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@@awesomemagicstarlovegirl2005 definitely read more poetry then! It's great fun - I love the uncertainty of reapproaching a poem for a long time and letting my interpretation shift with time. Lmao as for haunting your lover, that's totally understandable - I'd probably do the same 😂 Most of us are cows for someone else. I'm a recovering cow of Richard Brautigan's, so it's okay. The feeling of being boxed in by others' expectations has been on my mind a lot lately though - I was thinking about doing a video on it. Thanks for your comment here, Ms. Magicstarlovegirl2005! Glad you got something out of this. Who are some of your favourite poets?

@@awesomemagicstarlovegirl2005 and it goes without saying that a long comment is no biggy. If I have the nerve/audacity/unmitigated gall to post a useless 20-30 minute ramble about whatever dumb topic burrows into my brain that day you're more than welcome to comment something that takes 20 seconds to read instead of the usual 5! I love the chatting.

@@idgitreadsandrambles7090 It’s difficult for me to confidently say I have a favorite poet because there’s so much poetry that I haven’t read yet, and I don’t think I have analyzed any poems so well. But whenever I’m asked, I say it’s Walt Whitman. The first poem I read from him was “When I Heard at the Close of the Day.” That poem really made me so happy and at ease. I think I love him so much because his poetry is so down to earth and he writes a lot about the sea, which is my favorite theme/subject in any art.

It was interesting! I recorded this a year or so ago, and never ended up uploading it publicly. The course went quite well - Barney's Version was my favourite. This semester's very invigorating too though. Hope everything's good in your own life, too. Glad you can reexperience your own school days through me, Mr. Babble :)

Thanks, magicstarlovegal! It's called Day and Night, by Dorothy Livesay. She wrote some awesome lesbian poetry later in life, so that might be worth looking at too

@@idgitreadsandrambles7090 That’s really awesome. Thanks🍁♥️I really love Canada. I went in the summer and I enjoyed it dearly. Maybe living there is a far different reality LOL

@@awesomemagicstarlovegirl2005 it can be awesome, tbh! Where did you go in Canada? Was it the GTA, or did you go out west/east? Anywhere scenic?

@@idgitreadsandrambles7090 Well, I went to Montreal and Quebec City, and then I went to Ottawa, and finally Niagara Falls. I loved Montreal the most, but maybe that’s a different Canada to you hahaha

@@awesomemagicstarlovegirl2005 Glad you loved the trip - it's cool to hear about. I can't speak to Montreal and Quebec City, but Ottawa's not bad! Niagara Falls is actually quite close to me. In winter it's phenomenal too, though summer is a more ideal time to visit. Always good to hear from you in a comment or something :)

Hey, Amir! I recorded this about a year ago, and would recommend Barney's Version and Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion as a good starting place for you. Both are some of my favourite books ever, and totally representative of my country

@@ConRob734 yes, but I've never heard it....

@@Canerd17 I can't actually remember who that is.... but I felt like plenty of these characters before too

Thanks, Poopy. Love your pic. What a legend

Thankee, Jason! He's a very talented writer. So much humanity and specificity in every story. Lovely stuff

@@idgitreadsandrambles7090 A tangent, but given your age I'll mention the fact that the French movie, Delicatessen, runs with the idea of all the characters and events in an apartment building intersecting with one another in assorted bizarre ways. Recommended.

@@TheChannelofaDisappointedMan I'll orobably look into that some time, too, then. It sounds like a good one to view alongside Perec

Thanks, Amir! You're right about the tedium and the prose. The prose is extremely unadorned and standard and the descriptions can get tedious, but the whole project makes me feel great. Plus the stories are usually very emotive. I do like it, but it's not exactly binge-able, you know? Always good to hear from ya!

Thanks for the encouragement, Marcel! I'll have to check out Life on Books. Stay groovy!

Let me know how Cavern goes for you - I have Ise on deck! No, I haven't been to Japan, but so many of the country's modern classics bear Genji's influence. Recently I read a history of Japanese painting and the amount of influence from Genji on the visual art side is apparent too. It would be cool to see ways that Genji itself and the culture of Genji influences the non-artistic aspects of Japanese life. Any thoughts on that front? Hope you keep well!

It is not so much Genji per se but Heien culture that is alive and well in Japan. I passed a musical instrument store with all those instruments. I went into a paper store with literally hundreds of varieties of paper, ink and brushes. And I know Japanese women that constantly lut their hands over their mouth and look aside when talking, for want of a fan. Also male cheating is a given, there are whole RUclipss on it. The women don't seem to mind as long as they know where home is.

