by John Barth
I conclude this first category of my fellow scribblers' wisdom-pearls with the grand declaration made by Richard Brautigan at the close of his "reading" at SUNY - Buffalo toward the end of the high 1960s. The author of Trout Fishing in America, The Revenge of the Lawn, and In Watermelon Sugar was at the peak of his literary fame then, a hippie icon warmly received on a campus that prided itself, in those years of antiwar sit-ins and teargassing riot police, on being "the Berkeley of the East." It was a time, too, when Marshall McLuhan, across the Niagara River in Toronto, was warning us "print-oriented bastards" that our medium was moribund in the Electronic Global Village. In that spirit, after my introduction, Brautigan said hello to the packed hall, pushed the Play button on an old reel-to-reel tape recorder beside the lectern, and disappeared into the auditorium's projection booth, from where — as we all sat for a very long three-quarters of an hour listening to our guest's recorded reading — the invisible author projected slides of giant punctuation marks: five or ten minutes each of a comma, a semicolon, a period, entirely without bearing on the taped recitation. Had it been anybody but Brautigan, that audience would never have sat still for it - but still we sat, until, when the eye-glazing hour was done at last, the shaggy, beaming author reappeared from the projection booth, gestured grandly toward the tape machine, and declared, "There you have it, folks: the twentieth century!" Whereat one of my seriously avant-garde graduate students sitting nearby turned to me and muttered, "Yup: about 1913."
Poets & Writers?
January/February 2004
Online Source: http://www.pw.org/mag/0401/barth.htm
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