Bukowski / In the morning

Charles Bukowski 

IN THE MORNING

Sundays by Bukowski

 

Bukowski by Zach Mendoza

QUOTES

by Charles Bukowski

Sunday kill more kill more people than bombs.

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Find what you love and let it kill you.

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Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.

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The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.

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Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.

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You have to die a few times before you can really live.

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Without literature, life is hell.

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An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

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I don’t hate people. I just feel better when they aren’t around.

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Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.

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Don’t fight your demons. Your demons are here to teach you lessons. Sit down with your demons and have a drink and a chat and learn their names and talk about the burns on their fingers and scratches on their ankles. Some of them are very nice.

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Love breaks my bones and I laugh.

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Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicity.

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I wanted the whole world or nothing.

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We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.

Does Charles Bukowski’s sexism make him a bad writer?

By Alex Klein
April 24, 2018

Some of what Charles Bukowski wrote is resonant enough to still be enjoyable today, and some of it is not. In one part of Bukowski’s novel “Ham on Rye,” the main character’s father beats his son with a two-by-four for not mowing the lawn properly. Then he takes his son inside and beats him some more with a razor strop. The autobiographical stories about child abuse in “Ham on Rye” are mundane, believable and haunting. Yet, Charles Bukowski’s writing is most haunting (and least enjoyable) when its subject is the author’s own violent impulses. Halfway through the novel “Factotum,” Charles Bukowski’s self-insert protagonist assaults his girlfriend in public. He finds her flirting with other men in a bar and slaps her off her stool. Chinaski, the protagonist, turns before leaving and says, “Now, if there’s anybody here who doesn’t like what I just did, just say so.” Nobody says anything, so he concludes that everyone must have liked what he just did. It is a meaningless and cruel story which does not mesh well with the rest of the novel, and which has made many readers wonder why Bukowski’s legacy endures despite his abusive personality.

Sometimes, as in the episode from “Factotum,” Charles Bukowski’s violent stories are condemnable. Those who read Bukowski often call him a misogynist and it is impossible to argue against that claim. Bukowski was absolutely a misogynist, or at least a man who said unjustifiable things about women and who was a danger to them. One blogger wrote that Bukowski’s stories are “puerile, solipsistic, and misogynistic,” and added, “Hamlet’s consciousness reaches the cosmos; Bukowski’s merely propels him to the fridge for another drink.” Bukowski becomes even harder to defend when one discovers that the girlfriend Chinaski slaps in “Factotum” and other stories is, in fact, based on a woman the author knew, loved and married.

Bukowski wrote about hitting his girlfriend Jane several times. The rendition of the story which can be found in “Factotum” has almost no sense of irony. The prose reeks of self-justification and machismo. There is nothing wrong with criticizing an author because of his or her sexism or racism. I hated “On the Road” partly because of its flat, static and hyper-sexualized female characters. Bukowski, like Kerouac, is an author who struggles to write female characters with personalities and motivations. But a literary critic writing an article which is solely about an author’s moral shortcomings is comparable to a boy in little league swinging at a ball which someone has set up on a tee. It requires no effort to engage with the writing on a deeper level. One writer for Slate.com lumped Bukowski in with other “midcentury misogynists” like Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Philip Roth. Notably, the Slate article did not include a quotation from any of the midcentury misogynists.

At the very least, one has to admit that Bukowski has his moments of insight. Jan, the woman Bukowski slaps in “Factotum,” died in 1962 of complications resulting from alcoholism. She was the basis for many characters in Bukowski’s poems and novels, including the romantic interest for the Bukowski film “Barfly” in which she was played by Faye Dunaway. In a poem written after the film’s release, Bukowski said he could “hear Jane now” laughing at the fact that someone decided she should be played by a beautiful movie star. Bukowski wrote, “Jane, that’s show biz, so go back to sleep, dear, because no matter how hard they tried they just couldn’t find anybody exactly like you. And neither can I.”

No one can be faulted for condemning Bukowski because of his reputation as an abusive partner, but his moral failings do not taint every poem he ever wrote. Buying and reading his books is not morally wrong, just as it is not morally wrong to enjoy the work of any artist who is not an entirely decent human being.

Alex Klein is a staff columnist for the Daily Campus.

THE DAILY CAMPUS

The pulp poetry of Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski
by Robert Crumb

Smashed

The pulp poetry of Charles Bukowski

By Adam Kirsch
March 6, 2005

In the third edition of “The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry,” in which poets appear in order of birth, the class of 1920 fields a strong team, including Howard Nemerov and Amy Clampitt. If you were to browse the poetry section of any large bookstore, you would probably find a book or two by each of those critically esteemed, prize-winning poets. Nowhere to be found in the canonizing Norton anthology, however, is the man who occupies the most shelf space of any American poet: Charles Bukowski. Bukowski’s books make up a burly phalanx, with their stark covers and long, lurid titles: “Love Is a Dog from Hell”; “Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit.” They give the impression of an aloof, possibly belligerent empire in the middle of the republic of letters.

Bukowski on Writing

Bukowski on Writing, True Art, and the Courage to Create Outside Society’s Forms of Approval

By: Maria Popova

“Art is its own excuse, and it’s either Art or it’s something else. It’s either a poem or a piece of cheese.”

“There are contradictory impulses in everything,”Susan Sontag observed in lamenting how our inability to sit with duality makes us fall into perilous polarities. Few creators exorcised those contradictory impulses more intensely than Charles Bukowski (August 16, 1920–March 9, 1994) — a writer of uncommon attentiveness to the rawness of life, to both its pain and its beauty, with an unselfconscious capacity for sincerity, a crazy daily routine, and zero tolerance for creative pretensions. His enormous inner tumult and strong opinions often came off as bitterness, but he was at heart far from embittered, always in self-conscious — and sometimes self-destructive — search for that which nourishes the spirit. Unifying all of his writing — his poetry, his prose, his correspondence — is an electrifying and unapologetic aliveness.

On Writing (public library), edited by Abel DeBritto, collects Bukowski’s thoughts on the craft — sometimes wild, often wise, always impassioned to a point of ferocity — culled from his prolific letters to friends and comrades on the trying yet tremendously rewarding creative path.

The question of what poetry is and isn’t has been addressed by some of humanity’s greatest poets, from Wordsworth to Elizabeth Alexander. But in a 1959 letter to his friend Anthony Linick, 29-year-old Bukowski argues that the only thing of importance when it comes to poetry is not what it is but that it is — a notion that gets at the heart of all great art: