Bukowski

Charles Bukowski needs little introduction to the literati of the mid to late 20th century. A prolific writer of short stories, novels and poetry,  he was the king of counterculture going back to the 1960s. Although he lived in a variety of places during the 1940s and 1950s, it was Los Angeles that he called home after the Vietnam War began. The subject matter of his work is primarily about the underbelly of the City of Angels. What Donald Goines is to Detroit, Charles Bukowski is to Los Angeles. For a five year period during the late 1980s, I read anything of his I could get my hands on. His novels were great and I particularly liked his short stories.

I had some downtime recently and was surfing Amazon Prime for a movie to watch and came across a 2003 documentary, Bukowski: Born Into This. Although critically acclaimed, I really couldn't get into it. I watched half of the presentation and then stopped streaming. I got the gist of the story but Bukowski's schtick seemed antiquated. The chain-smoking and excessive drinking are outdated and that's what he did for the first hour of the movie, if not his entire adult life.

I recently read some of his "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" columns from the Open City underground newspaper going back to the Lyndon Johnson Administration. Bukowski is very funny which is why I enjoyed reading him in the first place. It's a shame it doesn't translate well on film. 

The first book I read by Bukowski was Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness. The book is out of print, and if you want a new copy, it will set you back $1,200 or thereabouts on Amazon. The material in the book is still in circulation but published in different collections of his stories. One is titled Tales of Ordinary Madness. I prefer the original title and it irks me that everything is sanitized now. Although many writers are on television talk shows and podcasts these days, I don't think it would have been a good fit for Bukowski. If he were alive today, I believe he would have been content to remain in his hovel, hunched over a Smith-Corona typewriter, smoking roll-your-owns and drinking whiskey. 

There's not a lot more to be said about Bukowski that hasn't been said already. Just look at his Wikipedia page. He's the subject of documentary films, was influential in pop culture of the previous century, and had an enviable creative output. It's because of writers such as Bukowski, Hunter Thompson, Jim Thompson and Richard Stark (a pseudonym for Donald E. Westlake), that I have a difficult time reading fiction these days. I know that there's good if not great fiction writers out there, there has to be. For some reason, I've transitioned to nonfiction. Probably because the truth is stranger than fiction. You don't need to read Faharenheit 451, books are being banned nationwide. You want the newspeak, doublethink, thoughtcrimes or the cult-of-personality in 1984, look no further than The White House. 

When I was a kid, I collected U.S. Commemorative stamps. That's what kids did in the 1960s, stamps, coins and baseball card collecting. I had a fairly sizable collection including first-day issues in an H.E. Harris Liberty binder. Ten years ago I went to a stamp and coin dealer and tried to sell it. The proprietor told me that the entire collection was worthless. Nobody collects stamps anymore and there's not a market for them was the rationale. He had a valid point. It's basic economics. If you don't have a buyer, you can't have a seller. Bukowski died in 1994 at the age of 73 from complications of leukemia. I'm approaching that age and it makes me think. I hope Bukowski has a longer shelf life than my stamp collection. Like he said in Factotum: "The world is filled with shipping clerks who have read the Harvard Classics.".