Just as he did in life, Brautigan continues to inspire readers, writers, scholars, musicians, and artists, even now, two decades after his death. Readers continue to be attracted to his easy-to-read yet idiosyncratic prose style. Writers continue to emulate his writing style complete with his humor and use of whimsy, or at least refer to Brautigan and his works. Scholars continue to argue Brautigan's place in American literature. And musicians and artists continue to interpret his work, or are inspired to create their own. This node provides an overview of such efforts, and links to further information and resources. Use this node to find information about writing, publishing, scholarship, music, performances, movies, graphics, libraries, brief mentions in reference and other sources, book banning, book collecting, naming, and other expressions of Brautigan's continuing inspiration.

Richard Brautigan wrote a stunning short story called "The World War I Los Angeles Airplane," in which the story is simply a list of thirty-three items in a man's life. The thirty-third is a repetition of an earlier item. By the time all thirty-three are stated, the reader has been given the personality of a man of generosity not taught generosity by his society. He has a sense of beauty not taught by his background. It is one of the loveliest stories I've ever read. It is three pages long.

We can learn a chronology lesson from Brautigan. It is that if a meaningful scene, no matter how short, is set next to another meaningful scene, feeling and value multiply. The reader rejoices in the queer, abortive spaces between these brief scenes. Let's try it ourselves. Let's say we half-see in our mind's eye a marvelous or horrible character. Let's pretend (not writing but simply reviewing in the mind only) that we are doing his or her autobiography. Then let's have a piece of paper with thirty lines, numbered. Then choose thirty events or half-hours in that person's life and write them down. Then think of the most telling of those scenes—and repeat it, for item number thirty-one.

Such an exercise returns writers from the jagged world of disturbed chronology. (109-110)

Warner, Sharon Oard. "What We Write About When We Write About Love." The Writer 115(11) November 2002: 41-43.
Recounts turning to this creative writing exercise. Says,

Upon reading that story, I immediately saw Bly's point: "We can learn a chronology lesson from Brautigan," she writes. "It is that if a meaningful scene, no matter how short, is set next to another meaningful scene, feeling and value multiply." (43)

The poem, reprinted by permission, reads,

To the memory of Richard Brautigan smart farter at the left side of the Lord. A few days ago I let an incredible five stars upper-class fart by It beset & skirmished my guiltless nostrils nearly one minute long so disgustingly that I wanted to be far away from my own self

Now if I were able to create such foul wraith entities again to my liking I would within the week screen myself from those I have no bloody mind at all to speak with No stress No rudeness No bad temper But what the hell did I eat a few days ago?

The poem, reprinted by permission, reads,

One evening January 1999 round 9 p.m.
Snow tempest
I'm watching through the window
I've put the outside spotlight on
to fully appreciate the show of the fir-trees
disarticulated by the squalls
Suddenly I see a guy calmly crossing my lawn
Tall, thin, long hair, a big mustache, glasses
& a large black hat that he holds
on his head with his hand
I watch him crossing the lit field
& slowly disappearing
into the darkness of a winter evening
Who will believe me if I assert that
by a winter evening Richard Brautigan
confused my garden
with his ranch in Montana?

Fluide Glacial 313 July 2002.
French monthly magazine

Remue-Méninges (27) March 2003.
Belgian small magazine

trailer court sluts, devil dogs from hell, wafting sex, underwater rivers, fugues, femmes seeking femmes, nose rings, love, cataclysms, effortless erotica, and Richard Brautigan all come together somewhere in West Virginia

READ Drouot's "The Shangaï Check" diary online
READ this essay.

Happy to Be Here. New York: Antheneum Publishers, 1981: 189-192.
Happy to Be Here. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1983: 245-248.

Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 42. Eds. Daniel G. Marowski and Roger Matuz. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1980. 48-66.
READ this essay.

READ Kong's essay at the San Francisco Chronicle website.
Bryson, Michael. "The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh." The Danforth Review ***?***.

READ this review at The Danforth Review website.


LEARN more at Mesler's website.

A longer excerpt from Mesler's chapbook is available online, at the turnrow journal website, (turnrow.ulm.edu/Mesler.htm). turnrow is published by Desperation Press and the English Department of The University of Louisiana at Monroe.

READ this excerpt at the turnrow website.
READ this story.

Ton téléphone sonne encore au beau milieu de la nuit près du juke-box déglingué de North Beach. Ici on entend toujours le canon et les bruits de guerre. Baudelaire a fermé son kiosque à hamburgers sur le Haight. Il n'aime plus aller danser au Fillmore il ressemble à un homme égaré il parle par énigmes et ses mots se perdent dans le vent. Des passants ordinaires marchent près de lui sans le voir envapé dans un repli du temps. Que veux-tu que je te dise? Moi aussi j'ai un cafard noir je suis miné par la solitude le dédain et les emmerdes je n'y peux rien et une dernière fois je cherche la clé qui ouvrira la tombe au fond de laquelle tu as appris tous les secrets que savent les corbeaux il le faut.

