Category: Literary Matters
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Of Ether, Lead, and Misattribution
Those of us who pursue the ethereal should never forget that it is blood, iron, and lead that secure the spaces of tranquillity wherein we flourish. I found the following in a gun forum: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” It…
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Why We Can’t Ignore Politics
Thomas Mann, Diaries 1918-1939, entry of August 5, 1934: A cynical egotism, a selfish limitation of concern to one's personal welfare and one's reasonable survival in the face of the headstrong and voluptuous madness of 'history' is amply justified. One is a fool to take politics seriously, to care about it, to sacrifice one's…
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The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Here. I have the book in my library (but of course!) but this site offers among other things information about the people and places mentioned by the good Pepys as he records the quotidiana of an existence unremarkable except for the insight it affords into those far-off times. How can one not love the 'Net…
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Flannery O’Connor
Bukowski was my last binge, literarily speaking. I feel a Flannery binge in the offing. How's that for catholic tastes? I found a copy of her first novel, Wise Blood, in a used bookstore back in December while on the hunt for Bukowski materials. But I just recently started in on it. Repellent and boring…
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Paul Auster
I picked up The Brooklyn Follies (2006) and the first couple of lines sucked me right in. "I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn . . . ."
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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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Is a Fascist a Fascist When Pulling Up His Pants?
George Orwell's humanity is on display in the following passage from "Looking Back on the Spanish War" (1943), reprinted in A Collection of Essays (Harvest, 1981), pp. 193-194: Early one morning another man and I had gone out to snipe at the Fascists in the trenches outside Huesca. Their line and ours here lay three…
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Don Colacho’s Aphorisms
If you value aphorisms, do not miss these specimens from a master. Example: Poetry rescues things by reconciling matter and spirit in the metaphor. Permit me a quibble. There are poets who eschew metaphor in favor of metonymy, Bukowski, for example. If you protest that he is not a 'real poet,' I won't put up…
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Philip Larkin Reads “Aubade”
Reading by Larkin. A reading by another, with text. This is a great poem!
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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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Aphorisms and Poems
Aphorisms and poems have this in common: neither can justify what they say while remaining what they are.
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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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And You Think You Suffer from Writer’s Block?
Henry Roth published his first novel, Call It Sleep, in 1934. Sixty years had to pass before his second novel appeared.
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Kerouac October Quotation #30
The despairing section X of Book Thirteen of Vanity of Duluoz which I quoted yesterday is followed immediately by this: Yet I saw the cross just then when I closed my eyes after writing all this. I cant escape its mysterious penetration into all this brutality. I just simply SEE it all the time, even…