Should I skip posting a Burn After Submitting because the thing I did least this week was read online journals? That seems like a fair question. On my days off, I went to Mount Washington with my wife and kids and didn’t use my phone or iPad or any electronic devices much which greatly diminished my opportunities to read online fiction. On the days I worked I was excessively tired before and after work because I work a job that requires long, physical, late night hours which greatly impedes reading time. Those are the first reasons to skip this list.
While I was at Mount Washington I read Richard Brautigan flash fiction. I wonder if the hippies of 1962-1972 called it flash fiction. His writing is so good it probably forced all the people who didn’t understand what it was to accept it as a thing even as they sat there holding the pages wondering what the thing was they were holding.
There are several amazing pieces that I read and re-read in Richard Brautigan’s Revenge of the Lawn this past weekend. I read them over and over again so many times the book quite literally fell apart in my hand. If you don’t believe that, I posted a photo of it here on Substack last weekend. I kept handing the loose pages to my wife and son to read. I read one of them out loud on TikTok (maybe even here on Substack, I can’t remember.) I will re-type one of the stories below the list if you want a flavor of Richard Brautigan.
Jim Ruland
THE GROTTO by Jim Ruland | X-R-A-Y
Calvin Westra
https://muumuuhouse.com/cw.10nov2024.html
Andrew Porter
https://imagejournal.org/article/home/
Benjamin Drevlow
https://www.bruisermag.com/drevlow_pulledpork
Adam Petty
Ernest Hemingway’s Typist
by Richard Brautigan
It sounds like religious music. A friend of mine just came back from New York where he had Ernest Hemingway’s typist do some typing for him.
He’s a successful writer, so he went and got the very best, which happens to be the woman who did Ernest Hemingway’s typing. It’s enough to take your breath away, to marble your lungs with silence.
Ernest Hemingway’s typist!
She’s every young writer’s dream come true with the appearance of her hands which are like a harpsichord and the perfect intensity of her gaze and all to be followed by the profound sound of her typing.
He paid her fifteen dollars an hour. That’s more money than a plumber or an electrician gets.
$120 a day! for a typist!
He said that she does everything for you. You just hand her the copy and like a miracle you have attractive, correct spelling and punctuation that is so beautiful that it brings tears to your eyes and paragraphs that look like Greek temples and she even finishes sentences for you.
She’s Ernest Hemingway’s
She’s Ernest Hemingway’s typist.
Instead of reading online journals, I read this book until it fell apart. I sat on a rock in the middle of a river, with my son sitting on another rock, in the middle of the same river, reading Richard Brautigan stories, while my son listened to music he was making for an analogue horror series he and his friends are making for YouTube, and sometimes I watched my son sitting there with his head down, his hair over his face, watching the clear water move over stones, and thought, he isn’t looking at a screen, and turned back to my book of Richard Brautigan stories and thought about hippies which I don’t often think about, and how they enjoyed the sound of water coming together with other water, and thought, did Richard Brautigan ever sit by this river, he lived in the great, north west, so I highly doubt he ever marveled at the few hours his son was able to escape a screen in a world that is all screens everywhere you look and it is so hard to find moving water to watch even if you live across the street from a river, and having a son who won’t walk ten feet to watch that river, so you drive two hundred miles to sit quietly beside a different river and listen to the music he made on a screen in his bedroom for a project that will be projected on a screen even thought I don’t think images are projected any more on anything unless you buy an older technology because the images are just 1s and 0s now on a screen that will rule over us soon and we know it and we don’t do anything about it anyway.
Do people still read Richard Brautigan?
I know of one person who reads Richard Brautigan.
He is a writer I greatly like and I think he is greatly influenced by Richard Brautigan.
Many, many people still read Ernest Hemingway. This past week I noticed a post by another writer I greatly enjoy who said, after re-reading The Sun Also Rises, that Hemingway would flick Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson away with his index finger like those little folded footballs you make with paper while you are bored waiting for a waitress to bring your dinner or while listening to a Chemistry teacher talk. I can’t decide if I agree. I think I don’t agree. I wonder if I should read The Sun Also Rises again, since twenty years have elapsed since last I read that book, and see if I agree. I did read a Hemingway story last year, two, actually, and was staggered again by what I read.
I read somewhere that Hemingway first wrote the story Hills Like White Elephants without punctuation. When I read that Richard Brautigan story the other night and thought about it and read it again and watched it fall out of the book I was holding I thought about that story I read once that claimed Hemingway wrote Hills Like White Elephants without punctuation and I wondered if Richard Brautigan read the same claim and that was why he was thinking about Hemingway’s typist. I think, like all of us writers, he was thinking about how great he was and he was thinking about the friend he mentioned in the story and how that friend was more successful than him and he was thinking about how unfair success is and how maybe Hemingway’s typist put in all the punctuation for Hills Like White Elephants and who really wrote the story Hills Like White Elephants if Hemingway left out the punctuation? Is a story the words and their arrangement, or is it the periods and all the commas we leave out along the way.
I love the line “to marble your lungs with silence.”
I’m grateful you posted today and for bringing Adam Petty’s story in Bruiser to my attention. Gracias!