Your telephone is still ringing in the middle of the night near the smashed-up jukebox from north beach. Here we can still hear the gun and noises of the war. Baudelaire has closed his hamburger stand on the Haight. He doesn't like going to dance at the Fillmore any longer he looks like a bewildered man he speaks with riddles and his words get lost in the wind. Ordinary pedestrians walk by without seeing him ripped in a time crease. What do you want me to say? I'm in a deep blues, too, I'm sapped by loneliness disdain and hassles I can't help it and I'm looking a last time for the key that will open the tomb at the bottom of which you've learnt all the secrets that ravens know I need it.

LEARN more at the "Der Kartaus Verlag" website.

Rossetto, Louis. "On Newsstands Now." Wired 1.02 May/June 1993: ***?***.

READ this review at the Wired magazine website.



LEARN more at the "Marcos y Marcos" website.

READ about La Casa dei Libri at the Marcos y Marcos website.

READ about Sognando Babilonia at the Marcos y Marcos website.

READ about Pesca Alla Trota in America at the Marcos y Marcos website.

READ about Willard e i soui trofei di bowling at the Marcos y Marcos website.

This study examines grotesque forms in postmodern American literature and the various modes which reflect postmodern concerns. . . . In particular, this study analyzes works by Tennessee Williams, Ken Kesey, Joseph Heller, Tom Robbins, Richard Brautigan, John Irving, Raymond Carver, and Sam Shepard, contrasting them to the earlier works of Sherwood Anderson, Nathanael West, and Flannery O'Connor.

While much of recent American literature seems to exhibit only depression, despair, absurdity and alienation as characteristic responses to the bleakness of life in a modern technological society, a few literary artists have felt that the only recourse from, or alternative to, the constriction of spirit and feeling in the mechanized, computerized world is to return—almost in desperation—to "nature" as if humanity's only hope lay in rediscovering those "natural" or spontaneous hopes, desires, passions and dreams that make us fully human. We have not said enough, it seems to me, about these contemporary writers who, in taking the "return to nature" as one of their principal ways of recovering the wholeness of being that has been eroded by modern civilization, offer an optimistic alternative to the doomsayers of contemporary American literature. Thus this study is concerned with how and why novelists James Dickey, John Gardner, Richard Brautigan and John Updike are united in their interests in investigating the natural world as a means of restoring value and meaning to individual human lives.

These four writers, in suggesting that nature contains the means of countering the imposing threat of domination by civilization and in associating nature with the intuitive and imaginative freedom neglected by a highly scientific and rational society, are working within a well-defined literary tradition. In affirming the value of the "return to nature," Dickey, Gardner, Brautigan and Updike align themselves with those major American writers—Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Steinbeck, Hemingway and Faulkner—who have viewed the natural world as the source of forces which enable the individual to escape the suffocating crush of civilization. Dickey, Gardner, Brautigan, Updike, each in his own way, suggest that the movement into and return from the natural world can heal the broken spirit and release the suppressed physical and mental potential for an urban-oriented, over-specialized population. Thus these four novelists, like their romantic predecessors, search for the vital balance of nature and civilization, the conscious and unconscious minds. Their subject is humanity in the post-World War II world; but their theme is one that places them squarely in the tradition of American letters.

READ this paper.

This study explores the Beats' appropriation of Zen Buddhism into Western culture and its structures of signification. . . . Chapters IV-VI explore the influence of Zen on the works of Jack Kerouac, Richard Brautigan, and Tom Robbins. Kerouac's appropriation of Zen is highly cerebral and therefore remains limited by the differentiation of discursive structures. Brautigan uses Zen to introduce the elements of silence and in-difference into his fiction, and thereby reaches towards the very margins of language. Robbins's fiction illustrates the mind of the Zen lunatic and counters stasis and opposition through motion and harmony.

READ this abstract.

The 1960s was a decade of spiritual as well as political restlessness. The counterculture embodied one highly visible manifestation of this spiritual discontent and of the problems attending its resolution in contemporary America. The period's fiction constitutes a second manifestation of these concerns. As a social phenomenon, the counterculture also forms a significant part of the social context within which this fiction was written, a context affecting the attitudes and beliefs of many authors, including the four under consideration here: Walker Percy, John Updike, Richard Brautigan, and Thomas Pynchon. . . . Chapter Five discusses several works by Brautigan and the various ploys they use to gain imaginative control over death.

Richard Brautigan who has often been cast as a writer of "hippie" fiction of the 1960's has proven himself otherwise with important novels like Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar, and The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, novels that have made their impression and left their mark on the genre itself. An accomplished author, Brautigan's works are marked by a personal vision that is representative of many aspects of the American imagination. His genius lies in his ability to portray old themes of human alienation, broken dreams, and loneliness in completely new images that are often startling in their originality. Brautigan's special appeal to readers of all ages lies in his ability to capture the remnants of the American dream and frame it within either a lost pastoral background, or a utopian hope for a future society, or even to transform that dream into a sad burlesque. By doing so, the author has produced works that, on one hand, incorporate the sense of growing disaster, and on the other, provide the notion of possibilities within an increasingly detached contemporary society. The creative energy of Brautigan's works illumines the past anew and as a result certain aspects of the American imagination take on a deeper perspective and acquire a richer hue. Brautigan's novels are an assertion of his own identity in the development of the American myth.

Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America is one of the most distinctive books to come out of a decade of literary inventiveness and experimentation in the 1960s. [It] remains the artistic high point of his career and a book whose merits will likely endure. The book is organized into three major categories: the narrator's childhood memories, his experiences as an adult living in San Francisco, and his ongoing fishing trip through the western United States which provides the novel's central focus of activity. The narrator arrives at a new vision for how to cope with a hostile contemporary environment by assimilating and synthesizing important discoveries within these three categories of experience. Once he has arrived at this vision the narrator becomes a chronicler of how it came to be using insights revealed in the stylistic elements which inform his tale. The three most prominent stylistic features which convey the narrator's discovery, and hence Brautigan's artistic vision, are the abstract and spatial use of the novel's title phrase—Trout Fishing in America; the examination of and experimentation with linguistic and nonlinguistic forms; and the bizarre manipulation of language, particularly through similes and metaphors. The combination of Brautigan's narrative structure and stylistic expression dramatizes the crucial importance he places on using the mind, using the imagination, to create existence, rather than surrendering the mind to the corrupting influences of twentieth century America.

READ this abstract.

Since the Beat Movement first rose to attention in 1955, critics have tended to view it as an urban phenomenon—the product of a post-war youth culture with roots in the cities of New York and San Francisco. This study examines another side of the Beat Movement: its strong desire for a reconnection with nature. Although each took a different path in attaining this goal, the four writers considered here—Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Lew Welch, and Michael McClure—sought a new and closer connection with the natural world. . . . The final chapter examines the work of several other writers of the Beat period and their contributions in regard to nature and environmental writing: Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Kirby Doyle, Ed Sanders, and Richard Brautigan.

Scope of Study
This dissertation examines Richard Brautigan's novels in relation to a magic box metaphor, that is, an implied comparison to a fictional technique that portrays through multiple modes of perception the various layers of reality. The aim here is to establish the magic box metaphor through Hermann Hesse's The Steppenwolf and examine its development in selected novels by other authors. In turn, this study will examine Richard Brautigan's use of the magic box metaphor in his eight novels to date.

Findings and Conclusions
This study reveals that the magic box metaphor explicit in Pablo's "Magic Theater" in The Steppenwolf stands for a certain type of fiction, which through multiple modes of perception reveals various levels of reality. As early as the Eighteenth century Defoe mixes imagination with concrete facts in Moll Flanders; Richardson portrays subjective states of mind through character, form, and symbol in Clarissa and while Austen conveys the classic construct of reality per se in Pride and Prejudice, Sterne portrays surreality through the mind of Tristam in Tristam Shandy. In the Nineteenth century, the Brontë sisters, Elliot, and Hardy introduce nature as a metaphor to reveal another mode of perception through which states of mind are portrayed; and in the Twentieth century, Nabakov like Hesse uses narrator, character, form, scene and structure to convey the many levels of reality that exist within the self. The analysis of Richard Brautigan's works reveals multiple use of the metaphor. His first two novels, Confederate General from Big Sur and Trout Fishing in America establish basic structural patterns. In Confederate General a scene plot line is supported by surrealistic elements, and in Trout Fishing in America a whole mosaic of boxes—chapters, sense impressions, dream scenes, symbols, metaphors—are controlled by the mind of the narrator and the imagination of the artist. The six novels that follow experiment in a variety of ways but in all eight of his works, Brautigan sees reality as a construct that can be exemplified in multiple dimensions. To Brautigan, reality is based on the personal perception of one's own multifaceted construct in which concrete experience is only the beginning departure.

Richard Brautigan uses naive narrators to create ambiguity and irony through the conflict between their innocent tone and the frequently unpleasant and death-filled worlds they depict. Brautigan's outrageous similes and metaphors and his fantastic content illustrate his recurrent theme about the importance of the healthy imagination.

Indeterminacy has become a dominant concern in postmodern literature and literary criticism as well as in other postmodern cultures and the research done [in] these areas demonstrates an abiding interest in indeterminacy. However, little effort has been made in establishing a meeting ground between Eastern mystical traditions and Western postmodern thought. And even less research has been done on the postmodern writers who pave a new way of understanding postmodern culture by establishing dialogue between the traditions of the East and literary postmodernism of the West.