Also, descendants of al these clans, Minamoto, Fujiwara etc. are alive and well in Japan. I have a copy of The Tale of Heike, written by a samurai 200 years later (1219) than Genji, arriving today.

Thanks, Roberto! I'm really excited to reread it. Someone in the comments pointed out that a huge part of the book was about the ways in which women cope in such a patriarchal society, and that wasn't something I paid super close attention to on my first read. Glad to know I did well here, and that there are yet more depths to be explored, too! How many times have you read it? Thanks for the comment, by the way. Always nice to hear from new folk.

Bang-on, James! It's pretty helpful to state the obvious, especially when talking about a book like this one. Sometimes I get caught up with things beyond the obvious and forget it's even there! Good to know you're rereading Brautigan. What works have you got to so far? Rereading his novels has really yielded a lot for me - his tendency to radically condense big ideas makes his works tough to make sense of on first read, yet it never really gets in the way of enjoying a book of his.

Totally! This edition has a great foreword from the translator talking about "domesticating" the book by translating the sentence structure into common english vs "foreignizing" the structure by using the em dashes I speak about here. It's good to know that this translation seeks to convey the feel of the original. Still, the cultural references that are common to readers from the area, as well as the nuances of the languages (and the lack of any authoritative Persian text) make this an absolute nightmare to translate. Doubtless, I'm missing a lot. Still - it's a fantastic read! Thanks for the comment.

Thanks! It's quite a tough collection to grasp, but can be a great pleasure.

Ah, Whitman! Yeah, he's a great poet for those melancholy moments. Maybe I should return to him a bit more often, even if I haven't been feeling down lately.

Holy shit! This is a fantastic interpretation, Mr(s?). Shooky! It would explain so much about the book, and I can see how my angle of rumination would fit into this. The book is basically rumination, and would become a useless literary navel-gazing session. It would be really cool to check out your ideas about inBOIL and Charley, as well as the ideas about fame and the protagonist's friends. For some reason I'm not recalling the friends as particularly famous. I'm loving the amount of readings that this thing generates!

It’s Mr. Hooky. I left iDeath many years ago. A few words about fame and names When we talk about fame in the context of Richard Brautigan's friends in San Francisco, we're talking about people who wanted to make a living through their writing. Of course, this is far from being Hollywood famous or anything like that. In this group, your reputation improves by winning literary awards, publishing short stories or poems in literary magazines, getting reviews in newspapers, securing paid reading assignments, and so on - basically anything that makes you money and gets your name out there. And if you are an unpublished writer and can’t get your name out, then you don’t have a name to speak of. Charley and inBoil I don't want to dwell too much on this conflict of supposed schools of thought, but I think it's a conflict between style and content. Charley perhaps represents a certain harmonic stylistic approach and a clear melodic choice of words. InBoil, on the other hand, is the rough and ugly face of what life is really about, and the notion that ultimately art can only have value if it shows the real world with a complete disregard for style and order. inBoil and his gang finds their end in the hatchery (bookstore) because no one wants to read this kind of literature. Their refusal to put on or held on to a pretty face is their ultimate demise. Why do you think the tigers in the story eat the narrator's parents? @@idgitreadsandrambles7090

@@hookybrickshooky9529 Again with the awesome analysis, Mr. Hooky. Fair point about the names - the fact that they even have names signals some degree of notoriety and individuality. The hatchery would make allegorical sense as a bookstore, too. What you say is becoming more and more valid. Next time I reread it, I'll read with the literary perspective in mind. The tigers are surely Blake's tigers, no? So in that reading of the book, it would be another instance of past art snuffing out the present's, leaving the narrator's unpublished pursuits aimless and wandering. There's only one part of the book I never really parsed out - why help with arithmetic? Not sure.

