Books I Read This Month: May 2025

Matthew Specktor • Joan Didion • Richard Brautigan

The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood (Matthew Specktor)

When David Lynch was in his dotage, a longtime smoker too compromised by emphysema to leave his concrete duplex in the Hollywood Hills, he would still pick up the odd directing job. One of his final gigs had him remotely helming a music video from his house in 2021 for his fellow septuagenarian Donovan, the longtime British troubadour who meant to be mystical but often ended up sounding eerie. The song, called “I Am the Shaman,” is purportedly about a guru dispensing healing, but it sounds more like a curse than a cure. The collaboration was a fitting marriage of singer and director, much as Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet”—an orchestral pop tune about lost love that inadvertently became a haunting creep-fest—had been the perfect chorus for Lynch’s eerie, cerebral 1986 film of the same name, which cemented his reputation as one of the great auteurs of his generation.

There is a parade of disturbing images in Blue Velvet. Early on, a stricken man grabs his neck and collapses while watering his lawn. As he lies crumpled on the greenery, life draining from him, a dog eagerly runs up to drink from the still-flowing hose. Nature, indifferent to human suffering, pays him no mind. Later, Dennis Hopper’s vicious Frank Booth chases euphoria by inhaling amyl nitrite through a face mask. A raucous party begins in his head as his muscles relax and his blood vessels widen. In the harsh final days of Lynch’s life early this year, these two strange visions revisited him.

In January, as wildfires tore through Los Angeles, Lynch had to be moved to safer ground in a particularly fragile state. A face mask fed him supplemental oxygen to ease his labored breathing during the abrupt relocation. The winds kept blowing, and the flames spread—nature was indifferent to the fallen man. Numerous articles about the end of the filmmaker’s life speculated that the blazes and the panic they wrought caused him to die sooner than he otherwise would have.

The book is a long-form ode to an industry in eclipse—and a nation no longer illuminated.

In 1979, before the heart of his wild career and life’s cruel end, Lynch stood in the Hollywood home of talent agent Fred Specktor. The artists, writers, and actors gathered were drunk on Soave Bolla¹ and Steely Dan. Lynch wore pink slacks—one leg at standard length, the other cropped above the knee. Even without the outré attire, he would have stood out: a milkshake-drinking² Midwesterner among the dope-addled L.A. film crowd. The young director, who’d begun making a name for himself with his singular debut, Eraserhead,³ saw Matthew, the twelve-year-old son of his host, and struck up a conversation. In an avuncular manner, he asked the boy—who’d already been using Quaaludes for two years—if he wanted to be an agent like his dad when he grew up. The pair quickly agreed that the child might not be executive material. “Personally, I think you’re an artist,” Lynch told the lad.

That’s the opening scene of Matthew Specktor’s 2025 memoir, The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood. It’s the tale of his relatives and an elegy to the now-faded Los Angeles movie business which has been a constant in their lives since the 1950s—a Bildungsroman that stretches from The King and I to the iPhone. The childhood meeting with Lynch speaks to the central tension of Specktor’s life. Would he be a Hollywood lifer on the corporate side like his perseverant father, Fred, or an artist like his troubled mother, Katherine? Over the years, he’s played both parts. The writer inside him ultimately triumphed; he has published two accomplished memoirs in the last four years—this one, and 2021’s keen meditation on the nature of success and failure in show business, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California.

You might wonder why the decades-long ride through the film business of a writer and his parents should matter to you. After all, the movies have told us that “the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”⁴ For one, the family dynamics are fascinating: a trio of fully realized characters who often remain inscrutable to one another despite the meaty roles they play in each other’s lives. (In that sense, they are every family.) Also, Specktor is an excellent writer—insightful and almost hard-boiled—describing young Jack Nicholson as a “werewolf in a polo shirt and canvas shoes” and a particularly savory dish as having a “swatch of pastrami as lurid as a severed tongue.” He’s gifted enough to fill in gaps in his narrative by convincingly creating internal monologues for numerous people, even some he never met. Beyond its focus on the family, the book is a long-form postmortem of an industry in eclipse—and a nation no longer illuminated.