This dissertation explores a meeting ground between Eastern mystical traditions and postmodern Western culture, attempts to account for it theoretically, and discusses how such dialogue works in selected novels by postmodernist writers, who not only employ postmodern indeterminacy but also incorporate Eastern mystical ideas in their works: Tom Robbins's [sic] Another Roadside Attraction, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, and Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

By studying these three authors' dominant concerns as these [sic] out from indeterminacy, we get a better sense of how far they have taken us in a postmodernist East-West dialogue of contemporary thought and expression and how the Easterners are potentially well equipped with spiritual traditions not only to understand Western postmodern literary phenomena which are still new to most Eastern readers but also to develop their own culture specific versions of postmodern literature and criticism.

During his lifetime, Richard Brautigan published ten novels and one collection of short stories. The themes and techniques of these innovative works of fiction contribute to that division of contemporary literature known as post-modernism.

This study identifies postmodernist elements in Brautigan's fiction, establishes Brautigan as an early initiator of postmodernism, and evaluates his place in contemporary literature. Recognizing the growth of technology, a change in the perception of reality, and the difficulties in establishing individuality in this fragmented world, Brautigan presents an anti-hero who survives by transforming reality, by enduring, or by forming a relationship with another person.

The first chapter, drawing from the contemporary criticism of John Barth, Leslie Fiedler, Jerome Klinkowitz, David Lodge and others characterizes postmodernism. Features of postmodernism include flat characterization, lack of plot development, lack of epiphany, multiple endings, typographical play and, frequently, the appearance of artlessness.

Chapter II discusses Brautigan's fiction of the 1960s: A Confederate General from Big Sur, Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 and Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970. These novels established Brautigan's reputation as an innovative author.

The five novels that Brautigan published in the 1970s are the subject of Chapter III: The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western, Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery, Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel, Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 and The Tokyo-Montana Express. Brautigan's further experimentation with the novel form is evident in these works.

Brautigan's final novel, published in 1982, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, blends elements of the traditional novel and the postmodernist novel to produce an important work. The study concludes that an understanding of Brautigan's themes and techniques can be best accomplished by knowing the totality of his fiction and the tenets of postmodernism.

In the post-war period in the United States, social scientists have often conflated apathy with non-participation or alienation. In addition, they have usually neither differentiated between apolitical and political variants of apathy, nor recognized that political apathy itself can take diverse forms. By contrast, this study argues that there are forms of apathy which are distinctly political, consciously chosen, and strategically staged. The dissertation investigates political apathy of this kind as it has been expressed in the writings of five authors often taken to be representative of American youth culture: Jack Kerouac, Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson, Jay McInerney, and Douglas Coupland. The study argues that these authors express political apathy to varying degrees, though the particular form is different for each writer.

This dissertation offers a reassessment of Brautigan's oeuvre by advancing a contemporary reading of his works within the critical and cultural environment of his times. After a preliminary examination of So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away to illustrate the artful complexity of Brautigan's final work, the dissertation examines the critical and literary framework that surrounded Brautigan's earliest writings, submitting that his works are best understood in a postmodern critical context. Trout Fishing in America, A Confederate General from Big Sur, and In Watermelon Sugar are examined as metafictions, self-reflexive works that are concerned primarily with the nature of words and texts and which foreground the text itself as the dominant subject of fiction. In the 1970s, Brautigan turns this fully developed metafictional sensibility toward the genres of popular romance. Through a metafictional combination and adaptation of several romance forms, including western, gothic, erotic, detective and historical romance, these genre experimentations move Brautigan toward the development of a unique hybrid text that aspires to enfold all forms of human discourse in an elastic fictive structure—such is the final substance of Richard Brautigan's metafictional romance.

. . . [T]he frontier is still affecting American culture and . . . a metaphorical frontier developed alongside the historical one . . . is still alive in Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1956), Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing In America (1967), and Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976). . . . In Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America the frontier only exists in the imagination, but in the novel creations of the imagination are the equal of objective reality. Like the historical pioneers, the protagonist and his family travel in search of a geographic paradise, but given the conventions of the frontier-inspired novel their quest is doomed. They move, though, for the frontier lives on in dreams and in works of the imagination such as this novel in which the imaginary is as real as the freeway that leads only to more freeway.

A Norwegian music group uses the title of Brautigan's poem for their album.

Gaute Drevdal, editor-in-chief for the biggest Norwegian entertainment newspaper, Natt og Dag (Night and Day), says the title speaks to the contrast between humans and machines, specifically because this album features techno music. The topic of the title is just a relevant today as it was in the 1960s, he says. Apart from the title, the album does not purport to send any particular message, politically or otherwise. Drevdal concludes that the choice of title shows that the musicians seem to have deeper understanding of things than what is common in techno and house music.

READ Drevdal's review at the Natt og Dag website. Track #7 is the original song "Richard Brautigan," written and performed by Frenay. The song deals with Brautigan's death.
Rereleased by Tangible Music, Merrick, NY, 1995 with one additional track

LEARN more at the "Saint Ettienne Heaven" website.