I really like the idea that it's actually Blake's tigers. For me it's canon now. Also my take on why they eat his parents is kind of similar I think. Since Richard was estranged from his mother at a very early age and he did not even know his father, we can assume that he had no significant parental ties as a young adult. So who was actually eaten by the tigers if not his parents? Since I have reason to believe that "In Watermelon Sugar" is a book about literature and art, I assume that the tigers as a symbol of real literature eclipsed his early reading experiences in a way that only the memory remained. Once you’ve read Vladimir Nabokov you probably will see Mickey Spillane in a different light. So young Richard went from Comics and Detective Novels on to Literature. Literature helped him to get educated but he also felt intimidated - how could he compare himself to these giants? But then comes Charley, someone who encourages him and becomes his mentor. Someone he could identify with and who showed him that the tigers are beautiful, but we can get along without them. But why arithmetic? This is a very good question. I mean, it's still Richard, someone who wrote about counting punctuation marks in "Ecclesiastes" - that's a kind of connection between words and numbers. So I wouldn't rule out the possibility that literature actually helped him with math, but I think we have a case of the "unreliable narrator" here. My time for today is running out, but I will come back another day for the narrator in the story. Next time I read “In Watermelon Sugar,” I’ll pay attention to nostalgia. Thank you for sharing your thoughts about the book with me, I very much appreciate it.@@idgitreadsandrambles7090

Howdy Katie! Thanks for the comment. I was thinking it was something like nostalgia (it's been a minute since I've reread it), but there seems to be multiple things it could be depending on how you want to read it. If I was reading the book as a personal metaphor, nostalgia would be what I'd look at it for, but definitely not if I was reading it as a social commentary. What would you think?

@@idgitreadsandrambles7090 that’s very interesting to think about. I’ve been writing a research paper on this book and I found a source (someone on tumblr i think) saying it could represent “the ephemeral essence of pleasure and how it can be found in many things when you live in harmony with nature”, which I think it’s a great take. I think the use of watermelon sugar in everything really reinforces the idea of how this community lives so intertwined with nature like how they build ideath around it with hundreds of rivers all around, some even flowing through the living room.

@@katieflanagan3877 that's a pretty interesting point. I'll return to the book and mull it over. If you want to talk in-depth about the book, please email me. I'd love to hear how you interpret the bat under the plank press and the forgotten works. Or, given your go-ahead (which I'd completely understand if you refused), I'd love to read the paper once it's complete or hear out some ideas. Later on in my academic career I'd really like to write a thesis on Brautigan, particularly his late-70s/80s output. The channel email is idgitreadsandrambles@gmail.com Again, please don't feel undue pressure.

@@katieflanagan3877 did you finish the paper? I would love to have a read!

I just wish I could read it in the original.... Maybe soon. Hope you're well Dimitris!

Thanks, Arina! It is an excellent book, isn't it! Glad you dug it. (I'm always fielding mug complements.)

Thanks, Brent! Same here - give the people some more Kiss covers, whydon'tcha! Hope you're doing well!

Oh, sweet!!!! I struggle with short story collections for the same reason, but if there's any episodic book to immerse you, it'd be Trout Fishing. Thanks a ton for the complement! Definitely check out In Watermelon Sugar if you want more crazy immersion. Hope you're doing well, too. And by the way, a few weeks ago, I saw your video on Mason and Dixon and really enjoyed your discussion. What a book that is - another episodic, immersive work.

@@idgitreadsandrambles7090 Thanks, that means so much to me!

Thanks for the complement, Aaron! Your Poetry Thursday videos - particularly the ones on W.S. Graham - prompted these, so thanks for them too!

Thankee, sir! Hope you're well.

Thankee, MJ! Hope you're doing well!

@@idgitreadsandrambles7090 Samesies! 🤗

Thanks, Amir! Always great to read your comments. It's been awesome to think about that type of stuff. One thing I forgot to add is that when you identify what you tend to read in bouts of melancholy, you can change it consciously. Hope you're well too - I certainly have been :)

Well thanks so much for the comment, Jack! Burton is probably a rather cliche answer, but it's still nice to spend time with someone so dead-set on working through his melancholy. You should get started with some Larkin poems like "Aubade" and "Photography" before getting into his High Windows collection! He's an excellent, formal poet. High Windows projects a really funny/relatable/brutally honest old man humour that I, being somewhat of an old soul myself, can relate to

I'll remember that!! Wodehouse is one I've meant to get to for a long long while. Is there a specific novel you'd suggest?

Yeah, it's a doozy. Check out Sean at Travel Through Stories - he did videos on the first two parts of it, and it seems bananas! Let me know what you think of it when you start it, too!

@@idgitreadsandrambles7090 oh, I didn't know he did a review of this

Howdy!

Oh, that sounds great! Thanks for the comment, Aaron. Your video was a pleasure as well! I'll see who else wants to read it and we can do a Voxer chat or something. This'll be in a month or two, though.

@@idgitreadsandrambles7090 that all sounds good to me!