Hi /lit/, what do you think of Richard Brautigan, either his

>>9835544
I have to mention that this poem is from 1967. In the current year it seems very naive to me.

The novels I got are
>A Convederate General from Big Sur
>Sombrero Fallout
So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away
>Trout Fishing in America
Any idea which one to start with?

>>9835563
>I have to mention that this poem is from 1967. In the current year it seems very naive to me.
lots of people accuse Brautigan of being naive, and usually it's an indication that they are middle class and would never conceive of the hardships he understood. To me, like his vision of the American home, that poem sounds apocalyptic: humans have gone back to nature and the machines continue without them, as pointless as flowers.
>inb5 flowers have a point
as much as everything else, including whirring computer tapes. A lot of people read it as a utopia, but they've never relied on fishing and hunting to not starve and hope for computers that will not make them return to standard mammalian existence. Brautigan on the other hand spent most of his childhood in such poverty that how they made pancakes in his house was sifting the rat droppings out of the flour before adding just water, and how they got meat was hunting. Returning to being a mammal for him isn't as hard to conceive.

Also good to note, he's resident poet at CalTech at the time.

You might want to save So the Wind for last. Any of the other three are good to start with, especially the Confederate General and Trout Fishing. Sombrero is better when you know enough about him to realize it's poking fun at himself. So the Wind is best last because it feels like he's been building up to tell that story over his whole career, and I'd leave it until you read the rest of his shit if you happen to like them.

adam curtis is a fag and cybernetics is a meme

>>9835744
At the California Institute of Technology
BY RICHARD BRAUTIGAN

I don’t care how God-damn smart
these guys are: I’m bored.

It’s been raining like hell all day long
and there’s nothing to do.

>>9835643
>To me, like his vision of the American home, that poem sounds apocalyptic: humans have gone back to nature and the machines continue without them, as pointless as flowers.
So do you think the tone of the poem is actually sarcastic? Because on first and second reading it does sound like he genuinely would prefer this kind of society.

Thanks for your thoughts, in any case.

>>9835789

Yes, it's ironic. This is being written during the height of the Green Revolution and new ecology. Technology being brought best on solving the environmental and humanitarian crises that human activity has generated. It's a send up of his contemporary STEMfags at Caltech who thought they could save the world from their labs, even though they'd never actually seen it, so couldn't possibly know it.

>>9835789
I'm not saying it's sarcastic. He does want the kind of future where machines and humans go on, he just doesn't think that in that utopia we use the machines. His vision isn't a world of people using machines. It's a world where humans are more concerned with being animals than being connected to technology. It's not like he expects the other mammals to learn how to use an IBM machine to live in harmony with them, any more than you would expect a cow to learn how to build a fence to live in harmony with nature. If we are returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, that does not mean we teach the zebras C++. It means we forget it.

its not hard to see that right now we are more concerned in making technology mammalian. while a very small percentage of humans actually understand technology. so if robots fuck us it means its humans giving in to their savage nature and technology trying its best to be like us.