Growing up in the then-sleepy burg of Santa Monica, Specktor, born in 1966, had a somewhat distant relationship with his father, a stolid man who keeps a lot to himself. Fred seemed average and aimless when he first entered the working world. A match was lit when he made it inside the halls of MCA in 1956, working in the mailroom of the multimedia entertainment Goliath run by Lew Wasserman, who was “no more interested in art than a bumblebee in an automobile tire.” Fred was a “blackbird,” a term for low-level corporate functionaries who were expected to wear dark suits and ties and draw no attention to themselves. He eventually became the boss’s factotum and was often the target of his superior’s ceaseless belligerence. Wasserman was a man of few words—but choice ones. “Are you stupid?” he barked at Fred one day when a script he delivered to Gregory Peck’s home went missing. “Are you a moron? Have I hired an imbecile? Do. Your. Fucking. Job!” Being able to withstand such abuse early in his career proved an incredible asset—he would outlast pretty much every boss and peer.⁵

Fred met his second corporate colossus in the 1970s when he left MCA to join CAA, the upstart talent agency run by Mike Ovitz, who would enable talent to take over the town, wresting it away from Wasserman and his ilk. Fred eventually became a superagent, representing the likes of DeVito and De Niro. Unlike Wasserman, Ovitz was an aesthete who collected art. He loved art. Fred, meanwhile, liked the movies well enough but mainly enjoyed the action and prestige of the business. He was treated with more respect at CAA than he had been at MCA, but Ovitz still cut him out of the action when the company was sold.

Katherine, the author’s mom, was an English major at UCLA from a comfortable home, who briefly tried to make it as an actor before marrying. She loved literature and was a political progressive—not agnostic like her husband, who was indifferent about pretty much everything except closing the next deal. She wrestled with James Joyce and dreamed of writing novels. Her goal as a mother was to steer her son toward an artistic life and be different from Fred. “Your father’s just a salesman,” she told him with contempt. “He’s just Willy Loman with a Rolodex.” She enrolled the middling student in Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences, an alternative college-preparatory school with an impressive curriculum. He attended alongside Michael Bay, Jack Black, and Gillian Welch. It was a druggy, though often informative, upbringing, with Specktor working part-time for CAA beginning in high school—a mailroom nepo baby!

One of the writer’s great strengths is his ability to perfectly recreate the muddled mindset of his younger self noticing—but not comprehending—mysterious changes in his parents. After one of Fred’s hard-charging pals keels over from a heart attack, he stops smoking and takes up jogging. Sure, his father is concerned about his health, but he seems to be preparing to run away for good. Katherine, whose reliance on alcohol steadily increases as she fails to make her mark on the world, gets the opportunity to complete a screenplay during the 1981 Writers Guild of America strike.⁶ She takes the assignment, but the movie⁷ makes no noise at the box office—and, worse yet, she’s labeled a scab. (The tag was accurate, though liberal Katherine was somehow surprised by the red flag permanently attached to her—the scarlet letter.) The lack of success and the union admonishment send her into a tailspin. The marriage was crumbling even if the child’s lack of life experience initially prevented him from figuring it out—and the pot, cocaine, and LSD he’d begun using by his fifteenth birthday probably weren’t helping his clarity.

The parents go through several marriages apiece as Fred becomes more successful and Katherine increasingly less so. Meanwhile, Specktor attempts to build his personal life and career from the welter of his youthful experiences. He ditches all substances apart from nicotine and caffeine. His first shot at marriage produces one child and a divorce. He gets a job in NYC searching for books adaptable for the big screen for production companies run by his dad’s clients. He finds the corporate suite claustrophobic, but he’s caught between his reality and his ambitions. Meanwhile, many friends die early and badly. Jay Moloney, a hotshot agent at CAA, committed suicide at 35.⁸ Raymond Bongiovanni, a brilliant film exec who willed the adaptation of Fight Club into existence, died from AIDS at 41.⁹ His beloved boss, the thoughtful producer Laura Ziskin, passed away from breast cancer at 61.

Specktor was even in a position to witness the death of Hollywood as he knew it. The industry’s decline in cultural power didn’t start with the Internet, smartphones, streaming, globalization, or Covid—though none of those developments helped. It began with myopia. After moving into a management job at Fox Entertainment, the author was present at the end of the 1990s when the future of the business was announced by Bill Mechanic, the COO of Fox Studios. While “spreading his arms like a TV evangelist,” the exec emphatically announced to the gathering of his employees, “No. More. Middle-Class. Movies!” From this moment forward, it was to be only tentpoles and microbudgets.

