Dear Brautigan folk,  

We're thrilled to have been invited by Literature Wales to curate a trilogy of events for the very first Dinefwr Literature Festival in West Wales. We've specially created each of the three events to commemorate the occasion, but we suddenly and unexpectedly lost some of our sponsorship recently and need some help recouping costs. If you like what we do, please do throw some pennies at the project. As little as £2 goes a long way, and larger donations offer you some personalised artwork, the chance to be actively involved in the creation of a pie

ce of performance, and some limited edition Kool-Aid illustrations by Fuchsia, made specially for you. Have a look here to donate. We've raised >50% in a week and need a further £1000. Do spread the word! Thank you! 

Vera

Ianthe ("Eye-'anne-thi") Brautigan will be visiting us in London and speaking in Wales, in June.

A Brautigan Book Club Trilogy

Invited by Literature Wales, we're bringing these events to the inaugural festival in Dinefwr, recently voted of the the top 5 summer literature festivals in the UK:

1. Replicating the Please Plant This Book project which has our guests participate in the planting of 'books' and creating a Brautigan garden then taking home poetry and seeds to grow

2. Taking the audience on a night-time journey filled with poetry and music along theTokyo-Montana Express. Gruff Rhys (of the Super Furry Animals), Martin Carr (you may know him from the Boo Radleys) and H.Hawkline are contributing new songs inspired by Brautigan, and we'll catch a sneak peek of the UK premiere of an exciting modern opera, Tonseisha - The Man Who Abandoned the World by LA-screenwriter Erik Patterson, with music by award-winning composer Kim Ashton.

3. A chaired conversation with Ianthe Brautigan reading from You Can't Catch Death and her sharing some new work with us.

“The time is right to mix sentences
sentences with dirt and the sun
with punctuation and the rain with
verbs, and for worms to pass
through question marks, and the
stars to shine down on budding
nouns, and the dew to form on
paragraphs.”

– from Please Plant This Book, Brautigan

Proceeds collected will go directly towards: Transport for Ianthe Brautigan from San Francisco to Wales - we had a kind donation of flights fall through at the very last minute; a week's rehearsal space for the actors and musicians, petrol money for the three cars driving from London to Wales, warm beds for those who physically not able to camp during the festival.

Did you know: Richard Brautigan self-published and distributed for free 6000 copies of Please Plant This Book in the Spring of 1968. It consisted of eight packets of garden seeds, each printed with a poem. Four were flowers and four were vegetables

People whose work you'll be enabling: 

1. Fuchsia Voremberg - writer & illustrator, recreating the Please Plant This Book project with performer Adrian Gillott
2. Actors Jamie Wood, Sean Patterson, Vera Chok, director Gary Merry, co-producer Tilly Brooke, and production manager Jack Robson. We're transforming Erik Patterson's play into an opera and showing an excerpt.
3. Soprano Philippa Boyle who divides her time between Italy and the UK, having trained in Rome with Renata Scotto.
4. Solo flautist Ilze Ikse, Royal Academy prize-winner, mentored by BBC Symphony Orchestra principal flautist Michael Cox
5. Kim Ashton, prize-winning composer who's written and conducted world over. Listen to examples here.
6. International pop stars and musicians Gruff Rhys, Martin Carr and H.Hawkline who have kindly donated their time to write and perform new songs together through their shared love of Brautigan's writings - I want to give them petrol money and bake them a cake to say a thank you for their support!
7. Ianthe Brautigan, daughter of Richard Brautigan and a gorgeous writer, reading from her work and sharing her new writing plans with us.

Did you know: Brautigan’s book, The Tokyo-Montana Express, is a collection of one hundred and thirty-one sections inspired by memories of travelling between Japan and Montana. Each section represents a separate stop along a journey, a station along a metaphorical rail line joining the two disparate worlds. He defended the format of this collection as “another way of looking at things.”

Sponsorship in kind we're gratefully receiving:

1. Everyone's using their own cars in a car pool, bringing their own tents and camping if they can
2. Discounted use of rehearsal space
3. Donated development, rehearsal and performance time from the entire team of professional performers
4. Voluntary involvement in the project
5. Printing of copies of Please Plant This Book at cost, to be distributed for free at the festival
6. Waiver of rights from Ianthe Brautigan, Erik Patterson and Kim Ashton to perform material they control at this festival
7. Online blog space, support and publicity from reading charity, The Reading Agency

Did you know: Ianthe \i(a)-nthe, ian-the\ is pronounced eye-AN-thee. It is of Greek origin, and means “violet flower“. Mythology: a sea nymph, daughter of Oceanus.

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We received a lovely email from Jimmy the Peach. Here's some of what he wrote: 

Hello, Richard Brautigan is absolutely my most inspirational author. I believe the first book of his was Rommel, a collection of poems, in 1972. Just out of high school. Read all of his work. And introduced all of my friends to his writing. In the last few months two of these old friends mentioned In Watermelon Sugar. Made a big impact on them, too. 

~ It Began To Snow ~

It began to snow, erasing the horizon.

A wedge of geese faded in and out...

A drifting channel on some rustic television.

The creek crackled with cold where

The current wasn’t.

Flakes fluttered like moths

Then melted where

They touched me

The history of flowers’ future lay buried

Where I rest.

Inhaling the breath of others,

I tasted them in me...

watching...

... with eyes closed...

