On Sunday, May 30, 2004 at 3:31:25 AM UTC-4 fearde...@yahoo.com wrote:
True Way Ministries" wrote:

Sounds like a real winner.

(and confessed dirty old man)

Sounds like my kinda guy, but I never like what
I read from him.

But Thx :-)

Buk had a great power, much like Kerouac. Plus, I love the way the
smug academics bristle when they see him continually capture the
praise, while they remain forgotten, at best.

A poet and a man... with the balls to carry off what they can only
have secret fantasies of.

So if you can..... copyright-wise...

Gimme his best.

I wonder what of Bukowski's poetry is already out there in the Usenet archives... I think I'll have a look...

Charles Bukowski: A Solitary Life
"Build then the ship of death for you must take the longest

journey to

oblivion."--D.H. Lawrence

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Charles Bukowski was known as the "poet laureate of the gutter,"

but he

never lived a day in Los Angeles' skid-row district. He wrote

about

being "down and out," but, in reality, held a job with the U.S.

post

office for 12 years. Stories of Bukowski's drinking are

legendary,

but some of his closest friends claim to have caught him

"nursing"

beers. He boasted of his sexual prowess, but there were long

stretches

of his life when he couldn't get laid "in a morgue." The
self-proclaimed "barfly" lived out his later years in a

ranch-style

house in San Pedro, California, with an attractive young wife 24

years

his junior, expensive German wines on the rack and a BMW in the
driveway. Howard Sounes' new biography, Charles Bukowski: Locked

in

the Arms of a Crazy Life (Grove Press, $25, 320 pages), attempts

to

separate Bukowski's actual-and often contradictory-life from that
of his alter ego, Henry Chinaski.

The basic details of Bukowski's life are widely known to most of

his

fanatical readers. Henry Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach,
Germany, on August 16, 1920, the son of a local seamstress and a

U.S.

Army soldier stationed there after World War I. The family set

sail

aboard the U.S.S. President Fillmore in 1923 in hopes of finding

a

better life in California. According to Bukowski's third novel,

Ham

on Rye, he had a miserable childhood courtesy of his father, a

sadistic

tyrant who regularly beat young Henry and his mother over the

slightest

infractions. To make matters worse, Bukowski suffered from a rare

skin

disorder, diagnosed as acne vulgaris, once he reached his teens.

His

only refuge was the local public library, where he voraciously

devoured

the writings of "The Lost Generation" school of American

novelists such

as Hemingway (whose later works he despised), Sherwood Anderson

and

John Dos Passos, as well as the works of European writers,

including

Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, Knut Hamsun's Hunger

and

Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Journey to the End of Night.

During his 20s, Bukowski drifted from job to job (including work

in a

dog biscuit factory, slaughterhouse and potato chip warehouse),
drinking, fighting and getting rejected from publishers along the

way.

He did manage to get his first short story published during this
period, "Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip," in Story

magazine. The

great love of his life, Jane Cooney Baker, was a widowed

alcoholic 11

years his senior with an immense pot belly. She served as the

model for

"Wanda" in the 1987 Bukowski-scripted film Barfly starring Mickey
Rourke and Faye Dunaway. After a long stint as a postal worker,
Bukowski worked out a deal with Black Sparrow Press publisher

John

Martin to quit his job, freeing him to write poetry, drink booze

and

bet at the racetrack. By the late 1980s, Bukowski had received a
measure of success in the United States and a couple of films had

been

released based on his writings, including the entertaining

Barfly, the

abysmal Tales of Ordinary Madness starring Ben Gazarra and the

European

production Love is a Dog from Hell(which he considered the most
faithful rendition of his work). During his final years, he

visited the

track every day, listened to classical music, drank expensive

wine and

wrote poetry well into the night. Bukowski died of leukemia on

March 9,

1994, at the age of 73.

Neeli Cherkovski covered much of the same ground in his 1991

biography,

Hank, but the book was a stale, scholarly piece of shit. Bukowski
himself called it "virtually unreadable," "dull" and "inept."

Sounes'

biography delves much more deeply into some of the truthful, and

often

unpleasant, episodes that even Bukowski felt were lacking from Cherkovski's tome. For instance:

Bukowski claimed a great affinity with the hobos who rode the

rails

during the '30s and '40s, but he never rode a boxcar nor

hitchhiked

in his life.
Shortly after his first chapbook, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail,

was

published in 1960, Bukowski attempted suicide by gassing himself

in his

room, but quickly changed his mind.
According to friends, Bukowski suffered from one of the world's

worst

cases of hemorrhoids, evident by the tubes of Preparation-H

always

visible in his waste basket.
Bukowski refused to admit he was an alcoholic since, on occasion,

he

could refrain from drinking for up to a day.
The first word Bukowski's daughter, Marina, learned to read was
"liquor" since Hank spent so much of his leisure time in a

drunken

stupor.
Bukowski often denounced the '60s drug culture, but friends

remember

him smoking marijuana, taking uppers and downers, and on one

occasion,

dropping acid.
Bukowski used his weekly column in the periodical Open City,

"Notes

from a Dirty Old Man," as a method of spreading untruths about acquaintances that he felt had betrayed him, in the process

trashing a

number of close friendships.
After a young poet Bukowski had befriended drank himself to

death, Hank

tried to seduce his grieving widow.
Sounes' biography lays down all of the sordid details of

Bukowski's

complex life. We come away with a truer picture of the sources of

pain

and rejection that led to so many of his most memorable writings.

One

minor disappointment: The book fails to mention anything about a
derelict friend of Bukowski's known simply as "Red Strange" or

"Kid

Red," a mentally ill tramp who wandered the highways and byways

of

America. Bukowski often plied Red with beer and encouraged him to
relate his wildest stories, many of which ended up in Bukowski's

own

poems and short stories. Red's influence is acknowledged by

Bukowski

in The Bukowski Tapes. It would have been nice to learn more

about the

background and current whereabouts of this mysterious source of inspiration.

What will Bukowski's legacy be? He successfully opened up the

field

of poetry to include the lower tier of American society-cheap

motel

rooms, menial factory jobs, skid-row alcoholics, social outcasts

and

the boredom of everyday life. Can you imagine T.S. Eliot or W.H.

Auden

writing poems like "the night I fucked my alarm clock", "I have

shit

stains in my underwear too" and "I saw an old-fashioned whore

today"?

Not likely! Five years after his death, I still prefer to think

of him

sitting in a small room somewhere in front of an old Remington
typewriter laying down the line. It's late at night, the radio's
tuned to Gustav Mahler and there's a bottle of wine at his side.

By the way, Bukowski is buried in Green Hills Memorial Park,

Palos

Verdes, California. His epitaph? "Don't Try."
ˆ1999 Shelf-Life Productions

Outstanding read..!

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