Category: Bohemianism
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Be neither Bohemian nor Bourgeois
A Substack short with a scene from "Barfly." Is that Bukowski at the bar?
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Enlisting William S. Burroughs in the War Against Leftist Language-Abusers
I've been fulminating for over 20 years online against the language-abuse of the language-abusing Left, having found it necessary on only a few occasions to take conservatives to task. Although my Beat credentials are impeccable, I never took William Seward Burroughs seriously enough to suppose he could be enlisted on our side. And then I…
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ramblin’ Charles Adnopoz
At a book giveaway hereabouts the other day I did snag me a copy of Dave van Ronk's memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street. I'll have to dig into it one of these Saturday nights and pull out some tunes that you've never heard before. In memory of the Mayor, here is his version of…
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Walter Morris: Bourgeois Bohemian
Walter Morris may count as an early bourgeois bohemian, a 'BoBo' to adopt and adapt a coinage of David Brooks. Morris is an exceedingly obscure diarist, known only to a few, but a kindred spirit. An e-mail from a distant relative of his caused me to dip again into the stimulating waters of his journal. I have…
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Brown-Eyed Girls
Summer subsides once again into the sweetness of September. Judy Collins, Cravings: How I Conquered Food, Doubleday 2017, pp. 112-113: . . . and writing Albert Grossmann that no, I did not want to join a trio of women he was bent on calling the Brown-Eyed Girls. He had put Peter, Paul and Mary together, telling me that…
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Even Misfits Find Their ‘Fit’
I have a longstanding interest in 'marginal types': the characters, oddballs, misfits, Thoreauvian different-drummers, wildmen, mavericks, weirdos, those who find an adjustment to life, if they find it at all, at the margins, on the fringes of respectability, near the edge of things. Those who were not stamped out as by a cookie cutter, but put…
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Be Neither Bohemian nor Bourgeois
The barfly and the gambler, the flâneur and the floozy, fritter away their time. And they are condemned for so doing by the solid bourgeois. But the latter thinks, though he may not say, that the pursuits of the monastery and the ivory tower, though opposite to the low life's dissipation, are equally time-wasting. Prayer, meditation, study…
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The Several-Storied Thomas Merton: Contemplative, Writer, Bohemian, Activist
An outstanding essay by Robert Royal on the many Mertons and their uneasy unity in one fleshly vehicle. There is of course Merton the Contemplative, the convert to Catholicism who, with the typical zeal of the convert, took it all the way to the austerities of Trappist monasticism, and that at a time (1941) when…
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BEATific October Again
And no better way to kick off Kerouac month than with 'sweet gone Jack' reading from "October in Railroad Earth" from Lonesome Traveler, 1960. Steve Allen provides the wonderful piano accompaniment. I have the Grove Press Black Cat 1970 paperback edition. Bought it on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, 12 April 1973. I was travelling…
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October Again
And no better way to kick off Kerouac month than with a reading from "October in Railroad Earth" from Lonesome Traveler, 1960. Steve Allen provides the wonderful piano accompaniment. I have the Grove Press Black Cat 1970 paperback edition. Bought it on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, 12 April 1973. I was travelling East by…
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Lower and Higher Ways of Wasting Time
A Bukowski binge appears to be in the offing, following hard on the heels of Beat October, all part of ongoing ruminations on styles of life and modes of muddling along the via dolorosa of this vale of samsara enroute to points unknown. Here is something that came out of my pen early in the predawn:…
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Charles Bukowski Meets Simone Weil
Both refused to live conventionally. The Laureate of Low Life and the Red Virgin. Both said No to the bourgeois life. But their styles of refusal were diametrically opposed. Both sought a truer and realer life, one by descent, the other by ascent. For one the true life, far from the ideological sham of church…
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Charles Bukowski
October's scrounging around in used book dens for Beat arcana uncovered Barry Miles' biography of this laureate of low life. It has been holding my interest. Bukowski, though not an associate of the Beat writers, is beat in the sense of beaten down and disaffected but not in Kerouac's sense of beatific. A worthless fellow, a drunkard,…
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A Map of Bohemia
Originally published in 1896 by Gelett Burgess in The Lark, the following curiosity I found on the inside front cover of Albert Parry, Garretts and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America, 1933, rev. 1960 with a new chapter "Enter Beatniks" by Henry T. Moore (New York: Dover Publications). The Book Gallery on Mesa Arizona's 1950s-reminiscent Main…