Talk:Richard Brautigan

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[edit] Too negative

I'm sorry but this entry, beginning with his suicide then moving on to pan his work really, for lack of a more explicit term, sucks rocks!


I feel this article is far too negative and that quote should not be there.

Yes! I agree. And while I am not without some admiration for Ferlinghetti (our paths have crossed many time here in San Francisco), I believe his subjective statement carries far more weight than its value in such a short and incomplete article. ". . .I guess Richard was all the novelist the hippies needed. It was a nonliterate age." One would have to include Ken Kesey in that "nonliterate age". The complete statement reveals much about Ferlinghetti, but very little about Brautigan or his work. --terry1944
If that's the case, if Ferlinghetti's comments as a peer of Brautigan's are in some way unrepresentative of the opinion of Brautigan's peers or of critics of the time generally, then try adding some more appropriate examples. --Calton | Talk 00:29, 11 November 2005 (UTC)
Indeed, one of the hazards of constructing a biography piecemeal is creating a lopsided profile that waits to be righted. Terry1944 02:50, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

I've expanded the article and balanced it out a bit. It's a start at least. --Sachabrunel 14:20, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Well Done! Terry1944 19:35, 17 November 2005 (UTC)
People who think of Richard as a naif or thought he needed to "grow up" probably felt that his writing lacked self-mockery or what is today erroneously termed irony. The problem is that the irony is there, but it's so subtle that even guys like Ferlinghetti don't catch it. Ferlinghetti also said Richard could "never be an important writer", yet I've got a feeling Richard is more recognizable as a part of the national culture than Ferlinghetti will ever be. --Bluejay Young 04:47, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Unfashionable?

"This negative view of his work from the new literary establishment took hold in the late 1970s and early 1980s, though it could be said that his unpopularity was based on fashion and wilful misunderstanding." I don't see evidence for the generalization here that "a negative view of his work took hold" or that he suffered from "unpopularity". He published about a bazillion books and has a cult following even today. Where's the unpopularity? If someone doesn't have a back-up for that, I'd like to take it out. Katsam 21:50, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

His work was unfashionable, especially with the literary establishment, in the late 70s and early 80s, just look at the earlier versions of this page to see this. --Sachabrunel 11:15, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
Very often when something is popular with "the masses" or with the ordinary readers like you and me that just pick it up off the stands, the lit'ry establishment will decry it as "genre fiction" or worse. [1] [2] —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Bluejay Young (talk • contribs) 05:01, 26 April 2007 (UTC).

The quotes included in this article are too critical of Brautigan.

[edit] Beat generation

I'm not sure Brautigan qualifies as "beat generation". I believe the article once made reference to this. He's more like a "post-beat" though I'm sure he benefitted from being located in San Francisco, with its association with the beat scene. Sources anyone? Katr67 19:03, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

How about:
'The influence of the Beat Generation was evident in many aspects of the counterculture which came afterwards. Richard Brautigan was one writer whose career bridged the Beats and the hippie era. Too young to have participated as a full-fledged Beat, he had hung out on the fringes of the San Francisco literary scene from 1954 onwards. Perhaps the most widely read author of the sixties' counterculture, his book Trout Fishing in America sold over two million copies. His previous novel, A Confederate General From Big Sur, had attracted little attention when Grove published it in 1964: "Some critics liked it, others didn't, and the public was overwhelmingly indifferent. Generally publicized as a novel of the Beat generation, it appeared long after the Beats had ceased to interest the American public" (Foster 1983).
Brautigan was just one of those whom Gregory Stephenson, in his excellent introduction to The Daybreak Boys (Stephenson 1990), termed "second generation Beats:"
younger men and women who, in the late fifties and early sixties, responded to and were inspired by the Beat Generation. Some notable second generation Beats would include Ed Sanders, Ken Kesey, Ted Berrigan, Emmet Grogan, Bob Dylan, Richard Brautigan, and Richard Fariña. Their writings and activities, together with those of the original Beats, helped to catalyze the second phase of the impact of the Beat Generation: the counterculture of the late sixties and the early seventies.'