... nature...

... unfold...

© 2010 JimmythePeach (Peach) All Rights Reserved.

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   At that time, all the Brautigans were, if not prominently displayed in the university bookshop, certainly in plentiful supply. I navigated my life by the light of books. I was bound to bump into Brautigan sooner or later, so there was nothing magical about it. And yet, and yet ...  

   The very thing that irritates him so much about her now, once he found exciting. From our own relationships we can all identify with that. Everything we need to know, the entire course of their relationship, is encapsulated in that one simple motif of a squeaky wooden board. I find that absolutely extraordinary. 
   And here is half (half!) a chapter, from after the Statue of Mirrors has shown to the narrator Margaret hanging herself from the branch of an apple tree, and they go to retrieve her body:

          The wind grew stronger now and a few small things fell down.

   That, in the context of the story, remains one of the most beautiful and poignant sentences that I have ever read. It still amazes me after thirty years and more. That is the point about Brautigan. When you've been thrilled by a thriller, or you have found out Whodunnit in a crime novel, however good those books were at the time you are most unlikely to return to them. Brautigan is a genre of his own. His books can be read and read again, as I have done with In Watermelon Sugar.

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I’m back at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club for April’s Brautigan Book Club (and late again…), this time the BBC are unpicking Brautigan’s ideas on the commune in In Watermelon Sugar.

Drinks bought and (false) name-tags firmly attached Vera introduced Neil Schiller. Neil’s ideas sparked a discussion on whether living in a small town is akin to a commune. Thinking of my own home town (Crook, County Durham) I couldn’t help but agree. Whether you like it or not everybody knows your name and what you’re doing. They know your Mam and Dad and the house you live in. The quaint country town, much like the commune, may seem like a good idea but there’s a sinister underbelly poisoning the serenity. Admire the peace and quiet, the lakes and mountains but maybe soon a dead girl will float to the surface wrapped in plastic or a man will publicly start cutting off appendages until he bleeds to death…

Sarah and Dan, straight off the boat from Melbourne, agreed with the small town commune idea. It was some how comforting to think that even on the other side of the world small towns are stifling adolescent Brautigan readers. These readers long for escape and, if they’re lucky, move to the big city to join Brautigan book clubs. We came a bit unstuck when trying to place where the tigers fit in with this theory, until it was suggested that they’re ‘just the fucking bastards’. Difficult to argue with that.

Vera was eager to know on which side on the Pauline/ Margaret divide people stood. I’m firmly rooted in the team Margaret camp. Margaret gives a big fuck you to iDEATH by hunting for treasures in the Forgotten Works. Pauline cooks things without carrots and looks pretty. Margaret wins (although the suicide does give this victory a very bitter taste). This did lead to the inevitable question of how I, as a woman, felt about Brautigan’s treatment of women. If I’m honest, I’m really not sure how I feel about it. It’s difficult to reconcile being a feminist with female characters that are basically defined by their (ultra feminine) bodies. But I think it’s okay to be unsure and, even with the misogyny charges, I still love Brautigan. And, if he’s taught me one thing, it’s not to take things too seriously.

Once again I’m leaving with a head full of ideas and excitement and I’m bound to have Brautigan-induced insomnia. Last year’s broken heart is almost fully mended and I’m crediting Brautigan with a big chunk of the healing, who knew sitting in the basement of a working men’s club would make me so happy? As Fuchsia says, it’s a good time to be a Brautigan reader.

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For all those who met Chris for the first time tonight, this is what I wrote about last month's book club meeting, as published online on the Reading Agency's blog. - Vera

Brautigan Book Club: discussion and diversions

7 April 2012 / 0 Comments

saltpeter's Vera Chok tells us about the second meeting of The Brautigan Book Club at the Bethnal Green Working Men's Club where Trout Fishing in America was discussed:

Chris, an old Irishman and member of the actual working men's club, wandered into the room, post the Brautigan Book Club meeting on Trout Fishing in America, looking for a biro. He recognised me from the January launch, where I had found him gazing, full-eyed and silent, at artist Joe Duggan's incredible painting as we were setting up. Back then, he had spoken at length about art in general, expounded on his theories about the light in the room and recommended the Islamic exhibition at the British Museum. Chris has been so overjoyed to see the beauty of Joe's painting indoors, in a working men's club of all places, in urban Bethnal Green and had gone away happy. (See pictures of the event and the painting as our backdrop here)

Is this some kind of elitist, intellectual club?

Two months later and anxious to do my best as chairperson of the evening, I was desperate to meet those who had come along to our book club session, still gathered in the room. The presentations had gone well, but strangely, I was still a little tentative and shy, in a roomful of strangers. Biro-seeking Chris recognised me and looked so happy to see me. I found him a pen and used that moment to steady myself. However, before I could go back to the book clubbers, Chris launched straight into a speech about how important a book club could be. After he had established that everyone was welcome - "Is this some kind of elitist, intellectual club?", he had demanded - he told me an abridged version of his life story: how he taught himself how to speak English and to read when he was 12. He had left home to survive, moving away from the starvation he faced, and made his way in the world alone. Through welcoming, social organisations and spaces like the working men's club, Chris had grown new roots deep into a new city. He seemed to love what we were trying to build via the book club.

