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If you like PKD, Burroughs, or Vonnegut then you should be reading Séb Doubinsky

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At the end of March, the writer Séb Doubinsky should have been traveling across America giving readings from his latest novel The Invisible. Picture him in a busy, crammed bookshop wearing a plaid shirt, leather jacket with steel-rimmed glasses and neatly-trimmed beard. He sits at a table with a pile of books to his left, a glass of water to his right, the audience in front. Some sit in chairs, some stand around the edges with arms folded, heads tilted, all listening to Doubinsky’s strong, clear voice. There are questions then a long-line of bright-eyed readers waiting to shake his hand, take pictures, and get their copies signed.

In another reality this all happened. Turn the page, there’s someone at the back, leaning against shelves laden with bright, clean paperbacks asking:

What is your earliest memory?

Sébastien Doubinsky: My earliest memory is actually a patchwork of scenes from my childhood in America, between 1966 and 1968. I can see myself playing with my favorite toys, which were rubber Mattel astronauts, watching black-and-white Spiderman cartoons sitting upside down on the sofa, riding in my father’s dark blue huge station-wagon, going to Space Needle’s fun park and having a blast… Very vivid memories, in color, which have certainly influenced the very way I write, like Pop Art—or rather Anti-Pop Art, as Rosenquist called it—and Punk well, much later.

But a virus stopped all this. Doubinsky is in lockdown at his home in Denmark. If anyone could have seen such a deadly pandemic coming then it was him. He had already written about a similar outbreak in Absinth—the story of the Apocalypse with ancient Gods attempting a new order, the publishing of a new gospel according to Jesus (“Burn all churches”), and an outbreak of Ebola that claims the lives of the President and the Vice-President. There’s hope for us yet! Doubinsky saw it coming.

What the Corona crisis taught us: all useful people are underpaid and all useless people are overpaid and decide who will live or die.

Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider that gave him, in some unfathomable way, arachnid powers of strength and agility to jump great heights, climb walls, and have a tingling spider sense that alerted him to danger. At some point, most kids want to be Peter Parker, but then they give up on their imagination and subscribe to another’s imposed order.

August 1963, copies of The Amazing Spider-Man #3 were in bookshop carousels when Sébastien Doubinsky was born at a Parisian cinema. Spidey was fighting a new enemy the “grotesque Dr. Octopus.” Doubinsky’s parents had been watching a Hollywood western. They never saw the end of it. Celebrating the birth of a son was more important. Arriving at a hospital, Mother and child were doing fine. Father then found some work in America. Doubinsky spent his early years growing-up in the States watching TV and marveling at the unchanging blue sky. What’s your earliest memory? “I already answered that.”

Back in Paris, Doubinsky discovered a copy of William S. Burroughs’ The Ticket That Exploded while visiting his Aunt’s apartment on the Avenue René Coty. It was a weird looking book with a weird sounding title. Doubinsky sat down and read it. He was blown away. He might not have understood it but he knew he loved it. He had discovered his superpowers.

When did you first think seriously about becoming a writer and why?

SD: It’s rather a difficult question to answer, as there were many stages in this decision—at least until it became a rationally formulated one. I come from a very intellectual background, culturally mixed (Jewish and Catholic, but both my parents were leftists and radical atheists) and extremely open to other cultures. What’s more, both sides of my family had been very active in the French Résistance during World War Two, and I therefore inherited quite a strong human-rights ethic. All this to say that literature was not a passive element of my upbringing, but was seen as a powerful object that could serve the best or the worst causes, and that it was important.

Growing up I loved poetry, and for a long time wanted to be a poet (but also a painter, until I discovered I was colorblind…) but little by little, prose seeped in and took more and more space. I began to write some short stories in my late teenage years, but still not really considering dedicating myself seriously. The tragedy that sealed my writer’s fate was the suicide of my beloved cousin Bruno, then, like me, 20 years old. He had introduced me to punk and New Wave—especially The Cure, Bauhaus and all the darker stuff—and in his last note, he told me I should carry on writing “my great stuff.” That’s when the weight of words and the responsibility attached to writing hit me like a runaway train. That’s the day I really became, in my eyes, a “writer.”
 
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More from Sébastien Doubinsky, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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05.21.2020
08:25 am
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Rarely seen film footage of hippie bard Richard Brautigan
11.29.2016
10:05 am
Topics:
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Photo: Baron Wolman
 
The following is an edited version of an article I wrote on Dangerous Minds back in 2012 when Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan, the then-new biography of the poet, was published. I felt I couldn’t improve upon it so am sharing it again in a different context, as a preamble to this new video I put together of footage I’d never seen before of Richard Brautigan. This is an excerpt from a documentary about The Summer Of Love which was broadcast on the Canadian TV series The Way It Is in 1967. There is very little Brautigan on film, so for fans of the bard of San Francisco this is a short, but sweet, visit with one of our great countercultural heroes.

