell you about it—including this book being written near iDEATH. All this will be gone into, travelled in watermelon sugar.
>>24712263NPR didn't even exist at the time it was written
Was he a better poet or a novelist?
>>24706821please don't do this to him, he was a soulful writer and you're puttin that X-sloppification on him.Anyway, The Pill Vs. has a very high batting average of good poems.
I want to make sweet sweet love to Miss Hawkline.
>>24706821He's kind of hippie cringe, imo. Sombrero Fallout could be fun if he stopped whining about his 'japanese girlfriend'.
>>24712270>Hippies weren't the "movement" we think of them today.Mostly it was just imbibing youth pop culture of the day. That was the extent of what being a hippie meant to most.