Sony released the first of its Spider-Man blockbusters (one of Ziskin’s final triumphs¹⁰), and the die was cast. These weren’t decisions made by uncultured monsters but by people who loved movies but had come to hate risk. Fungible steroidal actors and costumed characters with CGI superpowers would become the coin of the realm—no more little people and their problems, that hill of beans. And no more visionaries who needed financial support to create something we hadn’t yet dreamed. The author realized that Hollywood was “a world that has started to curl and burn,” and he wasn’t thinking about wildfires. It’s easy to forget that Lynch wasn’t able to get funding to make a movie during the last nineteen years of his life.

“Are the movies bad for me—so much dreaming—or are they life itself?” the memoirist wonders at one point. An existence in and around the screen trade doesn’t seem to have hurt him. Wait a beat after Mechanic issues his edict about “no more middle-class movies,” and the author incisively extrapolates further: “And no more middle-class people either, just riches and poors.” Specktor became the sort of incisive writer who doesn’t seem at all given to delusions.

Not everything in the book works. The author oddly overreaches when he shoehorns the story of Mohamed Atta, the 9/11 terrorist who watched one movie in his life (The Jungle Book), into his narrative, even though the connection is strained. Some of the large-picture pronouncements aren’t fully developed. “Americans don’t want honesty,” the writer tells us. “They want hypocrisy. They want lies, like children who’ve been brought to the circus.” Sure, but considering the long success of Hollywood movies around the world, I don’t think we’re alone in those urges. It seems more like a universal truth than a provincial one. Overall, though, this book is a great triumph.

The title term, “golden hour,” has dual meanings. It most commonly refers to the hour after sunrise or before sunset when the natural light is soft—perfect for cinematographers to play with. In medical terms, it denotes the critical first hour after trauma when urgent medical treatment can prevent death. Specktor used these crucial moments in his life to emerge better and wiser. Only time will tell whether Hollywood and America survive their self-induced traumas, in their golden hours.•

Notes to John (Joan Didion)

You’d be forgiven for looking at the cover of Notes to John, the posthumous 2025 publication of Joan Didion’s records from two years of therapy sessions that began at the end of 1999, and recalling the famous photos from decades earlier of the journalist in front of—and behind the wheel of—her Daytona Yellow Corvette Stingray. Those 1968 images of Didion by Julian Wasser¹¹ made her seem the epitome of California cool, establishing her as fashionable in addition to intellectual—but they were incredibly misleading.

Didion was brilliant and driven, but cool she wasn’t. Plagued by migraines, aphasia, and alienation, terrified not only of death but also of life; she endlessly grasped a cigarette like a crutch. Nor was she liberal chic, another message the photos conveyed. As Slouching Towards Bethlehem, published that same year, demonstrated, she was a conservative by temperament, worried that the center would not hold. Didion with a flashy sports car was akin to Brian Wilson¹² with a tri-fin surfboard—the photos signified something, but not the essential thing.

The cover of Notes to John features an Annie Leibovitz photo of late-life Didion at her desk. A torchère stands ready to illuminate the room, a rolling filing cabinet sits behind her, and an open copy of the FSG Classics edition of Slouching Towards Bethlehem rests on a desk to her right. (That edition is graced by another Wasser photo: Didion in chic sunglasses, approximating Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.) The writer’s milieu is fetishized, and Didion—arms crossed and wizened—appears to be an icon in command as she peers directly at the camera. Once more, the image speaks more to the strength of her work than to the person herself. Didion was, for good reasons, often falling apart at the seams in life’s home stretch.

The new book focuses on a period when Didion and her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, were going through an extremely rough patch with their adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, a photographer in her early thirties, progressively drinking herself to death. By this point, Quintana had been in and out of numerous rehab centers, tried AA many times, and was in therapy with a doctor who deemed her “a hard-core alcoholic.” Quintana’s therapist believed that Quintana’s situation might improve if her mother received treatment for depression, so Didion dutifully began seeing the Freudian analyst Dr. Roger MacKinnon.¹³

The book’s publication has been controversial since Didion left no indication that these painful, painstaking entries—written to her husband, the “John” of the title—were meant to be published. The pages were sitting in a box in her home office at the time of her death in 2021. However, the writings are available without restriction, among her papers, at the Didion/Dunne archive at the New York Public Library, so there seems to be little need for hand-wringing. Of course, being ethical to print and being worthwhile to read are not necessarily the same. Is the book valuable to anyone but a Didion completist? Yes, it is.