Richard Brautigan, Jack Kerouac and The Doors were my saviors in the year of the Summer Of Love. I was stuck in the suburbs of Virginia, surrounded by jocks and greasers, mostly always alone in my room full of beatnik books, magical vinyl and a meerschaum pipe full of banana peel. It was the year I read Brautigan’s second book Trout Fishing In America and the year that I left home for San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury.

Those were the days when a book or a record album could change your life. If literature had a Beatles, his name was Richard Brautigan. It comes as no surprise that John Lennon was a Brautigan fan. They both had a whimsical point of view that started in the square inch field and expanded into the cosmos.

In 1968, I lived inside of a parachute inside of a dance hall in a ghost town near Los Gatos, California. It was my summer of In Watermelon Sugar. I read that book like a preacher reads the Bible. It was my new testament. Brautigan’s poems and prose had this uncanny ability to gently slap you upside the head while disappearing into what is being described. In Watermelon Sugar was Brautigan’s river Tao, a sweet subtle liquid that flowed through the pink flesh of our being.

William Carlos Williams famously wrote “no ideas but in things” and embodied that thought in poems like “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Brautigan wrote from a similar point of view - a kind of American Zen that was ordinary and transcendental, modern and prophetic…

  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.

For many of us, Brautigan was a door into a consciousness that was liberating in its playfulness and here and nowness. Reading Brautigan is like taking a pure hit of oxygen. Things sparkle. There is a sense of boundless delight and eroticism in his prose and poetry - a promise of the unspeakable, where language transcends itself.

Watch the clip after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Marc Campbell
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11.29.2016
10:05 am
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Richard Brautigan reading from ‘Trout Fishing in America’ and ‘In Watermelon Sugar’
06.14.2013
11:31 am
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Some rarely seen footage (it’s not like there is a lot if it, you’ll note that they ran out of it pretty quickly) of poet and novelist Richard Brautigan cut over readings from his classic Trout Fishing in America and the novella In Watermelon Sugar.

Richard Brautigan was once one of the most widely read poets and novelists of 60s and 70s America. He wasn’t quite as famous as say, Kurt Vonnegut or Allen Ginsberg, but he was up there. Brautigan was especially revered in counterculture circles. In the Dean Koontz novel, One Door Away From Heaven, one of the characters, a drug addict, believes that she would be able to unlock the occult secrets of the universe, if only she could understand the deeper meanings of In Watermelon Sugar.

It’s a tragedy—seriously, it’s a damned shame—that he is now all but forgotten. Fans of both Vonnegut and Tom Robbins will find much to appreciate in Brautigan’s work.

An album, Listening to Richard Brautigan, recorded in 1969, was supposed to come out on The Beatles’ experimental Zapple label managed by Barry Miles, but Zapple didn’t last that long (It eventually came out on EMI Harvest).

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Richard Brautigan: The Voice at the Heart of Nowness
 

Posted by Kimberly J. Bright
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06.14.2013
11:31 am
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Richard Brautigan’s ‘Please Plant This Book’
10.01.2012
07:27 pm
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In the Spring of 1968, Richard Brautigan published Please Plant This Book. The book was actually a folder that contained eight packets of seeds for planting. On each packet was a poem.
 
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I wonder how many seeds took root in 1968
I wonder how many became gardens
And I wonder how many people sat in those gardens
Reading books by Brautigan

Richard, you’re a poet
How do I know it?
It’s easy
Every time you open your mouth
Flowers fall out

 
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Photo of Richard Brautigan by Bob Seidemann for San Francisco Express Times via Babylon Falling.

Posted by Marc Campbell
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10.01.2012
07:27 pm
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‘Jubilee Hitchhiker’: A new biography of Richard Brautigan

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On the occasion of the publication of William Hjortsberg’s extraordinary 900 page biography of Richard Brautigan, Jubilee Hitchhiker,  I am sharing something I posted awhile ago on Dangerous Minds:

“I was 15 when I first read a book by Richard Brautigan. It was called A Confederate General From Big Sur . I borrowed the book from my friend Joseph, a free spirited guy two years older than me who had a beard and rolled his own cigarettes. Though he looked like one, Joseph wasn’t a hippie. Hippies were part of a movement and Joseph wasn’t a joiner. In the small town in Virgina where we grew up, Joseph was completely his own man, a suburban teenage Zen monk who seemed ancient at the age of 17. It made perfect sense that he would be the guy to turn me on to Brautigan. They shared common traits: a clarity of mind, a sharp sense of humor and a deep love for language. Joseph kept a notebook with him at all times in which he wrote short stories, poems and haiku.

