Pick up a copy of the new Boulder Weekly! It features an article on Bukowski by MPP author Adam Perry with an interview by Monkey-in-Chief Nate Jordon – or dig the online version by clicking here: Charles Bukowski Uncovered
Posts Tagged ‘charles bukowski’
Charles Bukowski Uncovered
Friday, July 2nd, 2010The Human Being can be very stupid . . .
Monday, June 21st, 2010The Human Being can be very stupid, especially in the half-light of almost 2,000 years of semi-Christian culture where emotionally barbaric ideals are mixed through with educational systems of learning based upon national, regional, economic, and status forces. The development of the Pure Mind in America is almost impossible unless a man is fortunate enough to spend the first 25 years of his life in a madhouse or in some other entombed or untouchable state.
- Charles Bukowski -
Being a Writer
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010“Being a writer is damning and difficult. If you have a talent it can leave you forever while you are sleeping one night. What keeps you going in the game is not easy to answer. Too much success is destructive; no success at all is destructive. A little rejection is good for the soul but total rejection creates cranks and madmen, rapists, sadists, drunkards, and wife-beaters. Just as too much success does.
I too have been misled by the Romantic concept of writing. As a youth I saw too many movies of the great Artist, and the writer was always some tragic and very interesting chap with a fine goatee, blazing eyes, and inner truths springing to his tongue continually. What a way to be, I thought, ah. But it isn’t so. The best writers that I know talk very little, I mean those who are doing the good writing. In fact, there is nothing duller than a good writer. In a crowd or even with another person, he is always busy (subconsciously) recording every goddamned thing. He is not interested in speechmaking or being the Life of the Party. He is greedy; he saves his juices for the typewriter. You can talk away inspiration, you can destroy god-given genius with your mouth. Energy will only spread so far. I too am greedy. One must be. The only juices that can be given up, the only time that can simply be given away is the time for Love. Love gives strength; it breaks down inbred hatred and prejudices. It makes the writing more full. But all other things must be saved for the work.
A writer must keep performing, hitting the high mark, or he is down on skid row. And there’s no way back up. For after some years of writing, the soul, the person, the creature becomes useless to operate in any other capacity. He is unemployable. He is a bird in a land of cats. I’d never advise anybody to become a writer, only if writing is the only thing which keeps you from going insane.”
- Charles Bukowski -
RIP Charles Bukowski
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010Henry Charles Bukowski
(August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994)
“I only want to say that at this time it is tough for the writer who wants to put it down as it is, or was. The 90s have far more strictures than the 50s ever had. We’ve gone back, not so much in how we think but in what we can say. Each Age has borne its own contritions but the end of the 20th century is a particularly sad one. We’ve lost our guts, our gamble, our heart. Listen, believe me, when we say it and say it true, the women will love it, the blacks, the browns, the yellows, the greens, the reds and the purples will love it, and the homosexuals and the lesbians and all the in between will love it. Let’s not crap ourselves, we are different but we are one. We bring death to each other and death brings it to us. Did you ever see that flattened cat on the freeway as you drove by at 70 mph? That’s us, baby. And I scream to the skies that there should be no way, no word, no limit. Just a roll of the dice, the tilting of the dark white light and the ability to laugh, a few times, at what has trapped us like this.”
- Charles Bukowski -
Hey, Man, Buk You!
Thursday, October 15th, 2009“The best thing any person can do is to be as much the way as he (she) wants to be rather than being molded by mass dictate, style, so forth. Of course, most people are completely wiped out by the educational system, church, country and the need to survive. And they will be offended by anything that goes against what they have been stuffed with, and they are stuffed, stuffed turkeys, stuffed sausages, stuffed bags of shit. Even death doesn’t do them honor because it just takes meat, not soul, not true gut, not anything interesting at all.”
- Charles Bukowski -
Hey, Man, Buk You!
Sunday, September 13th, 2009I believe what we have to fear is the feeling of the general public toward poetry and/or art. They have no idea what it is but they have the thought that anybody can do it if they feel like doing it. They feel that way too – they can do it, after Jill and Bobby finish college and the mortgage is paid. In fact, many of them already label themselves as Artists. “Oh, Bobby paints…Jill writes…” And they even might have little stacks of listless and off-hand work about. They may even have attended classes. They are the piddlers in the field and most of the field are piddlers. These won’t lay down any blood to get their work done, they won’t gamble with madness, starvation in their need to get the work done. They don’t feel it that way. They want fame and name but they won’t give up their comforts and their securities. They just claim to be Artists and somehow feel that it will all come together for them. The public has this big soft toad concept of Art, they see it as being done by nice scrubbed intelligent pretty folk with French, German or especially English accents. They have no idea that it can be done by a bus driver, a field hand or a fry cook. They have no idea where it comes from. It comes from pain, damnation and impossibility. The blow to the soul of the gut. It comes from getting burned and seared and slugged. It comes from being too alive in the middle of death.
- Charles Bukowski -