In Watermelon Sugar (Sarah Torreta)
Coffee (Jeremy Voss and Claudette)
Zartliche Gluhbirne (Effectionate [sic] Light Bulb) (Wolfgang Schwarz)
Greyhound Tragedy (Knight Berman, Jr.)
The 12,000,000, Real Estate, Taxi Driver, The Past Cannot Be Returned (Ryan Christoff)
The Pumpkin Tide, A Boat, The Pomegrantate [sic] Circus, Your Catfish Friend (Ken and Kelsey Keiran)
The Last Year the Trout Came up Hayman Creek (Ernest J. Green)
The Autopsy of Trout Fishing in America (Al Cronin)
Das verratene Koenigreich (The Betrayed Kingdom) (Wolfgang Schwarz)
Complicated Banking Problems (Jeremy Voss)
Karma Repair Kit: Items 1-4, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, Love Poem, The Beautiful Poem, Flowers for Those You Love (Ted Latty)
Lint, Women When They Put Their Clothes On, Halloween in Denver (excerpt) (Franklin Klock)
Love Poem, The Horse That Had a Flat Tire (Sarah Torretta)
Poker Star, Mrs. Myrtle Tate Movie Projectionist, Wood, Feasting and Drinking Went on Far into the Night, The History of Bolivia, We Stopped at Perfect Days (Ken Keiran)
September California (Knight Berman, Jr.)
Dreams Are Like the Wind, A Short Study in Gone, Floating Chandeliers, Worms, Taking No Chances, Speaking is Speaking, Playing Games, Love 12 (Al Cronin)
Trauerarbeit (I Feel Horrible. She Doesn't), Sexueller Unfall (Sexual Accident) (Wolfgang Schwarz)
The Scarlatti Tilt (Knight Berman, Jr.)

So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away (Ryan Christoff)
1/3, 1/3, 1/3 (Ernest J. Green)
The Return of the Rivers, 7 Watermelon Suns, San Francisco Weather Report (Ted Latty)
My Name (Al Cronin)
It Takes A Secret To Know A "Secret" (Ken and Kelsey Keiran)
The American Hotel Part 2 (Ryan Christoff)
Heroine of the Time Machine (Jeremy Voss)
Karma Repair Kit: Items 1-4 (Ernest J. Green)
Horse Race (Ken Keiran)
Looking At My Bed, At the Guess of a Simple Hello, Taking No Chances (Ryan Christoff)
Ein unbegrenzter Vorrat an 35-mm-Film (An Unlimited Supply of 35 Millimeter Film) (Wolfgang Schwarz)
I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone (Knight Berman, Jr.)
A Confederate General from Big Sur (excerpt), Revenge of the Lawn (excerpt), But Does It Matter (story about RB) (Melanthe Alexian)
Hommage fur den CVJM San Fransisko (Homage to the San Francisco YMCA) (Wolfgang Schwarz)

Knight Berman, Jr.
1. "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" (1:37)
2. "No Hunting Without Permission" (3:53)

Hardy Koenig (submitted by Woody Hood)
3. "Hangover as Folk Art" (1:46)
4. "Dogs on the Roof" (1:18)
5. "Clouds over Egypt" (1:03)
6. "Kyoto, Montana' (0:45)

Steve Heilig
7. "Claudia/1923-1970" (0:38)
8. "January 17" (0:23)
9. "The Scarlattti Tilt" (0:21)

Jen Leibhart & Jeremy "Sexy Legs" Voss
10. (3 Poems in Greek) "Night", "Flowers For A Crow", "It's Time To Train Yourself" (0:45)
11. "I'll Effect You Slowly" (0:16)
12. "Margaret Again" (0:31)
13. "I Feel Horrible. She Doesn't" (0:15)
14. "It's Raining in Love" (1:06)
15. "Love Poem" (0:13)
16. "The Beautiful Poem" (0:17)

Larry Gieseke
17. "Witness for Trout Fishing in America Peace" (3;23)
18. "The Galilee Hitch-Hiker" (4:38)
   "The Galilee Hitch-Hiker" Part 1
   "The American Hotel" Part 2
   "1939" Part 3
   "The Flowerburgers" Part 4
   "The Hour of Eternity" Part 5
   "Salvador Dali" Part 6
   "A Baseball Game" Part 7
   "Insane Asylum" Part 8
   "My Insect Funeral" Part 9

Marta Kelran
19. "1692 Cotton Mather Newsreel" (5:18)
20. "The Smallest Snowstorm on Record" (2:08)

Kelsey Keiran
21. "Blackberry Motorist" (2:26)
22. "Winter Vacation" (1:04)
23. "Spiders Are in the House" (0:47)

Ken Keiran
24. "The Beacon" (2:09)
25. "The Riding Lesson" (2:43)
26. "Ghosts" (0:49)

Cindy Gendrich (submitted by Woody Hood)
27. "At the California Institute of Technology" (0:12)
28. "The Fever Monument" (0:18)
29. "Kitty Hawk Kimonos" (0:32)
30. "Talking" (0:42)
31. "In Watermelon Sugar" (2:57)
32. "The Gentle Cricket" (1:01)
33. "Passing to Where?" (0:12)
34. "Taxi Driver" (0:12)
35. "Your Departure Versus the Hindenburg" (0:25)
36. "Romance" (0:28)