Chris then proceeded to tell me about Taoism, where every creature is a gift. He recommended Studs Terkel, the writer who followed hobos in America. I, in turn, volunteered information about Trout Fishing, the book of the evening and how the tale of the Kool-Aid wino in the book was one of my favourite pieces of writing ever: "He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it".

Libraries as places where people flourish, discover and grow

Chris talked on. He urged us to write what he calls "a moving story", a project of collecting stories from people "in the pub, religious buildings, the streets" - an oral history from people who would otherwise not be regarded. Mark Aitken, radio and documentary producer, who had featured the Brautigan Book Club on his charming radio programme, "I Can Hear The Grass Grow" (listen here), was present, had just been telling me about The Library of Unwritten Books, run by Caroline Jupp, inspired by the library in Brautigan's The Abortion which accepts books - "the unwanted, the lyrical and haunted volumes of American writing" - from anyone.

Chris told me about physically walking people through the key places of his London life, sharing his love of the beauty of these spaces. He shared how he had encountered, that day, a woman who showed him a bird building a nest, and how they sat and watched it together. Jonathan Swain, Brighton-based artist I love and admire, also in the room, had, prior to the start of the book club session, been telling me about watching birds for four hours, on one of his long outdoor walks.

During the Q&A session earlier that evening I was reminded of what Fuchsia had called the areas of "designated wilderness" in Brautigan's writing - parks and libraries acted as places where, within urban landscapes, people could flourish, discover and grow.

Hijacking my Brautigan experience!

HANG ON! Chris had hijacked my Brautigan experience! I was the chairperson of the evening and now I was supposed to be making the rounds, ensuring everyone was happy chatting and discussing Brautigan-related items! While the main body of the evening - the gorgeous illustrated prose poem presentation by Fuchsia Voremberg, song by stephenmcaines, and poem by Will Burns - was done, I was still on duty! But strangely, everything Chris was saying was Brautigan-related. Not only that, it was directly echoing tales the other guests in the room had brought with them and he hadn't even read the book or been at the meeting. Had I simply drunk too many Kool-Aid cocktails? Or is this what can happen if a room is filled with open, inquisitive and generous strangers who read?

That very day, Chris had been given a brooch which spelled "Love"- all diamante and pearls, squiggly writing and a flower above the 'V' for added effect. He was told to give it to the nicest person he met that day. He gave it to me, and I pinned my hand-made, all-the-way-from-Nepal, Trout Fishing patch to my denim shirt, and wondered at the strangely delightful, unexpected and thoroughly hope-filled evening I had had in a long time.

Postscript: I've invited Chris back, to recommend his book of the month, each month, to a roomful of Brautigan fans.

Footnotes

• Have a look at photos and videos of the Trout Fishing evening here.

• Book your free seat to April's meeting on In Watermelon Sugar here.

• In Watermelon Sugar was Richard Brautigan's third published novel and, according to Newton Smith, his most serious: a parable for survival in the 20th century. It is the story of a successful commune called iDEATH whose inhabitants survive in passive unity while a group of rebels live violently and end up dying in a mass suicide.

• The Brautigan Book Club's home is the Bethnal Green Working Men's Club, an East London arts space which regularly hosts wild acts in the shape of fire-eaters, gorgeously outrageous trannies, circus acts and David Lynchian cabarets. Lesser known to people, BGWMC is incredibly supportive of emerging artists and is a lovely, supportive arts hub in the unlikeliest of places. Warren Dent, who curates the events there, says he does what he does to give people freedom. There's not much else to say than that!

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SALENA GODDEN, gorgeous goddess of a poetess, will be presenting at May's Brautigan Book Club! Things are hotting up, and many more of you Brautigan fans out there are coming forward and volunteering your ideas and creations. So very excited to finally be meeting Neil Schiller (coming all the way fro Liverpool) tonight and we've a special surprise guest in the way of Brighton-based artist Jonathan Swain too. We're doing our call out for guests for the second half of the year, so if you'd like to show some work, do get in touch!

Back to Salena - I am particularly excited about meeting Salena as she has been travelling the world so much, and it's been well over a year since someone mentioned her as a tremendous person to find out more about in general, and this was before the Brautigan Book Club existed. Via twitter and her online pages, I've always been struck by her amazing generosity and dynamism and lo! we find out that we're Brautigan fans, we both run organisations called saltpeter (Check out Salena's saltpeter-y goodness here). Read about Salena's incredible work below and pop the date in your diary now.

Also, stay tuned for our special June events, where Ianthe Brautigan will be in London and at Dinefwr Festival, Wales (see our Events page).

x Vera

***

Salena Godden's latest collection 'Under The Pier' was published by hip-indie imprint Nasty Little Press in 2011. Most recently her work has appeared in Shortfire Press, Illustrated Ape Magazine, Trespass Magazine, Paraphilia, Rising, Teller Magazine, The Mechanics Institute Review published by Birkbeck University, Picador's Punk Fiction and Parthian Books, Raconteur. Her poetry featured in the three latest anthologies from Tangerine Press titled Dwang. Salena Godden hosts and produces The Book Club Boutique -  Soho's hippest literary salon – soliciting their own unique brand of Books, Booze and Boogie-Woogie. Salena features regularly on BBC's 'Illustrated Verse'  'The Verb' and 'Bespoken Word' and is among the poets in residence on Radio 4's 'Saturday Live' - Salena is curently working on a poetic-documentary for BBC Radio 4.

