Category: Bukowski
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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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Anti-Bukowski
Aim high, do try. You won't reach what youthful fatuity fancied, but you will get farther than you would have got without the high shot.
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The Journals of John Cheever
Arrived yesterday. I open to any page and find good writing. How can such a decadent booze hound write so well? And why is the sauce ink to so many literary pens? One of the mysteries of life, like why so many Jews are leftists. Whole books have been written about this. Prager wrote one.…
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The Day Bukowski Discovered John Fante
Stack leader.
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Charles Bukowski Meets Simone Weil
My Substack latest
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Bukowski and Others on Writing
Includes a mess o' good links. Buk is trash, especially his novels, but in a load of rubbish you may sometimes find a gem. Bluebird is a pretty good poem.
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Intimacy, Reserve, and Bukowski’s Bluebird
We desire intimacy with human others but we must combine it with reserve. And this for three reasons: out of respect for the Other and her inwardness; from a sober recognition of our fallen tendency to dominate; and out of a need to protect ourselves. The wise do not wear their hearts on their sleeves,…
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Bukowski’s Juvenilia and Mine
Here are the first few lines of Charles Bukowski's one-page late poem "Zero" (You Get So Alone At Times it Just Makes Sense, Ecco 2002, p. 104, originally publ. 1986 by Black Sparrow Press): sitting here watching the second hand on the TIMEX go around andaround . . .this will hardly be a night to remembersitting…
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Success Enough?
Money in my pocket, food in my belly, clothes on my back, a roof over my head, physical and mental health. What does it say about us that the possession of things like these is not success enough? Aim high! Try high! Forget Bukowski.
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On Bukowski
Some write because they like the idea of being a writer. It's romantic or 'cool' or something. Others write to say something that they need to express. Most combine these motivations. The better the writer, the stronger the need to express something that not just needs expression for the psychic health of the writer, but that…
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The Day Bukowski Discovered John Fante
Through Charles Bukowski I discovered John Fante who I am now reading (Ask the Dust, Black Sparrow, 2000, originally published in 1939) and reading about (Stephen Cooper, Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante, North Point Press, 2000). Here is Bukowski's preface to the Black Sparrow edition of Ask the Dust in which Buk…
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A Good Aphorism
A good aphorism should swim suddenly before the mind fully formed. If you have to piece it together it will show its seams. Grunts of effort rarely produce good ones. Bukowski's "Don't try" finds application here. The good ones are grantings — from Elsewhere. Be grateful for them, on Thanksgiving, and every day.
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As Beer to Bukowski
Coffee is to me as beer to Bukowski. And morning's to me as night to him. He brags that he never wrote anything while sober. Me, while drunk.
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An Argument Against Bukowski
He had no appreciation of nature. That says something about a man. And what it says ain't good. I'll have to dig up one of his anti-nature poems for documentation. I recall one in which he has good things to say about smog, the atmosphere of LaLaLand, the oxygen of (fallen) Angelenos. Those last cute…
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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:…