Tim & Al Cronin
37. "The Lake Josephus Days" w[ith]/original score "Trout Duet" by Al Cronin (2:41)
38. "Deeply Do I Mourn, for My Friends Are Nothing Worth" (2:16)
39. "A Return to the Cover of this Book" (2:24)
40. (4 poems from Rommel Drives On Deep into Egypt) (1:15)
   "Cannibal Carpenters"
   "Sheep"
   "Donner Party"
   "Formal Portrait"
41. "The American Fool" (0:33)

Janice Huang
42. "The Pork Chop Alligator" (excerpt) (2:04)
43. "Things to Do on a Boring Tokyo Night in a Hotel" (0:53)
44. "The Necessity of Appearing In Your Own Face" (0:13)
45. "Umbrellaing Herself Like A Poorly Designed Angel" (0:17)
46. "Fuck Me Like Fried Potatoes" (0:11)
47. "Ah, Great Expectations!" (0:23)
48. "Romeo and Juliet" (0:17)
49. "Love's Not the Way to Treat a Friend" (0:38)
50. "Nice Ass" (0:06)

Ted Latty
51. (Story) Richard, Beverly & Ted (10:00)
   "Rommel Drives On Deep Into Egypt"
   "The Memories of Jesse James"
   "Mrs. Myrtle Tate, Movie Projectionist"
   "Critical Can Opener"
   "Negative Clank"
   "Lions Are Growing like Yellow Roses on the Wind"
   "Melting Ice Cream at the Edge of Your Final Thought"

The first album by this Charlottesville, Virginia group features the song, "Machines of Loving Grace," which was inspired by and includes lyrics from Brautigan's poem "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", published in 1967.

LEARN more at "The Naked Puritans" website. Includes "Lions Are Growing" composed by James A. Moorer and read by Charles Shere. Inspired by the poem "Lions Are Growing Like Yellow Roses" from Rommel Drives On Deep Into Egypt, published in 1970.

This album provided a sampling of work by composers at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Participants include: Renée Grant Williams, soprano; Stuart Dempster, trombone; Charles Shere, reader; Margaret Fabrizo, harpsichord; and George Marsh, conga drums. The album was concurrently released by Elektra in Hanover, West Germany apparently without Shere's reading.

Owens, David. "MIT Experimental Music Studio." High Fidelity 34 September 1984: MA24-25.
This review notes that during a concert in a series by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Experimental Music Studio, March 3, 1984, in Kresge Auditorium, James Moorer's performance of "Lions Are Growing Like Yellow Roses" fell flat.

Smith, Patricia. "Computers Make Music." Creative Computing July 1983: 111-112, 115.
Discusses the work of computer designer and composer Andy Moorer, Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Briefly mentions that two Brautigan poems (does not provide titles) were used in electronic music performance pieces. Says,

his demonstration tape illustrates his techniques. In "Perfect Days," there are three distinct sounds: Charles Shere's voice as he reads the Richard Brautigan poem, the sound of a flute played by Tim Weisberg, and a modified sound that is part speech and part flute, that has the vocal qualities of speech, but the pitch of the flute. (111)

In another piece based on a Richard Brautigan poem, Moorer took the voice reading the poem and changed some of the dynamics of the speech, for example, by adding some reverberation to portions of it. (115)

Includes the original song "Brautigan" written by Andrew Smith and performed by this Burlington, Vermont, based band. The lyrics read:

There's a woman with a cake
On the cover of the book.
The book is sitting on a stack of other books
A book by Brautigan.

The book is green.
It's a green book
And the picture on the book
Is black and white.
A book by Brautigan.

There are many stories in the book
I've read the stories in the book a thousand times.
A book by Brautigan.

Premiered at Stanford's Dinkelspiel Hall on Sunday, 8 March 1970. "The work," said Smith's program notes,

is really an environment of sound (and, to a certain extent, sight) for a reading of the poem, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, by Richard Brautigan. The three parts of the poem mention a "cybernetic meadow," a "cybernetic forest" and a "cybernetic ecology" in which human beings can return to their natural, mammal state under the loving protection of computers. The music is presented by a bassoon (the human-mammal) and a PDP 10 computer. The main elements . . . grow out of three chords and two melodic lines which are heard in a wide variety of computer-chosen and human-chosen random deviations.

"The blend and emergence was exceptionally artful," said the San Francisco Chronicle, ". . . like an infinitely flexible organ playing a fantasia."

Smith, an East Oakland native, attended classes at Mills University from 1941 to 1943 while he was still in high school. He matriculated at University of California- Berkeley, receiving his master's degree in 1948. He resumed studies with Milhaud in 1946-1947 and worked with Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory in 1948-1949 before returning to Mills as a member of its faculty in 1951. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1953 to 1958, when he joined the Stanford faculty.