Website: www.thebookclubboutique.com

Waiting For Godden:  http://www.salenagodden.com/

Out Now 'UNDER THE PIER' published by Nasty Little Press: www.nastylittlepress.org

Out Now: SIXTY-SIX Books: http://oberonbooks.com/66-books.html

Out Now: RACONTEUR: http://www.parthianbooks.com/content/raconteur-america

For quick updates twitter: @BookCBoutique or @salenagodden or @wearesaltpeter

Also check out these sites for more published work by Salena Godden: 

www.shortfirepress.com / www.paraphiliamagazine.com / www.tellermagazine.com  / www.eatmytangerine.com

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Just some thoughts, following a few encouraging emails from Brautigan readers around the country. (Please forgive weird formatting. Posterous goes mad every so often!)

One of the things I love about Richard Brautigan is how he is a key, if not the favourite, writer for so many people and that many of us think we're in isolation - the lucky few who have found him - and enjoy our feeling of being 'in' on this special secret. I don't believe I have done us all a disservice by steting up this book club, though. Someone said to me that being able to meet up in a room with other people who've read Brautigan is as simple as going out to meet some friends. No need for bells and whistles. We're not necessarily offering you a sound and light show every time you come to a meeting or an event, we simply gather, experience anything someone's brought, and see what happens. We don't even MAKE you talk about Brautigan.  

(A little shout out to Improbable Theatre's Open Space set up which showed me, years ago, how wonderful things happen in a room even if nothing at all is planned: every single person in the room is the right person there at the right time. The setting is perfect, by virtue of it happening at all. The most creative, inspiring things come out of talking or not talking round the reason you're there in the first place.) 

It's great hearing from you no matter what you have to say or show. I received a lovely email from Gareth Buchaillard-Davies in Cardiff (there's a lot of Brautigan readers in Cardiff, interestingly, eg the lovely Cardiff Library on twitter). Please have a look at Gareth's lovely metaliterature blog and if you're on twitter, I totally #ff him. He wrote in to say hi and to tell us how he'd come across Brautigan, tales of which we're collecting on an informal basis.

As always, send in your stories, thoughts, songs, pictures, suggestions.

With love, Vera

Here's what Gareth sent the BBC team:

 In 1997 I was taking my second stab at higher education, this time at a notable Russell Group university in a capital city. During an otherwise mistily remembered day, I stumbled into my creative writing seminar to be confronted by a man who insisted that to write one must first experience. He recounted tales of drunken disorder (I suspect to get us unshaven and disengaged young things on side) and amongst the other things he said which I have since forgotten, he produced an anecdote about a book where a sombrero falls from the sky into a small town. The anecdote is long forgotten, but the book is amongst my most cherished and, if a mixture of praxis and inertia had not gummed up with melancholy apathy my youthful enthusiasm for writing above all else, might have resulted in a generous spilling forth of prolix literary output from this verbose stand-pipe.

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“You’re supposed to make only two quarts of Kool-Aid from a package, but he always made a gallon, so his Kool-Aid was a mere shadow of its desired potency. And you’re supposed to add a cup of sugar to every package of Kool-Aid, but he never put any sugar in his Kool-Aid because there wasn’t any sugar to put in it.

He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.”

In 1967, (the same year that Trout Fishing in America came out, but five or six years after it was written) Tom Wolfe wrote a book called The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It is about the double ‘K’ Ken Kesey and his Merry Band of Pranksters, who were a sort of party-revolution new-age missionary group. They preached their acid gospel and they travelled the country in their psychedelic school bus ‘Furthur’, you can imagine them stopping at roadsides to tie-dye their clothing with Kool-Aid, using every colour of the flavour spectrum and then adding that to the humid heat in that bus as it passed through the love-summer of the American landscape; you can see the beads of sweat rolling down their necks, rolling down the backs of their thighs and mixing in the heat of their armpits with the Kool-Aid dye of their clothes into a kind of human salt sweat Kool-Aid reality, transferring the colour to their skins. The Acid-Test, permeating the membranes between things. 

They were driven by Neil Cassady, a true Kool-Aid Wino who had been driving for decades at this point, passing through Jack Kerouc’s On the Road, copies of which had been used to navigate hundreds if not thousands of Greyhound busses of young people to San Francisco, to Mexico, to Big Sur, back and forth across America. Ultimately Neil Cassady died beside a railway track before the publication of Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, but he is there, and also in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Howl and all these other notable works of Beat literature, Cassady might not have written them, but he is driving them. He was their trailblazing muse, like a Kool-Aid shooting star.

So back to the acid tests – these were a series of parties that happened between ‘66 and ’67 where the Pranksters would go to often predominantly poor black areas and hire a hall which they would wire for sound, put on a light show and a band, usually The Grateful Dead, and then on a few notable occasions they would mix Acid into a huge punch bowl of Kool-Aid. They thought this was pretty profound, and Tom Wolfe certainly makes it seem like they had discovered an unholy holy sacrament in his hysterically realist prose, but if you really want to know about the Kool-Aid sacrament, then I guess we had better think about Jim Jones.

