Jumping someone else's dream

Joe Meno on Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar:

[R]eading this book is like realizing there is an entire room somewhere in your house that you never had the chance to visit before, a world of talking tigers, junk heaps, and underwater coffins. Unlike the work of so many well-regarded, contemporary writers whose memoir or journalistic style seems like a literary stand-in for reality television, Richard Brautigan’s intricate, poetic fantasia is an invitation to use your imagination, and somewhere, turning the pages, you have the sense you’ve stepped into someone else’s dream.

(At The Millions)

Pickwick and the Bs

I. Dickens turned out a number of Pickwick every month from March 1836 to November 1837--but November of 1836, Dickens also took on the editorship of Bentley's Miscellany, and in January of 1837 he graced its pages with the first installment of Oliver Twist. From there on, for nearly a full year, Dickens wrote both novels simultaneously, a task which, the Companion rather flatly notes,

he accomplished by devoting the first two weeks of each month to the Miscellany and the latter half of the month to Pickwick.

—I've Been Reading Lately

II. The problem is not Baker himself. The problem is that, as long as Baker lasts, the B’s last, because whenever I am onsite I get caught up in Nicholson’s near neighbors—the Pat Barkers and the Julian Barneses and the John Barths of the stacks. The Bolanos and the Brautigans.

—Theo Schell-Lambert, "The Real Cost of Books, Footnoted" (from Flatmancrooked)

1/3, 1/3, 1/3

At The Millions' endless best-thing-I-read-this-year roundup, Mickey Hess writes about Richard Brautigan's Sombrero Fallout (which I happened to buy this year), and an RB story entitled "1/3, 1/3, 1/3."

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CONTEXT prints Ben Marcus's afterword to its reprint of Stanley Crawford's The Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine. Here's my take, from Bookforum. Aside: Crawford first hit my radar when I read a great piece by Marcus on SC's Some Instructions, in the PTSNBNLS; I probably have it clipped and saved somewhere...

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What books are behind Obama?

Context: Richard Brautigan/Stark

"There were so many blackberries back in there that it was hard to believe. They were huge like black diamonds but it took a lot of medieval blackberry engineering, chopping entrances and laying bridges, to be successful like the siege of a castle."

That's form a story called "Blackberry Motorist." The title caught my eye, as if it were written yesterday. Motorists using Blackberries while driving! But actually it's from Richard Brautigan's Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962–1970.

Reading a tense passage of description in one of Richard Stark's Parker novels, I realized it wouldn't seem tense without the setup. It would just seem like Parker was looking to buy a used truck.

Gleanings

As a way of getting in touch with my origins,
every night I set the alarm clock
for the time I was born, so that waking up
becomes a historical reenactment
—from "Self-Portrait at 28," David Berman, Actual Air

The road was very bleak, wandering like the handwriting of a dying person over the hills.
—Richard Brautigan, The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western

You half-expected fireflies to rush out of his mouth.
—last line of Fleet Foxes concert review, Amanda Petrusich, NYT

Lord Jeffrey Stillingfleete, Earl of Kislingbury, richest man in the en-tire world, gazed troubledly down at the slender American milltown girl, in cheap black cotton dress, with 10-cent-store white trimmings at the neck and elbows, whom he held fast in his arms. —first line of The Crimson Cube, Harry Stephen Keeler

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for May 8, 2008

I. Two duos:

A) Richard Brautigan and Jack Spicer (to whom RB dedicated Trout Fishing in America)
B) Rethinking Edmund Wilson on H.P. Lovecraft

II. Dzyd Thomas doesn't like the reviewerish phrase "achingly beautiful":

It's like, really? Achingly? Did you quiver? It's right up there with "intensely personal."

To which I'll add: "brutally honest"!

III. Dzyd/Pretty Standard cross-promotional contest! Here's how to play:

A) Take a favorite group's name.
B) "Translate" it to the late 19th century or the Stone Age.

Thus "TV on the Radio" becomes "Phonograph on the Wireless"!

IV. Dzyd Jordan on Rudy Burckhardt, at the Poetry Foundation site. Favorite bit:

Pictures might be worth a thousand words, but Burckhardt’s photographs are happy with just 14 lines. Each has the characteristic turn—the change of direction and perspective somewhere around line 8 or 9—that transforms a short rhymed poem into a sonnet. In one, a parking lot breaks off at a trash-covered hill leading down to dirt and railroad tracks scattered with tires. In another, a stooped crone, wearing a hat with a giant bow, is carrying a parcel in the crook of her arm; she looks out at the viewer from in front of a billboard featuring the enormous face of a young woman, eyes cast upward. His nudes, too, show wit—one shows a woman reclining face down, a bunch of bananas on her back.

(Also check out the great, evocative photos.)

Wining, Reading, Grading

From Tony Hoagland's "When Dean Young Talks About Wine," in What Narcissism Means to Me:

He says, Great first chapter but no plot.
He says, Long runway, short flight.
He says, This one never had a secret.
He says, You can't wear stripes like that.

This suggets a good writing exercise: Elaborate descriptions for wine.

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Dan Rhodes's Guardian list of his favorite books under 200 pages has been much linked to. (Dizzyheads, any candidates?) Off the top of my head, The Mezzanine would be high on my list, something by Richard Brautigan, and of course something by Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle, probably). Bernhard's The Loser is 183 pages. I'm also, randomly, a fan of Isherwood's Prater Violet...and Muriel Spark's The Girls of Slender Means must be sub-200. . . .

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Here is the Guardian obit for Vonnegut—the Times one is more interesting, I think. His official website is here, and today its splash page features an opened bird cage.

Wikipedia mentions Vonnegut's self-assessment of his books (in Palm Sunday); it reminded me of Nabokov's annotated copy of a collection of short stories, in which most things received C's or lower, except Salinger's "Bananafish" (A+) and...something by VN himself, if I'm not mistaken.

Here's Vonnegut's list:
Player Piano: B
The Sirens of Titan: A
Mother Night: A
Cat's Cradle: A-plus
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: A
Slaughterhouse-Five: A-plus
Welcome to the Monkey House: B-minus
Happy Birthday, Wanda June: D
Breakfast of Champions: C
Slapstick: D
Jailbird: A
Palm Sunday: C

This seems pretty clear-eyed—though I remember seeing this before reading Breakfast of Champions, then thinking BoC must be pretty mediocre...then reading BoC and being pleasantly surprised—the result of lowered expectations? Anyway, what a nice chunk, from Sirens to S-5. Enough for any writer, no?

UPDATE: Excellent set of online Vonnegut resources, compiled by the Mirror Ed.