... from http://www.harbour.sfu.ca/~hayward/UnspeakableVisions/Absorption.html ... Katsam 09:09, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Excellent. Thanks for the references. Some of this is referenced in the beat generation article too. So, not to start a huge argument or anything, but does he belong in Category:Beat writers? Katr67 14:23, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
I don't think he does. By my lights, we'd do well to take him out of that category.Katsam 07:00, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Redirect or disambig for Brautigan

I have proposed twice on your Wikipedia:Articles_for_creation/Today#Brautigan that there should be something to catch Brautigan and it should be a redirect or a disambig page, but your admins User:Rmhermen and User:SteveBaker are apparently too busy with Star Wars and Star Trek and rejected twice an item about a real writer, so I'm dropping the stuff here and give up on this thing, okay?

Brautigan may refer to:

P.S. : or, this should at least be a redirect item: Richard Brautigan is very famous, refering to him as just "Brautigan" is quite common, and thus there should be SOMETHING to catch it at Brautigan, redirect or dab.

Sources

62.147.36.113 23:33, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Done.Katsam 09:21, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sources

So there's this source tag saying the article needs more sources. I agree that it looks shady that pretty much all the references point to the same site. But that site is a repository of information from all manner of books, magazines, articles etc.

So, if I go through and find the original citation that each footnote is referring to, can we take the tag off? I hate tags. Katsam 09:21, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

If an editor feels a specific fact is challangeable then they should request an inline citation for that fact rather than just tagging an entire article that does list references. That just seems lazy to me. At the same time if you add a fact that could be challenged then the burden is on you to provide the inline reference. I went ahead and removed the tag for now. Awotter (talk) 23:54, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Contradiction

When did he leave for San Francisco? The article says two different dates. Katr67 (talk) 22:35, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

I checked the main reference, it states he attempted to move to San Francisco several times but didn't have the funds to stay. The sentence I added is pretty clunky, but I think it explains why he's then back in Oregon. Awotter (talk) 02:34, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] The Tokyo-Montana Express

On the bibliography page of Brautigan's books, The Tokyo-Montana Express is listed under "novels" - not under "short stories." Only Revenge of the Lawn is listed under "short stories." While it's true that TTME is a collection of stories, unlike ROTL, the stories do have a unifying theme, as does Trout Fishing In America.

So, I think that in all the Brautigan templates, TTME should be moved from "stories" to "novels." Anyone disagree? Jphillst (talk) 03:15, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Funny you should raise this issue as I just finished re-reading TTME and was asking a writer friend of mine what constituted a "novel". I was having a hard time convincing myself that this was indeed a novel. I tend to agree with the reviewer quoted at http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0418,bkpark,53367,10.html:
"Perhaps, when we are very old, people will write 'Brautigans,' just as we now write novels," wrote Lew Welch in the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner back in 1968.
But, not only does TTME list itself as a novel on the "Books by Richard Brautigan" page, so does So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away and An Unfortunate Woman. Either Brautigan himself or his publisher(s) considered this a novel. So, i agree with you even though i think his books defy classification.Ronald Joe Record (talk) 19:34, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
TTME and TFIA both seem to straddle the line between the novel and the short story collection. However, I think both can be classified as novels as the chapters have a unifying theme. (Many beat writers -- like Kerouac, Vonnegut, etc. -- wrote "novels" that were essentially travel diaries, so TTME could also fit under that classification.)
Revenge of the Lawn, on the other hand, is more or less a miscellaneous collection of random writings from over an eight-year period that didn't seem to fit anywhere else.
I changed the listing on this article and the bibliography page. Later, the individual templates for each of Brautigan's book pages should be changed as well. Jphillst (talk) 03:14, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
An anonymous editor has moved The Tokyo-Montana Express back into Short Story Collections. I suppose there's good argument for either classification but I recommend going with what Brautigan and/or his publishers felt which was to classify this work as a novel. How does this work on Wikipedia ? Do we have to decide this same question over and over again every time someone puts it back ? Ronald Joe Record (talk) 23:44, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
Again an anonymous editor has moved The Tokyo-Montana Express back into Short Collections. Is this a never ending cycle? Is TTME a novel or a collection of short stories? I guess we'll never know. Especially since those that represent the short story side of the argument are only IP addresses. I'm changing it back in accordance with Brautigan's listings. Ronald Joe Record (talk) 04:40, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] The God of The Martians

The unpublished novel The God of The Martians was deleted from the bibliography section. With an appropriate reference, should this be restored? Ronald Joe Record (talk) 19:23, 15 May 2008 (UTC)