Jim Jones’s father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, so you have that K stapled in your mind from an early age – you have the Kool (with a K) Filter King cigarettes that killed Nat King Cole, you have the K of Karl Marx and then it’s not so hard to imagine a young Jim Jones sitting at the back of his non-integrated math class in Ohio in the 1940s, staring at the tips of the all American corn-fed inbred girl who sits in front of him and has just dip dyed the ends of her hair with this k-k-k-Kool product that used to be called Fruit Smack and now is called Kool-Aid, and it tastes of grapes and it’s bright purple, and she’s used it to colour the tips of her hair and perhaps absentmindedly while Jim Jones doesn’t listen to the lesson on algebra he watches her take the very end of her hair into her mouth and then wince, her face puckering like the pretty little centre of a fist at the sour, unsweetened, concentrated taste. It makes you wonder if he ever wondered if her bath water would dilute that dip dye to the correct ratio, if he ever imagined rolling his fingers over her collarbones, her pale purple breasts, using that hand like an oar to mix a pound of sugar into her girl-skin grape bullion bath before dream-drinking it down in pints. Drinking so much that he’d cry purple tears like a sea snail as her skin cooled to a lilac Rosetti goose-flesh, camphor lanterns out, cool, cooler, cold Ophelia I drink you down like a diner milkshake…

I digress. I can pretend that to be the truth about Jim Jones, I can paint him in a wash of Kool-Aid tones, or I can tell you about the church he started, called the People’s Temple, how he took a five cent powder packet Bible and mixed it to his own Christian Communist Kool-Aid reality, a strange and spiritual potency in which: “What you need to believe in is what you can see ... If you see me as your friend, I'll be your friend. As you see me as your father, I'll be your father, for those of you that don't have a father ... If you see me as your God, I'll be your God." The People’s Temple was built on the basic premise of total integration, racial justice and social equality. This message was diluted and disseminated, but at its heart, the people of this temple were trying to improve their lives, to build what they described as a paradise on earth. By September 1977 (a decade after the acid tests and the publication Trout Fishing in America) just under a thousand of Jones’ followers had moved into a new community in the jungles of Guyana. They had fled San Francisco in the beginning of an exodus which ultimately, would take them Furthur still.

They were a different kind of school bus missionary troupe, driving back and forth across California gathering recruits but they had a lot in common too. Jim Jones and Ken Kesey. They both had this power and charisma, these sprawling families holding on to their every word. The San Francisco Headquarters of the People’s Temple was less than one block away from the venue of the Acid Test Graduation, they might as well have shared a parking lot. They had both wired their settlements for sound, Kesey on his farm so you could speak a word into a microphone in the house and it would reverberate through speakers hidden in the Oregon hills and then Jim Jones of course, his “I am Ahab” pulpit sermons, his jungle pavilion from which he soothed and slurred and cooed his followers not into an acid test, quite the opposite in fact, because if you mix cyanide into an oil drum of Kool-Aid, not LSD, what you get is a strong alkaline.

This act was the often-rehearsed white night, the ‘revolutionary suicide’ of November 18^th 1978. It was the death of 909 of his people, 606 adults, 303 children, it was the greatest singular loss of American civilian life before 9/11. As Jim Jones put it on the tape, which you can hear, he wanted his followers to: "Die with a degree of dignity. Lay down your life with dignity; don't lay down with tears and agony." In the background of the track, behind the clear sound of tears and agony of children dying, lain down as families, you can hear the ghosting of a sad and melancholy gospel song that the death tape is recorded over – it is a far cry from the Grateful Dead.

Now it seems that in America at least, conspiracy is as much a mechanism of grief as anything else.  It is a way of reconciling the mind to great tragedy by adding an element of un-knowable truth that is always ‘out-there’. It is a disavowal of difficult events, a shoring of fragments of evidence against your ruin. It is Elvis, never dead, endless sightings, maybe even hiding in the jungles of Guyana; it is luminous fame that outshines our belief in death. Marilyn Monroe, JFK, Michael Jackson.

With this in mind then, I want to think about how Harvey Milk ties into this punch bowl of events. For those of you who might not know, Harvey Milk was the openly gay district supervisor of the Castro in San Francisco. He fought for civil rights and hope, and he and Mayor George Moscone were both supporters of and supported by the People’s Temple of Jim Jones. On November 27^th 1978, nine days after the Jonestown Massacre, Moscone and Milk were both assassinated by a former member of the board of supervisors called Dan White. There is an easy narrative of conspiracy written into this case – Dan White’s defence was hinged upon his altered mental state, caused by an excessive quantity of sugar and junk food in his diet. They called it the “Twinkie defence”, but it might as well have been the Kool-Aid Overdose. When in office, Dan White held a position that had previously been filled by Jim Jones and there has been suggestion that this was Jones’ final act – to sent his emissary into City Hall to exact his revenge, tear down an empire that he helped to build, and then watch the ripples of time repeat themselves in another ‘White Night’ as the citizens of the Castro rioted against the unjust prosecution, the bent jury. "Just tell people that we ate too many Twinkies. That's why this is happening."

If you’re looking for other clues perhaps, there was the addition to Harvey Milk’s last will and testament that requested that his ashes be mixed with bubble bath and Grape Kool-Aid, before they were scattered into the waters of the San Francisco Bay. You could see this a final coded warning, an interconnection between his death and Jonestown, but maybe it is just the final Kool-Aid reality. A grey purple human Kool-Aid, sweetened with the ocean’s salt, swirling, illuminating and diluting into the deep.

