Just got done posting Richard Brautigan’s “Walnut Catsup” recipe over on Andrew Hofer’s site (under “comments” — the recipe comes from the “Another Method of Making Walnut Catsup” chapter of Trout Fishing in America), and I was reminded of some old Brautigan poetry I haven’t thought of in a while. Here’re a few of my favorites:
“The Beautiful Poem”
I go to bed in Los Angeles thinking
about you.
Pissing a few moments ago
I looked down at my penis
affectionately.
Knowing it has been inside
you twice today makes me
feel beautiful.
3 A.M.
January 15, 1967
“Haiku Ambulance”
A piece of green pepper
fell
off the wooden salad bowl:
so what?
“Elegy for an Armadillo”
Sometimes goodbyes are long
and complicated
like empty trout streams
running through your kitchen
down your hallway
cascading into your basement.
But sometimes goodbyes are short
and sweet
like tire tracks
on a lady armadillo.
So it goes.
So it goes
from The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster
Anybody else miss the salad days of the countercultural revolution? Today’s protesters are just so…played, I guess the word is…
[update: vis-a-vis today’s anti-globalization puppetheads, Glenn Kinen has a few choice comments. But Glenn — Cato? Say it so!]
Jiminy! I haven’t read anything from Brautigan since he offed himself (sometime in the 80s, I think). My friends and I used to sit around the quarry and read TFIA outloud, then get drunk on Port.
Now I market products for a living. Who’d have thunk it, hey?
Mayonnaise!
Richard Brautigan, Harpers, The Nation, monkey breast feedings…Am I come to the wrong weblog?
Hola, Jeff! I said “Where do you find stupid people who don’t know they are stupid? A number of places: Amway Conventions, The Cato Institute, and the BBC’s Talking Point.”
That is not an exhaustive list. But why Cato?
I’m (a little) sympathetic to libertarianism as a temperament, but not to libertarianism as an ideology. Ideologues are almost all loons, and the Cato people particularly get on my nerves. Though billed as a research institute, you usually know what they are going to say in advance.
This happens in other think-tanks and sometimes (though much less often) in universities, and it makes a mockery of scholarship.
Universities rightly get made fun of; these pretentious things called think-tanks need some of the same.
I hear you, Glenn—though sometimes I think that if it weren’t for “think tanks” we’d never hear a peep out of “traditionalists” in the humanities, they’re so marginalized by the academy. Coming out of Hopkins and the Cornell Crit Theory school, I’ve had just about enough of mindless hermeneutical theorizing. Believe me, after <i>that</i> dead end, it’s refreshing to read journals like <i>The New Criterion,</i> where you know the writers are putting the literature before what can “be done” with it.
Segue: Don’t the Thernstroms do some work for AEI? And are they still at Harvard, as well? I know Christina Hoff Sommers has left university teaching and researches for American Enterprise Institute now.
As for Cato…It’ll be our secret, but I usually call on Cato when I need some good anti-Kyoto numbers to throw at my Greenbuddies (who are legion).
Hi Jeff,
I’m so sorry that you ever had to read any “mindless hermeneutical theorizing.” Not that I know anything, but it looks like (semi-)recent lit crit has two horrible effects.
It killed the idea that literary criticism was itself literature. George Orwell, skewerer of Dickens and Kipling, and Robert Penn Warren, theorizer himself, were both literary critics, and their work was beautiful onto itself; you’d want to read their literary essays like you would want to read a novel or a poem. Does anyone really get that feeling when they hear “lit crit” nowadays?
And theory simply sucked the blood out of literature. Warren, Orwell, and some contemporary people (like Columbia Prof. Andrew Delbanco) make you want to read fiction writers–but most academic theorists nowadays make you want to give up.
Anyway, about Cato: what bothers me is that these folks are intellectual hired guns (not my phrase). They might believe what they write, and they might sometimes write good stuff, but I just think they’ve got the integrity of lawyers for Big Tobaccos and slip-and-fall victims.
In fifty years, we’ll read Orwell and Warren. In fifty years, history professors will be footnotes in big tomes; math professors will have their lemmata referenced; but when the latest policy fad dies, when the politicians of today themselves die, do you think anyone will care what a senior fellow at a Washington think-tank said or wrote or did?
Yours,
Glenn
And we’ll probably read the critical works of the likes of Eliot and Tate and Eco, as well, Glenn.
What these folks have in common (or at least the vast majority of them) is that they’re all either novelists or poets themselves. A couple years back, I chaired a conference here at DU on the chasm between creative writers and critical theorists who, given the current marketplace, often find themselves thrust together in the academy (in fact, that conference marked the debut of the term “creatical”). As a fiction writer taking classes with literary studies folk, I was often stunned by the difference in the ways we read the works/texts. To me, H.G. Wells’ “Time Machine” is interesting for its narrative machinations; for some of my classmates, the story was but a springboard to talk about the Boer War or Fabianism. And the linguistic gymnastics these theorists relied upon to make fiction fit into pre-fab critical templates/paradigms truly boggled the mind. ONce the pieces were in place, these students had no need to crack the book to show how Wells himself was complicit in colonialism, say.
Something terribly wrong with taking that view of art, I believe.
Good point, Jeff. I slipped over the idea that writers of fiction are usually the best critics of fiction. But it’s not a hard-and-fast rule that those who write fiction are immune from theoretical gobbledygook (I’ve got a copy of Sartre’s thousand-page Being and Nothingness on my shelf, and I’ll never read that thing). And some non-fiction-writing critics can write about fiction as beautifully and lucidly as the fiction writers themselves.
But Sartre’s stuff will be read forever.
So I lost my point–alright, it’s too late in tonight
G’night & nice speaking to you.
You’re absolutely right—not a hard and fast rule at all; for instance, I love Walter Benn Michaels’ stuff. <i>Our America</i> is a provocative book of lit crit—and I’m a staunch critic of his brand of New Historicism, too. Ditto Stanley Fish’s work. I fight with Fish constantly. Nevertheless, he’s an enormously gifted rhetoritician.
Then there are the fiction writers who have no business writing “theory.” A long list, none of whom I’ll mention here.
They know who they are, anyway.
–JG