The Big Green House

Tuesday, July 29, 2003

 

Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonaisse

Reading Richard Brautigan always makes me want to take a bath. (Not, I hasten to add, in the same way that reading Ann Coulter* makes me want to take a bath; with her, it�s more of a decontamination than anything else.) I find Brautigan to be very relaxing, and so I associate reading him with soaking in the tub. Actually, that�s usually how I read him.

I don�t know if Brautigan was much for soaking in the tub, himself. I like to think so, but then I like to think that I have something in common with people whose work I admire. It�s entirely possible that he actively despised bathtubs. I don�t really know.

I can tell you how I discovered RB. I was in junior high school, and very keen on learning anything to do with fishing. Girls did not seem to be very interested in me, so I devoted myself to the sporting destruction of trout. It was something to do.

Fortunately for the trout, I was a piss-poor fisherman. I would fish for hours on end; occasionally I�d get a nibble, but it was a very rare day that I actually caught something. As it turns out, I was really more interested in being out in the woods, away from people, just me and the stream and the trees and the clouds. And the fish.

I didn�t realize this until years later. Countless miles of fishing line, numberless lures, and more salmon eggs than there are hairs on a dog, all in the service of my being alone in the mountains.

But that�s not the point. The point is, at the time I thought that I just wasn�t using the right fishing technique, or perhaps my tackle was not what it should be. So, I spent a lot of my non-fishing time going to the library and checking out books on various methods of fishing. It was during one such search that I stumbled across Trout Fishing in America.

It was an eye-opener, as they say. I didn�t quite know what to make of it, at first. Although it did mention trout fishing throughout the book, most of it was completely outside my frame of reference as a suburban thirteen-year-old boy. And yet, I found it strangely compelling.

The various references to fucking didn�t hurt.

As I made my way into high school, I kept an eye out for other books by Brautigan. Used bookstores never let me down � before I graduated I�d found Revenge of the Lawn, The Abortion, The Hawkline Monster, and Willard and His Bowling Trophies. I�m thankful that I didn�t read In Watermelon Sugar until I was in my thirties. It would surely have put me off RB for good if I�d come across it any earlier. As it is, it gives me the itch. When people tell me that they don�t like Brautigan, I just assume that they read that one first.

If I were forced to describe RB�s work (and I�ll tell you right now that I cannot conceive of any circumstances under which I would be forced to do so, but let�s just play along), I�d say that it was gently surreal, always well-intentioned but with an undercurrent of melancholy. This is also a fair description of large portions of my life, and probably goes a long way toward explaining why I like him so much.

*If you think I�m going to feed that flaming attention-whore�s ego by linking to her in any way, think again. If you really want to know anything about the tragic waste of protein that calls itself Ann Coulter, you�re gonna have to look it up yourself. Be advised, though, that you�ll want to scrub your brain with steel wool afterwards, to wash out the ugliness. dong_resin sums her up nicely here.

bmarkey 7/29/2003 01:41:00 AM