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Composer – conductor – teacher – gardener – baroque oboist. In Kim’s music zen calm meets zen violence while the sounds of nature mix with the sweet strains of hardcore modernism. Currently writing his PhD in composition at King’s College London, he also teaches and lectures at Cambridge University.

Listen to some of his award-winning compositions here - DOTS was written for recorders and is one of the most insanely exciting things I've heard!

Kim is writing, right now, music and opera for our Brautigan-inspired show. The strongest reference point for me are Sombrero Fallout and Tokyo-Montana Express, as it's set in Tokyo and Montana, but The Wind Won't Blow it All Away and Ianthe Brautigan's You Can't Catch Death also spring to mind.

The Brautigan Book Club'll be showing the public a sneak peek at this show and Kim's music at Dinefwr Festival, Carmarthenshire June 30 - Jul 1.

Read about Kim and the show, Tonseisha - The Man Who Abandoned the World.

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Illustrations by Fuchsia Voremberg, drawn with Kool Aid, as part of her presentation.

See the full gallery on Posterous

stephenmcaines sings a work in progress tune he wrote for the meeting.. Will Burns, who we met for the first time on the evening, read us his lovely poem, The Osprey. Read the text here:

The Osprey

Late in the day

it was an osprey

first, then two

bald eagles that

flew over as we

put the dinner

things out on

the picnic table

by the cabin.

We stood watching

before setting out  

places with meat,

wine and bread.

I couldn't shake

the feeling that we

were somewhere

entirely foreign.

I felt it strongly

all night in that

cabin in the wood.

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We also had Kool Aid (pink lemonade and grape flavours) cocktails made with the help of our lovely venue, BGWMC. They were suitably lethal and we pictured dyeing our hair, t-shirts and our insides as we sipped them thoughtfully.

***

In the meantime, I thought it would be a jolly thing to have various people write about their experience of the monthly Brautigan Book Club meetings, from hardcore Brautiganites, to curious first-time attendees, to reflect the inclusive ethos of the club. Please do send in your thoughts and we'll post them directly.

"Is Trout Fishing in America about trout fishing?

See the full gallery on Posterous

***

Videos of guest speaker, Fuchsia Voremberg presenting her Kool Aid conspiracy theory and Vera Chok, chairing the casual Q&A:

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I read all of the Brautigan that I have ever read in the space of about two weeks, starting with A Confederate General from Big Sur which had been lent to me by a friend and which I read all in  one go, right through, in a single evening. My memories from this period of my life are characterised by extremes of weather. In them, it is either winter and very cold or summer and very hot, and the evenings are either wholly dark or uncannily light, as though that year for some reason there was no equinox but only two extended solstices. I was living on my own at the time; the house I was in was my house which until the death of my mother perhaps a year before had been her house, and my ownership of it was uneasy. It felt to me as if the house was a family pet I had often in the past casually stroked, and over which I had mentally assumed some degree of ownership but for whose welfare I now found myself solely and unwontedly responsible and of whose diet and habits I discovered that I was completely ignorant and which in addition was obviously pining for its real owner, who it now turned out wasn’t me at all so that not only was I unable to make the thing happy but I also felt constantly reproached by it as it watched me from the far corner of its cage. I felt that the walls of the house berated me. It was always cold, even when it wasn’t. I began to find the fact that for example a floor, once hoovered, would almost immediately need hoovering again so overwhelmingly, heart-rendingly sad that on the few occasions I tried I gave up after perhaps a few listless pushes of the vacuum head across the living room’s bare boards and instead lay down next to the hoover which, still on, would be humming at a pitch that was obscurely comforting; and still to this day I think of hoovers as being semi-sentient and I think of this sentience as being in character essentially sorrowful.   

   As a result of my discomfort when in the house, I spent a lot of time in cafes. I stayed out as long as I could in the evenings- until it was dark, until the pubs were full, until the streets were empty. Walking through the city with the night high above me I felt very far away from other people and very far away from myself; and then when I got home the house would be waiting to remind me that I was a poor substitute for my mother. I began to avoid the parts of the house which made me feel the most guilty, shutting off rooms where I was able and where I wasn’t, where I had to go through for example the living room to get to the kitchen and the kitchen to the bathroom, forging for myself a sort of path or track from which I didn’t deviate and along which I moved as quickly as possible, not turning the lights on or looking to either side or stopping. By the time I read Confederate General from Big Sur it had got to the point where I was living in only one room, a room on the first floor looking out onto the street. At some point I had started to paint the room but hadn’t finished, so the walls were half blue and half green and in the blue you could see the tracks of the brush, and into the room I had fitted my once-good but now un-good hifi and an odd assortment of furniture which did not include a bed but only a double mattress on the floor, and this mattress was both the place where I slept and also the place where I sat when I was not asleep or where I lay often for hours in the morning without opening my eyes or where I lay often for hours at night in the dark unable to sleep with everything around me rendered orange by the street light falling unevenly through the curtainless windows. Eventually the comfortably occupiable space in the house narrowed down pretty much just to this one mattress and even then quite a lot of it was covered in books and empty coffee mugs and assorted bits of computer equipment, and it was on this mattress that I read all of Confederate General in one sitting, and in the days that followed it was on this mattress that I read also everything else I could find by Brautigan, books that I bought in odd, furtive trips up to town during which I felt invisible, as though I were slipping through the spaces between people, between glances. I didn’t buy the books all in one go but singly, one per trip. While out I would get nothing else, just the book, and then I would come home again and go back through the house to my mattress, and there it would be as if I hadn’t left at all and the details of the past few hours would seem unclear, tenuous, and I would struggle to remember how my hair had got wet and my collar, from the rain; but somehow through the intervening time this has switched so that now it is these journeys outside that I remember with the greatest clarity: I remember the neon shop signs and the buses and the rain, it being dark outside at half past five, my fugitive reflection in the bookshop’s plate glass window and the way the reflection made my face look like a stranger’s face, and I remember the wet dog smell of the duffle coat that I wore, bought ten years earlier and even then already old, and my hands in the pockets folded neatly with the tissues and the dust, and the running gutters and my feet wet in canvas trainers and over all the rain and the smell of rain, and the bookshop lit to the brightness of institutions, after-hours classrooms or school corridors in winter rendered strange by sudden, sharp-edged emptiness; light which was both disinheriting and accusing, as though I was where I shouldn’t be and, given half the chance, might hitch up my skirt and swear, or steal. 

