My God Richard! You simply don’t hold up very well anymore, except for a few extraordinary lines that excite like something unearthed by an archaeologist’s trowel and dusted off with a fine brush.<\/p>\n
My high school creative writing teacher recommended you to me. I took him up 30 years later.<\/p>\n
Those extraordinary lines report on blackberries, rain and lint. You wrote a one-paragraph short story about lint! The lint read rock solid, heavy duty. You also memorably used the words \u201claid\u201d and \u201cunlaid\u201d and \u201cunlaid\u201d isn’t even a word! Are we better off now that writers, male or female (or somewhere in between,) don’t employ the word \u201claid\u201d like you did, like so much lint dryer lint floating above the dandelions of an unmowed, revenge-seeking lawn? Who knows? But dammit, I wish Rolling Stone<\/i> magazine was publishing short fiction addressing that question.<\/p>\n
To think that in the late 60s Rolling Stone <\/i>magazine used to pay you $2500 for a short story! Those were the ridiculous radiant days of macrame and typewriters and floppy fashions and jug wine. You could live in SF for six months on $2500 back then…and you did! Your biggest expense was red wine and you cadged most of your drinks in the North Beach bars anyway because you were a SF literary celebrity. Is there one literary celebrity living in SF today? I mean, the kind still writing and cadging drinks?<\/p>\n
Your writing about women has gone the way of the television Western (Gunsmoke<\/i>!), perhaps both good and bad developments. Miss Kitty is dead. Marshal Dillon is dead. So is a writer like you.<\/p>\n
I won’t mention your ignominious end, perhaps the most ignominious end to a major, semi-major, minor, obscure or totally unknown writer in American literary history. If only you could have gone the way of Hart Crane, slipping out that porthole of a ship at sea and all. Or was that Martin Eden?<\/p>\n
There was a shot gun and a lot of maggots at your end. Sorry, I wasn’t going to mention that.<\/p>\n
You would truly despise what your country has become: the landscapes, the literature, the President, the cars, the clothes, computers, the infiltration of corporate commerce into every microbe of our lives.<\/p>\n
Still, take heart Richard and smile when I tell you: I’m probably the only person in America reading you in an automobile service center the size of an airport terminal in a decent sized Midwestern city from your heyday. And consider this Richard: there is an indoor pond in this center and trout (goldfish) are swimming around. No one is trout fishing of course, but this pond might inspire a short story on the banality of indoor ponds inside automobile service centers. You would have known what to do with that subject.<\/p>\n
(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.) <\/i><\/p>\n\n My God Richard! You simply don’t hold up very well anymore, except for a few extraordinary lines that excite like something unearthed by an archaeologist’s trowel and dusted off with a fine brush. My high school creative writing teacher recommended you to me. I took him up 30 years later. Those extraordinary lines report on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3999,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[763,761,762],"class_list":["post-3998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-meditations","tag-revenge-of-the-lawn","tag-richard-brautigan","tag-trout-fishing-in-america","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3998"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4001,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3998\/revisions\/4001"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}