From these sessions, we learn of Didion’s WWII childhood, the frequent moves her family made after her father enlisted, leaving her socially disconnected, and the lack of nurturing she received from her withdrawn mother. Her precocious love of literature was, for whatever reason, discouraged, which led the child to nurture her love of writing through the trashy, melodramatic novels she could get her hands on. (These youthful readings must have influenced her literary version of an overwrought novel, Play It as It Lays.) Her father, who was depressive, also left behind a cache of deeply personal notes after his death in a safe deposit box. The missives were expressions of suicidal ideation.

Given her parents’ proclivities, Didion had, unsurprisingly, a rocky personality from the crib—and her husband had his reasons to be the same. “This tendency to worry… predated the arrival of Quintana,” MacKinnon tells her. “But once she was there—all of your worries and fears focused on her safety.” The doctor is often masterful at helping Didion unknot her problems and pointing out the unhealthy ways she’s bound to her daughter. Most of the analysis suggests Didion clings to Quintana because of her insecurities, and the daughter accepts the tight embrace because of her fears. The doctor believes the daughter must break this pattern to free herself of her chemical dependency.

But did this loving-if-imperfect mother-daughter relationship lead to Quintana’s alcoholism? It’s not likely. The photographer discovers, after being contacted by a biological sister, that almost all members of her birth family deal with alcoholism. Her genetic predisposition to problem drinking was profound. Despite his dedication to psychiatry, MacKinnon isn’t blind to the pull of nature. “Nurture is a lot, but it isn’t everything,” he tells Didion. “There are certain areas in which we’re programmed genetically to act a certain way, to cope, not cope, whatever we do. I’m not saying that because she’s adopted. Every time a sperm meets an egg you get a different set of genetic possibilities.”

On other subjects, the doctor seems less wise. He scolds Didion for watching Night of the Living Dead with Quintana when the girl was seven. (I mean, seeing an R-rated movie when you’re a child is practically a rite of passage.) Even worse is his extreme interpretation of what happened during the film. Didion mentions that she asked Quintana to accompany her to the kitchen because the film has made her too afraid to go alone. MacKinnon tells her this was a crucial mistake, that the request communicated to Quintana that she was responsible thereafter for protecting her mother—that she couldn’t break free from her and establish independence. It’s a heavy judgment over a small decision.

But the most puzzling part of the book arises when Didion and MacKinnon discuss the presence of alcohol in the household when Quintana was small. Didion shares that “there had never been in her childhood an evening when alcohol was not being consumed. And there had never been a social occasion on which somebody didn’t get drunk.” The doctor’s response is odd. “Somebody, sure. But it wasn’t necessarily you or her father.” Why would he assume this as fact? It wasn’t exactly a secret that Dunne was alcoholic at different points in his life. Was he never drunk in front of Quintana? Didion would surely be diagnosed as an alcoholic by any modern measure. Either both parties are in denial or maybe Didion did some New Journalism magic on this passage? It’s a mystery that nags at the reader.

It’s not exactly a spoiler at this point, not after The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, to reveal that little more than five years after the sessions began, Didion’s husband and daughter would be dead. Dunne died from a heart attack at the end of 2003, and Quintana from acute pancreatitis in the summer of 2005. Didion’s sessions with MacKinnon continued into the 2010s, when the doctor, in his eighties, retired.

“You’re becoming a great deal more open,” he told the author not long after they began their sessions, pleased to see that his patient was working hard to achieve the best outcome. But being open doesn’t mean you can save the people you love, and though the best outcome didn’t happen for Quintana, Didion seemed to grow and change from the process. She certainly would need all the strength she had for what was ahead. Before the writer’s tragic twin losses, MacKinnon spoke to her sagely about the importance of dealing with the dwindling possibilities in life—how we need to go on when things haven’t gone our way. “You make your life around what you have left, what doors haven’t closed,” he says. “This happens to everybody.” Even people who look cool in photographs standing in front of a Stingray with a cigarette.•

In Watermelon Sugar (Richard Brautigan)

