Gatsby's Bar: My Brautigan
I wasn't much of a reader when I was younger. Oh, sure, I had made an eager tunnel through the hilarious cynicism of a thick stack of Vonnegut.
Also, at one time I was so enraptured with Orwell's Animal Farm that I blithely and somewhat pedantically invented a series of my own novels
which featured similarly anthropomorphic and anti-establishmentarian critters. Naturally, I never wrote a single one, but I and my good friend
Eddie Lopresti did manage to create hyperbolic blurbs and overheated jacket copy for several. And yes, I once carried on a platonic affair with Holden Caulfield and searched longingly for a real life and of age counterpart to Holden's sweetheart of a little sister, Phoebe. Later I imagined she grew up to be my next love Franny Glass. Together we would uncover the winter secrets of the Central Park ducks and discuss The Pilgrim's Way deep into the violet twilight of our chastely romantic evenings.
But other than these rare spikes my literary cardiogram was pretty much a flat-line until my sophomore year of high school.
Jeffrey Dunn was my instructor for American Literature that year and he was a man who knew the back roads of this country's literary history. Unlike my other teachers, all fine people by the way, just rather parochial and staid in their scholarship, Jeff had a keenly imaginative theoretical mind and an enthusiasm as pointed and electric as a flying-V. Up on his Barthes and Benjamin, well-versed in Burroughs and Ballard Jeff was a gateway into the wider culture and more than any teacher I have ever encountered Jeff had a profound effect on me.
Most of us have moments in our lives of great epiphany or crisis that precipitate a change so deep that we are altered on a cellular level, made new in our subatomic schema. My moment came when one week, or maybe it only took a couple of days, Jeff read aloud to my class Richard Brautigan's novel In Watermelon Sugar. I hadn't been read to since first grade and the idea of being read to as a high school student struck me as laughably funny and not a little bit weird. What's this all about, I wondered. But like any good student I was more than happy to listen to this reading than have to do any real work. Read on, I thought to myself.
But then something very strange happened - In Watermelon Sugar. I had never heard anything like this before. Was this really a book? A serious house published this thing? What is it? What does it mean? Let me quote the first page in its entirety of the first chapter entitled naturally enough “In Watermelon Sugar”:
In Watermelon Sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. I'll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.
Wherever you are, we must do the best we can. It is so far to travel, and we have nothing here to travel, except watermelon sugar. I hope this works out.
I live in a shack near iDEATH. I can see iDEATH out the window. It is beautiful. I can also see it with my eyes closed and touch it. Right now it is cold and turns like something in the hand of a child. I do not know what that thing could be.
There is a delicate balance in iDEATH. It suits us.
The shack is small but pleasing and comfortable as my life and made from pine, watermelon sugar and stones as just about everything here is.
Our lives we have carefully constructed from watermelon sugar and then traveled to the length of our dreams, along roads lined with pines and stones.
I have a bed, a chair, a table and a large chest that I keep my things in. I have a lantern that burns watermelontrout oil at night.
That is something else. I'll tell you about it later. I have a gentle life.
Some members of the class were bored and somewhat confused by this. Others were openly hostile. And a handful of us were completely charmed.
As I mentioned earlier I had never heard anything like this before. The language of the thing struck me as extraordinary. In Watermelon Sugar is less than 150 pages of prose, most chapters lasting no more than two pages, and every sentence captivated me, led me deeper into a kind of mystery.
Yes, the book itself was a mystery. Who was the nameless narrator? Where is iDEATH? What is the Forgotten Works? Is the story post-apocalyptic, or is something else, something far stranger happening here? But there was another mystery making itself known to me - the bottomless, never-ending puzzle that is language, most notably as it is expressed in poetry.
Hitherto poetry was an irritant to me. I could not understand the lure of writing/reading sonnets and villanelles and haiku when good clean prose was at one's disposal. Poetry was like some Rube Goldberg device whereby the quite simple is made ridiculously complicated for no reason other than a certain extreme perversity on the part of the author. Hearing Brautigan read aloud, though, cracked something open in my head. My resistance to poetry came crashing down. I fell in love and it was a love both instantaneous and all encompassing.
My new love led me away from the life I thought I was pursuing, a bright future ensconced in the sterile world of medical research, and bade me follow and read everything I could get my hands on and write poems in my notebooks rather than the solutions to physics equations. And it was through the writing that I began to truly see this city. First Pittsburgh appeared as something that must be overcome and escaped, but later a truce was called and a kind of peace forged.
Today the path Brautigan opened my eyes to nearly sixteen years ago has led me here, to The New Yinzer, and it's that moment of explosive recognition, the fuse of which was lit by Jeffrey Dunn, that informs and pushes my understanding of this magazine and its role on the local scene. To question, develop, and embody the newly emergent identity of Pittsburgh is a call to arms. In his novel, Trout Fishing in America Brautigan wrote one simple sentence which eloquently defines the project of The New Yinzer and, I believe, the responsibility shared by everyone who reads this journal. Brautigan wrote, “Imagine Pittsburgh.”
Imagine Pittsburgh!
Kristofer Collins is an editor at The New Yinzer and owner of Desolation Row CDs. A book of his poems entitled “King Everything - Selected Poems” will be published later this year by Six Gallery Press.
Paulette Poullet is a puertorican pittsburgher who draws comics for fun and deficit. In addition to the New Yinzer, her work has also been featured in Unicorn Mountain and Backwards City Review. Visit www.comicore.com to take a look!