Prior to Brautigan fortnight my reading material had consisted almost entirely of a diet of depressed American alcoholics leavened only occasionally by detective fiction and schlock romance. This reading gave me an illusion of companionship. It made me feel that I was not entirely alone. I was effectively using this collection of dead American writers as a support group, a sympathetic collective of imaginary friends created by me using a dubious process of extrapolation back from some published work and my minimal background reading on Wikipedia. Predictably, the effect on my psyche, already somewhat strained, was far from ideal; the reading and rereading of work characterised by a particularly relentless interiority skewed and possibly even temporarily destroyed my capacity for sympathy as well as leaving me convinced, despite all evidence to the contrary, that how I saw things was absolutely, completely, how they were, and that how they were was cold, and hard, and pitiless.

   The most extreme manifestation of my American drunks thing came in the form of repetitive to the point of obsessional reading of John Berryman’s Dream Songs my copy of which, subsequently lost, had sprouted a startling number of little torn paper markers made of rail tickets and napkins and till receipts, markers whose usefulness was inversely proportional to their degree of proliferation and which to my knowledge I never actually used for anything anyway, as in I didn’t use them as reference points or as a way of getting back to something that I had already read, but which nevertheless I kept on sticking in, every time I got to a bit I thought was particularly resonant or meaningful or important. Aside from Berryman there was Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich. The point being that for about a year all the books I read had been to unhappiness as fish are to water, and I read them in a way that was almost prurient, with an attitude that bordered on voyeurism, except that instead of a sight of some tits what I wanted was a glimpse of misery; and as a result of this I became furtive, evasive about what I had been reading, as though the material itself was distasteful, second-rate pornography rather than twentieth century American literature.  

   At the time what I thought was that I was seeing the world as it was, naked, stripped bare, without the distorting lenses of expectation or kindness or hope. The writers I had chosen seemed, I thought, to see the world as I did, or in their work I thought I had found a landscape that was familiar to me, all sharp corners and jagged edges, although it’s probably worth pointing out that my reading was far from critical. I was looking for confirmation of what I already believed I knew to be the case and so it is unsurprising that I thought that I had I found it, regardless of whether it was there. And it didn’t occur to me, either, that I might not to take the authors at their word in what I took to be their confirmation of my world-view; it didn’t occur to me to wonder if perhaps the fact that any of them had actually managed to write anything sustained meant that they were probably being slightly disingenuous about the amount of time that they spent working as opposed to being for example drunk and miserable and prostrate on a mattress, engaged in a complicated, passive-aggressive relationship with their own house. I remember thinking through all this that I was being profoundly rational. I remember thinking that I saw myself with clarity and without judgement, exactly as I was. I remember thinking that to ask compassion would be dishonest. I remember thinking that to extend compassion would be indulgent. I remember thinking that what I saw was the bones of the wreck, and that everything was what it seemed.

   What I lacked in quite a profound way was any capacity for kindness or forgiveness and also any sense of humour.

   Given all this it surprises me that it took me so long to get around to reading Brautigan. On paper he looks like the perfect candidate, being as he was mostly miserable and his life was chaotic and disordered and featured periods of hospitalisation and periods of alcoholism and that he ended up by shooting himself in the head somewhere lonely by the sea, but as it was the book sat for a long time unread on the table in the corner of my room, long enough that at some point I put something sticky on it, perhaps something covered in honey or treacle, and this had left a mark on the cover of the book, and in between this happening and me reading the book enough time passed that the sticky patch acquired a pelt of dust and fluff so that from a distance it looked like there was a dead mouse on the book. I think perhaps I didn’t read it for so long because I thought that Confederate General was something other than it was, perhaps a historical novel, a novel about the American Civil War; certainly the cover of the copy which I was lent had a picture on it of a man in an old style military hat, a picture drawn in a peculiar faux-naive style, the colours unpleasantly bright and slightly out of tune, and in general it gave the impression that no one responsible for that particular edition had at any point in its conception or design actually bothered to read it. And then something made me pick it up at last and I read it all in one go and the next day went out and bought So the Wind Wont Blow it All Away because the title sounded like the title of a novel about a nuclear holocaust, so much so that I’m still not sure that it isn’t a novel about a nuclear holocaust, and after that I read Trout Fishing and the Abortion which in fact I didn’t like, and An Unfortunate Woman about which I felt uncomfortable and ambivalent.