In 1967, Richard Brautigan hiked around Berkeley and the groovier patches of San Francisco, reciting his poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.”¹⁴ Depending on how your ears were tuned, the lines may have sounded like a sincere wish for a techno-utopia or a sardonic broadside against the totalitarian possibilities of the computer age. Even during the Summer of Love, at the height of “Flower Power,” technology was ascendant, barreling forward—driven by the raging U.S.–Soviet space race. You can read reams of commentary about the writer’s biography and philosophy, and the meaning of his verse still won’t be clear—he never made it explicit in interviews. Was he imagining a symbiosis between carbon and silicon, dreaming of a “cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics,” and believing a time would soon arrive when humans and machines combined to form something like paradise? Or was he mocking the naïveté of such an attitude? Was he hopeful or fearful about technology?

Why not both?

Despite the nature-loving ethos of the era, some 1960s hippies believed the counterculture and the science community were both patches on the same quilt. (Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog was their Bible.) It may boggle the mind, in our age of techno-fascist billionaires aggressively building surveillance states, to realize that the original impulse behind much of modern Silicon Valley was a mutual hippie-techie embrace. Brautigan had mixed feelings. In the same year he published “All Watched Over,” he accepted a poet-in-residence position at the California Institute of Technology, participating in the quotidian life of the higher-education institution that trained and minted astrophysicists and information theorists. He appreciated the post most of the time, but one day the mundanity of being adjacent to engineers wore on him, and he wrote: “I don’t care how God-damn smart/these guys are: I’m bored.”¹⁵

Brautigan’s other major statement on technology during that period was his 1970 novel, In Watermelon Sugar. The narrative focuses on a post-apocalyptic community, oddly called “iDEATH,” in a time and place when former tools have not only been rendered useless but their intended use has been forgotten. These devices caused societal collapse, and the fall must have been devastating, like the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Now everything is decidedly more primitive—except when innovation is required to provide necessities.

Our chief protagonist is a man of a youngish age, a seemingly reliable narrator who “lacks a regular name” and doesn’t toil in the Watermelon Works like many of his neighbors. That’s where the fruit is processed into sugar that “we work into the shape of this thing we have: our lives.” The motley group of 375 locals, who seem like lost pioneers, make almost all their essential items from processed sugar: bridges, homes, and even ink. The last item is vital to our narrator because he’s writing a book. Everyone in the community is excited, even though he seems to be doing a half-assed job. No one can remember the last time anyone in iDEATH wrote a book. There was one about owls and another about the weather, but most of the old volumes from the “before times” were burned for heat. Literature is not a going concern in this new order.

The narrator was a boy during the “time of the tigers,” when big cats—who could speak English and do basic math—murdered and ate his parents in front of him. Eventually, the members of iDEATH tired of the carnage and killed and burned all the tigers so they could enjoy life sans smart felines with sharp canines. Like everyone else in the village, which seems low-rent but pleasant enough, the fledgling writer owns meager possessions, though he doesn’t seem to want for much, considering he isn’t a worker bee. Fruit, fish, and plants provide all that’s required. “We use watermelon sugar and trout juice and special herbs all together and in their proper time to make this fine oil that we use to light our world,” he says.

He has a free-spirited girlfriend, Margaret, who’s wearing his patience thin. She takes a basket into the Forgotten Works—a former industrial and tech area—where she collects odd items to decorate her shack. That would be fine, but the community’s alcoholic ne’er-do-wells, a man named IBOIL and his gang, canvass the area to find forgotten things they can ferment into whiskey. They’re horrible messes, dirty in every sense, and passionately hate iDEATH. People begin to wonder if Margaret is in cahoots with them somehow. IBOIL promises his band will commit some large-scale violence to change the community forever, and their grisly act at the trout hatchery does not disappoint.

