Hot Brushy Country

Richard Brautigan must have had some stories. Among his infinite biographical details, Wikipedia has taught me:

• That he was left in a hotel room unsupervised for two days when he was six
• That he once intentionally broke a police station window to go to jail for "three hots and a cot" because he was starving
• That he was given electroconvulsive therapy twelve times at Oregon State Hospital
• And that he once recorded a spoken-word album for the Beatles' record label, Zapple

If you're genuinely curious to learn more about him, a website about his life and work has been erected by a loose group of admirers, and it seems a decent enough fount of information.

I want that hat.

Now I really, desperately have to write a paper about the short story "A Little Cloud" from James Joyce's Dubliners, so I'll leave you with this poem.

"The Double-Bed Dream Gallows"

Driving through
hot brushy country
the late autumn,
I saw a hawk
crucified on a
barbed-wire fence. 

I guess as a kind
of advertisement
to other hawks,
saying from the pages
of a leading women’s
   magazine, 

“She’s beautiful,
but burn all the maps
to your body.
I’m not here
of my own choosing.”

-from The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968)