i12bent:

January 30 is the birthday of one of my favourite writers, Richard Brautigan (1935 - 1984, suicide)…

Brautigan was a literary jester, a fellow traveller of the Beats for a while, and then he struck out for unknown territories, staking a claim as one of the first truly post-modern American novelists - one cut from a different cloth than the intellectual postmodernism of Pynchon and Barth. But lots of fun to read!

Here is a short short:

The Scarlatti Tilt

“It’s very hard to live in a studio apartment in San Jose with a man who’s learning to play the violin.’ That’s what she told the police when she handed them the empty revolver.” — from Revenge of the Lawn

I have never been able to understand umbrellas because I don’t care if I get wet. Umbrellas have always been a mystery to me because I can’t understand why they appear just before it starts to rain. The rest of the time they are vacant from the landscape as if they had never existed. Maybe the umbrellas live by themselves in little appartments under Tokyo.

Do the umbrellas know that it’s going to rain? Because I know that people don’t know. The weatherman says that it will rain tomorrow but it doesn’t and you don’t see a single God-damn umbrella. Then the weatherman says that it will be a sunshiny day and suddenly there are umbrellas everywhere you look, and a few moments later, it starts raining like hell.

Who are these umbrellas?

(from Tokyo Montana Express)

i12bent:

One of my favourite American writers, Richard Brautigan, could have been 75 today - but he got away at 49 when he took his own life in 1984…

Photo of Brautigan communing with the river, near San Fran., 1970 - by Vernon Merritt III

nevver:

Mayonnaise

Top 5

Expressing a human need, I have always wanted to end a blog post with the word mayonnaise.

The tribute to Richard Brautigan I made to act as my desktop wallpaper and a warning to baffle and confuse all would-be hackers of my computer.

scrapbookforpanindunin:

boo, forever - richard brautigan

meaghano:

For Valerie

All girls should have a poem
written for them even if
we have to turn this God-damn world
upside down to do it.

New Mexico
March 16, 1969

(via poetry365)