Thane Plambeck

More Brautigan

UFO VERSUS CBS by Susan DeWitt. The author was an old woman who told me that her book, which was written in Santa Barbara at her sister's house, was about a Martian conspiracy to take over the Columbia Broadcasting System.
"It's all here in my book," she said. "Remember all those flying saucers last summer?"
"I think so," I said.
"They're all in here," she said. The book looked quite handsome and I'm certain they were all in there.

THE EGG LAYED TWICE by Beatrice Quinn Porter. The author said this collection of poetry summed up the wisdom she had found while living twenty-six years on a chicken ranch in San Jose.
"It may not be poetry," she said. "I never went to college, but it's sure as hell about chickens."

BREAKFAST FIRST by Samuel Humber. The author said that breakfast was an absolute requisite for travelling and was overlooked in too many travel books, so he decided that he would write a book about how important breakfast was in travelling.

[book]

Richard Brautigan

From the amazingly comprehensive Brautigan Bibliography plus+:

A Happy But Footsore Writer Celebrates His Driver's Block

People Weekly June 8, 1981: 113, 116, 120.

In this interview with Cheryl McCall, part of a cross-country promotion for The Tokyo-Montana Express and written to appear as if he were the author, Brautigan discusses "his deep distaste for the automobile and explains how he successfully remains in the driver's seat by staying out of it." Includes photographs of Brautigan.

Not driving is a personal decision, not a protest in a socially active way. I don't dislike the modern world. I just don't have a love affair with the car.

I do think it's unacceptable that we have to walk around breathing what's left over from swamps and dinosaurs from prehistoric times. The noise pollution, hum, drone, shifting, grinding and roaring are enemies of silence and contemplation.

Not driving is almost considered a character flaw in America. I just accept it cheerfully and have evolved the Zen art of nondriving. Because I've made this conscious decision not to drive, I've accepted and created a lifestyle around the fact that I do not have spontaneous movement.

I'm always on the passenger sides or in the back seats and when I look at the drivers, they always seem to be enjoying themselves. It's a total mystery to me. The person who is driving always has to keep his eye on the road. Whenever I'm in a car as a passenger, I get to look out and see everything. I'm always pointing out things they can't look at.

Driving is such a part of our culture that the driver's license is a more respected document than a passport. It's almost like I don't have an identity without one.

My favorite form of transportation is walking anywhere with somebody I love. I've never gotten a parking ticket for walking and I don't need a license. I take buses, cabs, airplanes and sometimes I hitchhike. I don't care if I get wet.

Maybe I'm an anachronism—not of the past but of the future. A portent. The days of the automobile are numbered. I don't think the internal-combustion engine has a great future. Who knows, maybe five years from now I'll be driving alongside Paul Newman at some raceway. Stranger things have happened.

Unamuno

Still thinking of solitaire, or history. Solitaire represents the play of chance. A good mathematician could calculate the probability of a game's working out. And if two individuals were to set themselves to solving the problem competitively, the natural result would be that they would both find the same percentage of solutions to the same game. But the point of the competition should be to determine who can find more solutions in a given time. The best player is not the one who plays the fastest, but the one who breaks off the most games at the earliest moment, as soon as he foresees their lack of solution. In the supreme art of taking advantage of chance, the superiority of a player consists in his being able to make up his mind to abandon one game in time to start another. The same goes for politics and life.

Miguel de Unamuno, "How to Make a Novel," 1926

21 August 1911

The picture of dissatisfaction of a street, where everyone is perpetually lifting his feet to escape from the place where he stands.

Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1900-1913