Thereafter he became one of the founders of the Stanford computer music program, a leading international expert on the use of artificial intelligence as a means of generating sound and notation, and an adviser to the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique Musique (IRCAM), the massive Paris-based French government project administered by Boulez. Score, a computer-produced publication process created by him, has been widely described as the leading program of its kind.

LEARN more about Smith at the "History of Experimental Music in Northern California" website.
Includes the song "Pacific Radio Fire" whose title and lyrics are based on Brautigan's story "Pacific Radio Fire" which was collected in Revenge of the Lawn, published in 1971. The Marble Tea is Berman's songwriting/home-recording project. It's name is inspired by Brautigan's poetry collection Lay the Marble Tea, published in 1959.

LEARN more at Berman's "The Marble Tea Thing" website.
Includes the song "So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away" about which Andy Morten, the band's drummer says,

The album cover features a photograph of Brautigan. The 3-piece band is based in England.

LEARN more at the "Bronco Bullfrog" website.
Rock songs like "Office Girl," "Visions of Susan," "Drunk on You," "Bad Sleep," and more written and performed by Orton, a San Francisco independent musician. Album cover concept inspired by the front cover of Brautigan's novel Trout Fishing in America, published in 1967.
LEARN more at the "Hank Stone" website.
This album features a song titled "Richard Brautigan" (Side 1, Track 2), the lyrics of which are drawn partially from titles of Brautigan's works. The seven-member band is based in Blackburn and London. Three compositions written for various numbers of voices reciting various Brautigan poems, each part of a larger work toward an operatic treatment of Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar. "Trout Duet," its title a play on Schubert's "Trout Quintet" and a reference to the duet between right and left hands as it occurs in the music, was written for a harpsichord. It was included on the "Brautigan Basement Tapes '99" CD ("The Lake Josephus Days"; 2:41; Track 37) produced by many members of The Brautigan List email discussion group and featured Cronin's son, Tim, reading a passage from Brautigan's novel Trout Fishing in America, published in 1967.

LISTEN to Cronin's composition "Trout Duet." Used by permission.

"Fragment #1" is a rhythmically spoken setting of the poem "Fragment #1" from June 30th, June 30th, published in 1978.

LISTEN to Cronin's composition "Fragment #1." Used by permission.

LISTEN to Cronin's composition "Entr'acte." Used by permission.
LEARN more at the "Trout Fishing in America" website.
LEARN more at the "Mason Bates/Masonic" website.

In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.

Posters advertising the band's appearances in November 1990 repeated the Brautigan photograph and quote.
Originally filmed in Super-8. First shown at Frith Street Gallery, London, and then as part of Ireland's entry in the 1997 Venice Biennale. The original work consisted of five separate sections, the first four displayed on monitors, the fifth on a large screen. All five sections were scattered througout the gallery.

The second section features a young man sitting in a crowded train-carriage reading a book. A voice-over narrates what he reads: Brautigan's novel In Watermelon Sugar. He reads the portion of the novel (pages 36-37) where the narrator describes how tigers killed and ate his parents and then offered to tell him a story.

Irvine alluded to Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar in an earlier (1995) multi-screen installation, "Margaret Again," the title of which was taken from a chapter heading in the novel.

Leith, Caoimhin Mac Giolla. "Jaki Irvine: Metamorphoses and Becomings." Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine July-September 2001: 128-135.
Notes the use of Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar by Irvine in her 1995 multi-screen installation performance "Margaret Again" and in her 1996 installation "A Difficult Sunset." "In Watermelon Sugar" is an opera in 31-tone equal temperament, "The Return of the Rivers" is a cycle for solo voice and keyboards, "Two Transfers" is a cycle for tenor and string quartet, "Pity The Morning Light That Refuses to Wait for Dawn" is a requiem for soloists, chorus, and orchestra.

Oteri, a composer and music journalist is editor of the Amerian Music Center's monthly web magazine, NewMusicBox, a position he has held since its launch in May 1999.


LEARN more about the American Music Center at its website.

LEARN more about Frank J. Oteri at the "NewMusicBox" website
Sampson, Benjamin W. "Season Preview 2002-03." American Theatre 19(8) October 2002: ***43-?****.
Presents a list of theatrical productions at Theatre Communications Groups across the United States for the 2002-2003 season. This production was scheduled for 5-21 September 2002.

According to Artistic Director Joe Pesce, performances did not occur as announced because of difficulties arranging collaboration with the Keshet Dance Company, adapting Brautigan's novel In Watermelon Sugar, and coordinating the overall timing of mounting the production.

LEARN more at the "Tricklock Theater Company" website.
LEARN more at the "Hip Pocket Theatre" website.

Stewart, Perry. "Sweet Redux." Star-Telegram.com 11 October 2006.

READ this review.