In this moment of recalling Joseph, I am convinced he was as close to being enlightened as any teenager could be in America in 1966. I wonder where he is today and what he’s reading.

Joseph, Brautigan, Jack Kerouac and The Doors were my saviors in the year of the Summer Of Love. I was stuck in the suburbs, surrounded by jocks and greasers, completely alone in my world of beatnik books and a meerschaum pipe full of banana peel. It was the year I read Brautigan’s second book Trout Fishing In America and the year that I left home for San Francisco. Joseph was there and I needed to make the connection with the Bodhisattva of the ‘burbs.

Those were the days when a book or a record album could change your life. If literature had a Beatles, its name was Richard Brautigan. It comes as no surprise that John Lennon was a Brautigan fan. They both had a whimsical point of view that started in the square inch field and expanded into the cosmos.

In 1968, I lived inside of a parachute inside of a dance hall in a ghost town near Los Gatos, California. It was my summer of In Watermelon Sugar. I read that magical book repeatedly (my psychedelic New Testament) and lived a simple life of bathing in waterfalls, eating brown rice and scarfing down countless tabs of Benzedrine (in honor of my hero Jack Kerouac) while trying to write with the ease and purity of Brautigan. I discovered that ease ain’t easy (particularly when you’re wired to the gills) and purity is near impossible. Really good writers make writing seem so natural that we all think we can do it. And then we try and soon discover just how hard it is to take energy from where you get it through the word to the reader without losing any immediacy in the process of transference. Brautigan’s poems and prose had this uncanny ability to gently slap you upside the head while maintaining a Basho-like quality of disappearing into what is being described - you saw the words become transparent as they melted into watermelon sugar. Watermelon sugar was Brautigan’s river Tao, a sweet subtle liquid that flowed through the pink flesh of our being.

William Carlos Williams famously wrote “no ideas but in things” and embodied that thought in poems like “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Brautigan wrote from a similar point of view - a kind of American Zen that was ordinary and transcendental, modern and prophetic…

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

One of the things that was most compelling and inspiring for a young would-be writer like myself about Brautigan’s books were their covers. With every new book that Richard published there was always an attractive bohemian woman on the cover. It was as though Richard was sending a message to all the reclusive teenybopper poets in the world that said “write poetry and you will get laid.” And it was true. I would sit in the Mediterranean Cafe on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley with my journal unfolded before me and invariably a young flower child would approach and ask if I were a poet. A response of “yes” would often lead to a fuck fest in my attic apartment on Channing Way. In the sixties being an artist/intellectual had the same aphrodisiac qualities associated with cocaine and Rolex watches in the 80s. Being smart was sexy.

For many of us, Brautigan was a door into a consciousness that was liberating in its playfulness and here and nowness. Reading Brautigan is like taking a pure hit of oxygen. Things sparkle. There is a sense of boundless delight and eroticism in his prose and poetry - a promise of the unspeakable, where language transcends itself.

Brautigan, now more than ever.”  February 2, 2011.

You can purchase Jubilee Hitchhiker here. If you’re a Brautigan fan, you’ll find it an immersive and deeply satisfying trip. It took Hjortsberg, who knew Brautigan well,  20 years to write the book and during his research he discovered unpublished Brautigan writings that had been locked in a safe-deposit box in Eugene, Oregon for 30 years. This is a gift from the poetry gods.

The following recordings of Brautigan reading were intended to be released on Zapple records, a spinoff of The Beatles Apple label. But the project was never fully realized. Harvest Records released them as Listening To Brautigan in 1973.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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03.23.2012
01:23 am
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Documentary filmed in The Haight Ashbury during the Summer Of Love

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Filmed during the Summer Of Love (1967) in the Haight-Ashbury, this groovy documentary features commentary from visionary poet Michael McClure, footage of The Grateful Dead hanging out at their Ashbury Street home, a visit to The Psychedelic Bookshop, The Straight Theater, scenes from McClure’s play The Beard and rare shots of the bard of The Haight, Richard Brautigan, walking through Panhandle Park in all of his glorious splendor.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.18.2011
05:57 pm
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Richard Brautigan: The voice at the heart of nowness
02.02.2011
05:19 am
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
I was 15 when I first read a book by Richard Brautigan. It was called A Confederate General From Big Sur . I borrowed the book from my friend Joseph, a free spirited guy two years older than me who had a beard and rolled his own cigarettes. Though he looked like one, Joseph wasn’t a hippie. Hippies were part of a movement and Joseph wasn’t a joiner. In the small town in Virgina where we grew up, Joseph was completely his own man, a suburban teenage Zen monk who seemed ancient at the age of 17. It made perfect sense that he would be the guy to turn me on to Brautigan. They shared common traits: a clarity of mind, a sharp sense of humor and a deep love for language. Joseph kept a notebook with him at all times in which he wrote short stories, poems and haiku.

