Word: brautiganisms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...distinct from those wanderers who, to mock the present, dress like Depression Okies, trading-post Tontos or deserters from the Bolivian army. Jones seems very much at ease with himself. Where a certified counterculture writer like Richard Brautigan beats a well-attended retreat into an America of little more than his own enchanting imagination, Jones and his friends privately brave real effluvia. It would be a grand experience to be up a creek with them-with or without a paddle. ∙R.Z. Shepard
...Friends also contains a marvelous essay on undergraduate poetry ("Go Away Richard Brautigan, You're Not Helping College Poetry Any"), in which Rosen asks that "we should appreciate and encourage the struggle that goes on by thinking of the poem not as a flawless finale, but as a stopping point on the way to perfection. The poem is the point at which our strength gave out." His essays themselves are best read in the same light. Each talks to its neighbor, reveals its genesis and goals, sometimes even addresses its reader. As a collection, rarely do they presume to speak...
...wrote Richard Brautigan in his poem "Gee, You're So Beautiful That It's Starting to Rain." In this spirit, growing disenchantment with U.S. public schools has produced a new alternative in virtually every state: small, mostly private "free" schools. Influenced by reformist manifestos like John Holt's How Children Fail, more than 800 of them are now run by diverse idealists -suburban mothers, ghetto blacks, former campus radicals. Their mood is typified by exotic school names: The Mind Restaurant (Phoenix), The Elizabeth Cleaners (Manhattan). Stone Soup (Longwood, Fla.), All Together Now (Venice, Calif.). Their future...
...skull-bound argument iterates, and there is no resolving it. For the half-beguiled, half-annoyed, unyoung straight reader, Richard Brautigan's gentle, shaggy little books have in them much of what is both very nice and too easy about the kid culture: its music, its mobility, its sex, the milder varieties of its pharmaceutical voyaging. Brautigan, at 36 an honorary kid, floats through his books on pure talent. If he does not seem to work very hard at his writing, well, they repealed the Protestant ethic after all and insouciance is one of his major attractions...
There was not much plot in Brautigan's 1967 bestseller, Trout Fishing In America, or In Watermelon Sugar (1968), which were not so much novels as paper bags full of disassociated whimsy. By contrast, The Abortion has a real story. The heroine is Vida, who brings a manuscript to the library one night. Her book is about her gorgeous body, in which she feels uncomfortable. The hero makes her feel comfortable. They live together in the back of the library, and she bakes chocolate cookies, which the hero gives to old ladies who bring manuscripts at three...