Brautigan fastidiously controlled each novel’s jacket, typography, layout, and even promotional materials. Such powers, rarely bestowed on any author, resulted in the Brautigan brand, arguably more famous than anything in the books themselves. The cover photo for Trout Fishing in America is exemplary: in front of the Benjamin Franklin statue in San Francisco’s Washington Square Park, Brautigan appears like a Gold Rush prospector, his girlfriend at his side in style. For his friend Keith Abbott, the photo displays “His open, cheerful, confident expression … characteristic of his belief in his prospects, while his blue work shirt displays the uniform of artistic poverty”. The increasingly beautiful girlfriends, who always joined the author on his covers, were integral to his mystique. (via)
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence. -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Tom Waits recites “The Laughing Heart” by Charles Bukowski
Raymond Carver on Happiness
Mistake by Charles Bukowski
I reached up into the top of the closet
and took out a pair of blue panties
and showed them to her and
asked “are these yours?”
and she looked and said,
“no, those belong to a dog.”
she left after that and I haven’t seen
her since. she’s not at her place.
I keep going there, leaving notes stuck
into the door. I go back and the notes
are still there. I take the Maltese cross
cut it down from my car mirror, tie it
to her doorknob with a shoelace, leave
a book of poems.
when I go back the next night everything
is still there.
I keep searching the streets for that
blood-wine battleship she drives
with a weak battery, and the doors
hanging from broken hinges.
I drive around the streets
an inch away from weeping,
ashamed of my sentimentality and
possible love.
a confused old man driving in the rain
wondering where the good luck
went.
From: Love is a Dog From Hell
1916 Crime in Verse Prison Philosophy: To Mother
Going down in sin and shame;
All the evil it has tasted,
It would take much time to name.
Movement Song by Audre Lorde 
Rain, by Jack Gilbert
“The Beautiful Poem”, from The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster by Richard Brautigan.
