Listening to Richard Brautigan

If you follow this link, and scroll down through all of the background information, you'll be able to listen to Richard Brautigan's 1970 record, Listening to Richard Brautigan, which begins with "The Hunchback Trout," a chapter from Trout Fishing in America, which you'll be reading for Monday. The album also contains excerpts from his novels A Confederate General from Big Sur and In Watermelon Sugar, and the short story collection, Revenge of the Lawn, as well as a few dozen poems from The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, a collection of Brautigan's poetry, which is included in your three-in-one edition. In addition to Brautigan reading his work, there are a number of tracks which take the title more literarlly: the sounds of Brautigan getting undressed, talking on the phone, and having conversations with friends while making dinner. It's worth listening to a few tracks to get a feel for his voice.

If you flip further back to take a look at some of the poems, and consider the length of the chapters in Trout Fishing in America, or a very short story like "The Scarlatti Tilt," you'll begin to sense a pattern in Brautigan's work: brief, sometimes microscopic vignettes, which work together as a whole, almost like bits of glass in a mosaic. When reading the novels, try to be mindful of both the effect of each small bit of writing on its own, and the way in which they fit alongside one another.