“All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds.”
Richard Brautigan is my favourite poet. He wrote many novels and short stories too, but they were all basically poems in prose form. Everything Richard Brautigan did was like a poem, short and sweet.
Richard Brautigan was a truly unique writer. There is nobody else in the entire world who could possibly manage to write quite like he did. His use of words was beautiful, and often a little bit odd. There was a sense of innocence and simplicity to his works, but at the same time they expressed some very complex thoughts and feelings. Reading one of his works makes me experience emotions that I wish I could explain, but never fully can.
There is something very innocent about Brautigan’s stories, maybe because of how deceptively simple they are. He often did write about adult things, but always in a slightly naive sort of way. Brautigan didn’t seem to look at the world the way most of us do. His observations of other people and of the world around him, and how he expressed these observations, were totally idiosyncratic and unique to him. Brautigan captured the absurd beauty of everyday things with creative, musical phrases. He was the sort of person who could make wallpaper interesting.
Reading something by Brautigan always soothes me a little bit, though I’m never sure whether his works make me feel happy or sad. Often, they make me smile a little, inwardly, but they’re usually shaded in with a faint feeling of melancholy, too. I think that he suffered from depression, and in the end committed suicide. Because of this, there have been a lot of misconceptions and rumours spread about him, but most aren’t true. I strongly recommend his daughter, Ianthe Brautigan’s book You Can’t Catch Death, to anyone who wants to get a better idea of what sort of person he was like.
I love reading Richard Brautigan’s stories and poems, and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of them. They are experimental and challenging, but also humble, modest pleasures that manage to discover beauty in unlikely places. Listening to Richard Brautigan is equally wonderful. His voice sounds like a very gentle robot’s, a sympathetic machine.
“In March 1994, a teenager named Peter Eastman, Jr. from Carpinteria, California legally changed his name to Trout Fishing in America, and now teaches English at Waseda University in Japan. At around the same time, National Public Radio reported on a young couple who had named their baby Trout Fishing in America.” -Wikipedia (I would like to thank RibbonAroundABomb for sharing with me this wonderful story. I’d also like to wish her congratulations, as she is now a part time employee of the artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, which is a brilliant achievement.)