READ this review at the Star-Telegram.com website.

uses the chance sighting of a movie poster for "Barfly" in a Michigan theatre to digress into tales of youthful affairs with poets Charles Bukowski and Richard Brautigan, anecdotes which are funny but appear to be pointless. (1)

The talented visual artist damail ayo [sic] collaborated with James Moore and Kollodi on a performance sketch that incorporated text by writers Jamaica Kincaid, Harold Pinter and Richard Brautigan and the performers' own ideas. This critic wasn't sure of the source of the squabbles witnessed on stage, which incorporated music from a boombox and much physical agitation from all three. But the unsettling frisson, of embarrassment and admiration for the performers, suggested that the audience was being made privy to something unusually personal. (C8)

A Japanese woman, played by Fay Kato, searches for a corporeal replacement for the specter of novelist Richard Brautigan, played by Hugo Armstrong, who lovingly haunts her. Her marriage to sweetly earnest Montana poet Robert, played by David Conner, brings her to America, but her damaged psyche gradually and heartbreakingly unravels.


Anonymous. "EdgeFare. (Edge Of The World Theatre Festival November 8-18)." Back Stage West 1 November 2001: 4-***?***(5).
Notes the offering at the Theater of Note, "Near Life: Three Death-Defying One-Acts." Says,

Theatre of NOTE offers three one-acts about life—and, more specifically, about death. The Man Who Looked for the World in a Fortune Cookie (and Found It), written and directed by Christopher DeWan, is a short glimpse at loneliness and redemption, in which "a hermit doesn't sleep at night, in love with the vacant moon. The cool of the breeze that rustles the trees rustles him, too." Near Death, written and directed by Christopher Kelley (a great actor who also wrote the giddy Monstrosity and the haunting Ransomed Soul), is billed as a "dark, comic paean to familial love and rejection." Tonseisha, written by Erik Patterson and directed by Tim Hanson, is the story of a woman's desperate attempt to find "love, happiness, and Richard Brautigan." Considering the pedigree of the first two and the good buzz on the third, this looks like a must-see.

Gittleson, Gia Lauren. "The Guide." Los Angeles Magazine 24(12) December 2001: 159-***?***. Schreiber, Brad. "Near Life—Three Death Defying One-Acts." Back Stage West 8 November 2001: 11.
Notes the current program of three one-act plays at the Theater of Note and says "Tonseisha" was the longest, and strongest, of the evening.

There is something heartwarmingly Quixotic about Hollywood's determination to try to film every successful book ever written: there was once a plan for Clint Eastwood to star in Richard Brautigan's The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western, a novel whose main characters include a disaffected chemical cloud. (3)

LEARN more about Robert "Dux" Duxbury at the "Company of Experts" website.


The text reads:

Richard Brautigan
San Francisco Poet 1965
A Confederate General from Big Sur

The orginal photograph for this poster was taken by Jim Hatch in 1965.
It shows a young Brautigan with short hair and a moustache, but no beard.

LEARN more at "The Beat Museum" website.
Includes Felver's photograph of Brautigan wearing a sheepskin hat that first appeared in The Poet Exposed (see below). Brautigan is noted as "Novelist, poet."



In the early spring of 1957 (January or February), Geary (then Lind), a student in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, moved to San Francisco, where she lived until April or May.

While in San Francisco, Geary lived first in the YWCA before renting a tiny apartment in the bottom of a house on Filbert Street in the North Beach section of San Francisco for $30.00 a month.

In an apartment above lived Brautigan, Ginger (childhood nickname for Virginia Dionne Alder), and Lenore Yanoff.

Brautigan introduced Caroling to Beat poets and she bought their books at City Lights Books and listened to Brautigan and others reading their poetry at The Place, just up the hill from the apartment. Such readings were the inspiration for this painting of Brautigan and other poets at The Place.

The painting was part of the poetry that seemed to surround Brautigan and his life. As Caroling says in the text accompanying her website, "To Richard Brautigan, an iPoem altar,"

Brautigan exuded poetry like a time warp; everything that happened around him seemed like poetry. All my memories of him are poetic. Like, we said like all the time. Like he liked the painting, so he picked it up and carried it to The Place. He hung it on the wall so it was in back of him when he read poems at The Place.

Brautigan, says Geary, had a constant energy about him.


LEARN more about Caroling's painting, "Which Poet?" at her "University of Minnesota—NOT" webpage.

LEARN more at Caroling's "To Richard Brautigan, an iPoem altar" webpage.


Pincus also wrote "Hooked on Brautigan: 'Trout Fishing in America' Author Ripe for Rediscovery."

LEARN more about McGraw's exhibition at the "ACA Galleries" website.
LEARN more about Kelly's satellite artwork at her "Kelly Newcomer" website.
LOOK at the separate sheets of Seven Watermelon Suns.
LEARN more about this painting at Sherman's "Automatic Drawings" webpage.
Snyder, a professional artist living in Connecticut, created this print of Brautigan in 2003 as part of his book Portraits, a collection of linocut images of writers and artists.

LOOK at other photographs of Brautigan at the "Erik Weber Photography" website.
LOOK at other paintings by Wright at the "Artwork by F.N. Wright" website.

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