   Throughout the next two weeks I did nothing but drink and read Brautigan, and with the exception of the brief trips to the bookshop I stayed on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket, and I slept sometimes and woke and carried on reading and sometimes when I woke it was light and sometimes it wasn’t; and because I wasn’t counting the days in intervals of sleep it felt that in some way no time was passing at all, or like time was passing in a series of jumps, a stop motion animation, and this was also the way I moved through space, all in one go, changing on the mattress from one position to another without my limbs being forced through any intermediate contortion. When I was finally done with Brautigan I felt that something I had been holding had gone away. I felt very cold. The light through the window was the bleak, thin light of hangovers and the very early morning, and for the first time since I had started living on the mattress the room didn’t look accusatory or neglected or hurt but only as though the person who lived in it was both lost and profoundly unhappy but didn’t really know that they were. And outside the window the world didn’t look like a place I was seeing without prejudice but only like a place I couldn’t understand.

   About a year after I had read all the Brautigan I could in a two week period I recommended him to a friend who then for months afterwards sent me alligator or soup themed postcards, and the postcards and their clearly well-meaning intent made me feel uncomfortable, as though I was being forced to wear clothes that someone else had picked for me and which I had to pretend to like. I felt as though I had said to someone that I quite liked cats and now they were sending me pictures of cats and books about cats and little models of cats in clothes doing menial household chores. The postcards seemed to me to miss the parts of Brautigan that I liked while at the same time highlighting the bits that I found irritating or twee, and this made me feel defensive, as though I was trying to justify my liking of a film which had made me cry but which everyone else said was formulaic and mawkish. Brautigan is often funny or cute, which probably it’s easy to infer from everything I have said I don’t find particularly appealing, personally, and sometimes it feels like that’s all there is, the funny and the cute and the slightly wry dialogue and the vague, whimsical melancholy that’s like having been happy two years ago; but I remember that when I first read Brautigan what I thought was that he knew how is to be lost, both how it is to be lost in the manner that cats and keys are lost that can’t be found, and in the way that a person is lost who doesn’t know the way, and that behind the whimsy the heart of his work was talking about being mislaid.

   I remember someone I shared a house with once for whom parties never really ended, even when everyone else had gone home. I remember how I would find him sometimes sitting late at night when even the last stragglers brought back from the pub had gone home to their real lives, find him sitting in a chair by the window, sitting in the dark by the window with a drink and a cigarette, waiting for something that wouldn’t come, for sleep or waking or sobriety, for real life to reassert itself like it never had before. For him the line between what was real and what was pretend wasn’t thick and dark and clear like it is for other people, but tenuous, liable at any moment to betray him. There are people who seem to be lost in this awkward space between reality and the game. These are the fun-house’s permanent residents, inhabitants of a stage-set painted to look real, the leaders of revels and lords of misrule in fifty pence hats and second hand coats who somehow haven’t ever managed to find their way out. And when the visitors are gone and the house is empty there is nothing left but an alligator in a pond and some old tin cans and the grey daylight shows up the dust and the cracks and the one left behind is stripped bare by solitude and rendered, at last, in the flat silence when nothing is hidden and everything is finally as it seems, pitiable. Brautigan writes with great kindness about the people who are left behind when everyone else has gone back to the city. He makes it so the only possible response is compassion. And that, in the end, is all I really wanted to say about him.

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We thought it'd be an interesting idea to post a running list of how we all came to discover Richard Brautigan's writings. Please post your stories in the comments box or email brautigan@saltpeterproductions.co.uk if you prefer.

*My first Brautigan was pressed into my hands by a strange, tightly-wound young man. It was Sombrero Fallout, and I fell in love with Brautigan instantly. I returned the borrowed book sadly. The young man took to shouting at me down the phone. I refer to him unfairly and flippantly as one of my stalkers, but I am forever grateful for the gift. I have a question - do you think the first Brautigan you read will forever remain your favourite? - Vera

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A belated posting of the video from the launch event, via mwnghawk's youtube channel.

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Poems inspired by Brautigan, emailed to us by the rather lovely and intriguing Will Burns who found out about us via the equally fascinating, Caught by the River.

The Last Moving Thing

31 January 2012 // poetry

A poem by Will Burns.

The sun no longer rises
above the bare rock hills
around the house.
All that I ever see now

above the line of the horizon
is the dominion of the trees –
leafless, scratching at the sky
in bare, black lines.

The light receded slowly
and with it, bit by bit
was spent the life and
colour of the place.

All things moved away or died,
a mulch covered the ground,
then dissipated, revealing
a caustic white chalk below.

Although there were not,
and now never will be,
any specific acts of violence,
I am left the only movement in the air.

How I Learned To Live Without Candles

30 September 2009 // Miscellany

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via the wonderful Martin Carr, a link to graphic artist Paul O'Connell's page, The Sound of Drowning.

Paul O'Connell is a writer and graphic artist whose work has appeared in a variety of international books, magazines, zines and comic anthologies. As well as self-publishing collections of his own solo and collaborative work under the title of The Sound of Drowning, Paul's work has also been published and exhibited in the UK, Australia, New York and Europe.

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via martincarr.tumblr.com

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Richard Brautigan

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

Via http://Martincarr.tumblr.com

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