In this moment of recalling Joseph, I am convinced he was as close to being enlightened as any teenager could be in America in 1966. I wonder where he is today and what he’s reading.

Joseph, Brautigan, Jack Kerouac and The Doors were my saviors in the year of the Summer Of Love. I was stuck in the suburbs, surrounded by jocks and greasers, completely alone in my world of beatnik books and a meerschaum pipe full of banana peel. It was the year I read Brautigan’s second book Trout Fishing In America and the year that I left home for San Francisco. Joseph was there and I needed to make the connection with the Bodhisattva of the ‘burbs.
 
Those were the days when a book or a record album could change your life. If literature had a Beatles, its name was Richard Brautigan. It comes as no surprise that John Lennon was a Brautigan fan. They both had a whimsical point of view that started in the square inch field and expanded into the cosmos.

One of the things that was most compelling and inspiring for a young would-be writer like myself about Brautigan’s books was their covers. With every new book that Richard published there was always an attractive bohemian woman on the cover. It was as though Richard was sending a message to all the reclusive teenybopper poets in the world that said “write poetry and you will get laid.” And it was true. I would sit in the Mediterranean Cafe on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley with my journal unfolded before me and invariably a young flower child would approach and ask if I were a poet. A response of “yes” would often lead to a fuck fest in my attic apartment on Channing Way. In the sixties being an artist/intellectual had the same aphrodisiac qualities associated with cocaine and Rolex watches in the 80s. Being smart was sexy.

I’m not going to get into the biographical details of Brautigan’s life. In this Wiki world, his life story is easily accessible. In brief: he was married several times, managed the rare accomplishment of making money as a poet, became an alcoholic and killed himself at 49. Happy/sad, all of it. What really matters is what he wrote and he wrote a couple of dozen books that run the gamut from the sublime to the silly. Every word is worth reading. Even the sloppy stuff.

For many kids like myself Brautigan was a door into a consciousness that was liberating in its playfulness and here and nowness. Reading Brautigan is like taking a pure hit of oxygen. Things sparkle. There is a sense of boundless delight and eroticism in his prose and poetry - a promise of the unspeakable, where language transcends itself.

The following recordings of Brautigan reading were intended to be released on Zapple records, a spinoff of The Beatles Apple label. But the project was never fully realized. Harvest Records released them as Listening To Brautigan in 1973.

Brautigan, now more than ever.
 

 
Previously on DM: Richard Brautigan’s daughter Ianthe reads a poem on her father’s birthday.

Posted by Marc Campbell
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02.02.2011
05:19 am
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Richard Brautigan’s daughter wishes her father a happy birthday
02.01.2011
03:28 am
Topics:
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January 30th was Richard Brautigan’s birthday. His writing had a huge influence on me when I was a young man.

I spent one summer in the late sixties living in a tipi in a ghost town in Northern California reading Brautigan and living off brown rice, rolled oats and Benzedrine. It was the rainy season. As I read In Watermelon Sugar, I felt as though I were made of those sweet volatile molecules so I avoided the rain and a nearby waterfall. I stayed nice and dry in the upside down cone I called my home.

I had a big bag of pot that I buried under the floorboards of a decaying dancehall in the ghost town. Rats ate the reefer. It killed them. I imagined the headlines in my imaginary newspaper: “Mice Murdered By Marijuana.” But they died happy. I found their rat corpses, plump and round, under the floorboards. They died with smiles on their faces. That’s the way I wanna die, I thought. 

I was alone that summer, just me and Brautigan and that deadly waterfall. Occasionally I would go to the nearby village where there was a church called The Church Of Tomorrow. Inside the church were beautiful young girls who gave me LSD. I would eat the LSD and make love to the girls, melting into them like watermelon sugar.

When I wasn’t reading Brautigan or fucking or eating brown rice, I would just stare at the sky for hours and watch the sunlight curl along my optic nerve and splash against my brain like a tiny cloudburst made of watermelon sugar.

Ianthe Brautigan Swensen reads “One Afternoon in 1939” from her father’s book Revenge Of The Lawn. It’s a sweet video.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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02.01.2011
03:28 am
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