Less a formal departure than Brautigan’s most famous work, Trout Fishing in America, this novel of brief chapters is just as strange and singular. There are fantastical and psychedelic flourishes—rivers that measure half an inch wide! Statues of gigantic beans!—but a whimsical period piece¹⁶ it is not. Not fully surreal or satiric, the narrative is its own strange thing: a spiky, violent, loving, and timeless piece of writing that belongs on a continuum of dark, twisted fiction with Barthelme, Antrim, and Saunders. It does seem to answer the question of whether the author was hopeful or fearful about technology. Sophisticated tools brought about the fall of the former world, but a lack of them has only changed the scale of despair, violence, and heartbreak—not put an end to that pain. Either way, we’re just humans making wise decisions, making mistakes. There are always reasons to hope and fear powerful tools—and the people who make them.•

1. A so-so Italian white wine marketed on American TV during that era, often in ads featuring Franco Bolla, the family spokesperson, whom The New York Times once called “the epitome of the sophisticated Continental.” A serious Mediterranean with impeccable manners, he lacked Aldo Cella’s Falstaffian mirth.

2. For seven years, Lynch drank a chocolate milkshake every day at 2:30 p.m. at the Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank, jotting film ideas on napkins while slurping the chemical goop. He claimed he ended the ritual after climbing into a dumpster behind the restaurant to retrieve one of the milkshake cartons and discovering that the ingredients were unhealthy.

3. Unless the explanation was left behind in papers to be published posthumously, it appears Lynch died protecting the secret of what materials he used to create the strange baby in Eraserhead.

4. The unspoken joke of this famous Humphrey Bogart line is that Casablanca has made filmgoers care deeply about the lives of three little people for more than eighty years. It’s sort of what movies do best.

5. Fred Specktor is now 92 and still a Hollywood superagent at CAA. When profiled in The Wall Street Journal in 2023, he asserted that “you still need movie stars.” That contention is at odds with the culture at the moment.

6. The union was striking to ensure members would receive residual money from the VHS/Betamax versions of films. Gore Vidal and Billy Wilder were two of the writers who picketed together.

7. The film, Love Child, which was released in 1982, co-starred Amy Madigan and Beau Bridges.

8. A 2000 Vanity Fair article by Ned Zeman, titled “Golden Boy Lost,” chronicles Moloney’s sad descent.

9. Bongiovanni told Specktor he became ill with hepatitis A after eating bad sushi. The obituary in the New York Times listed his cause of death as a blood infection.

10. Ziskin produced the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy during the aughts. Her New York Times obituary referred to her as “a prominent Hollywood producer who ventured into the largely male world of special-effects movies.”

11. Wasser was something like the Weegee of the West, always on the scene—especially if it was a bad scene. From Dana Goodyear’s 2014 W article about him:

That sensibility—an instinct for drama and the decisive moment, the dab of beauty with a smear of grit—put Wasser in the way of news. He was at the Ambassador Hotel the night Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, and he was with the crowd watching as Richard Ramirez, the infamous Night Stalker, was taken into custody by police. In 1969, three days after the actress Sharon Tate was murdered, Wasser, on assignment from Life, went to the crime scene on Cielo Drive with Tate’s husband, Roman Polanski, a pair of detectives, and a celebrity psychic searching for vibrational clues. (The Manson family hadn’t yet been named as suspects.) Wasser took a picture of Polanski, crouched and grim-faced beside a door smudged with fingerprint dust, where the word pig had been written in Tate’s blood. “I felt so bad for Polanski and for being there photographing it,” Wasser remembers. “He was just shattered.” The psychic, meanwhile, stole Wasser’s Polaroids and sold them to the tabs. Later, during the case brought against Polanski for having sex with a minor at Nicholson’s house on Mulholland, Wasser photographed the judge.

12. The recently deceased, brilliant Beach Boy famously couldn’t surf or even swim, despite writing numerous hit songs about surfing and owning a surfboard.

13. In “Off the Couch,” a 1992 New York Times article, Dr. MacKinnon is described as “John Wayne in a blue suit playing a psychiatrist.”

14. Brautigan’s full poem:

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

15. Brautigan’s full poem:

At the California Institute of Technology

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.

16. Much of Brautigan’s work still resonates, even though his October 27, 1984 obituary in The New York Times reported that he was “a literary idol of the 1960s who eventually fell out of fashion.” Like many characters in this novel, Brautigan drank heavily and died by suicide, the result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The reasons were probably many, but being seen as passé was painful for him, according to his agent, Helen Brann. In the obit, she said, “What he couldn't bear was losing the readers. He really cared about his audience. The fact that his readership was diminishing was what was breaking his heart.” Brautigan committing suicide ten days before Ronald Reagan was reelected president via landslide wasn’t the death of the 1960s, but it was a cruel way to desecrate the decade’s corpse.