Weekday Literary Inspirations:

The Con Job
By C. Bukowski

the ground war began today
at dawn
in a desert land
far from here.
the U.S. ground troops were
largely
made up of
Blacks, Mexicans and poor
whites
most of whom had joined
the military
because it was the only job
they could find.

the ground war began today
at dawn
in a desert land
far from here
and the Blacks, Mexicans
and poor whites
were sent there
to fight and win
as on tv
and on the radio
the fat white rich newscasters
first told us all about
it
and then the fat rich white
analysts
told us
why
again
and again
and again
on almost every
tv and radio station
almost every minute
day and night
because
the Blacks, Mexicans
and poor whites
were sent there
to fight and win
at dawn
in a desert land
far enough away from
here.

-----
Thought that this would be a good representation on what the current fighting situation overseas is all about. And what Bush and Dick got us into.

Charles Bukowski Mondays

From the book:
Drinking With Bukowski

Charles Bukowski interviewed by Sean Penn

On Shakespeare:
He's unreadable and overrated. But people don't want to hear that. You see, you cannot attack shrines. Shakespeare is embedded through the centuries. You can say "So-and-so is lousy actor!" But you can't say Shakespeare is shit. The longer something is around, snobs begin to attach themselves to it, like suckerfish. When snobs feel something is safe...they attach. The moment you tell them the truth, they go wild. They can't handle it. It's attacking their own thought process. They disgust me.

On Writing:
I never write in the daytime. It's like running through the shopping mall with your clothes off. Everybody can see you. At night... that's when you pull the tricks... magic.

M.I.A & Jack Kerouac

It has been a crazy last few weeks so I apologize that I havent updated. My new seattlepi.com gig has kept me busy which has been a great blessing. So while I finally post a new piece I wanted to share some wisdom from the late great...



Jack Kerouac

Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, a list of thirty "essentials."


1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Charles Bukowski Mondays

the Interview

By Charles Bukowski

I read it all.
the poet went on and on
talking about the value of
workshops.
this poet taught at a
university.
believed in teaching poets in
prison,
and teaching poets in the schools,
high schools,
reading his poems there,
bringing the word.
this poet had studied under
C. and R. and O.
yes, this poet always carried
a notebook
to capture impressions
at odd moments
else they would be forgotten.
yes, this poet revised his stuff
many times.
as much as six revisions per
poem.
this poet had been awarded
grants and
prizes.
during dry periods this poet hiked
or rode his bicycle.
the masses, said this poet,
were hungry for poetry.
the reason the books didn't
sell was not that poetry itself
was insufficient but that the
masses were sadly unaware of
it.
it was our duty to awaken the
people he said, it was our responsi
bility, etc.

I dropped the magazine to the
floor, got up, walked to the
bathroom
and had one of my best
bowel movements in
several years.

Weekend Literary Inspirations:

Regarding the Writer's Life
By-Line: E. Hemingway, p. 185

"You must be prepared to work always without applause. When you are excited about something is when your first draft is done. But no one can see it until you have gone over it again and again until you have communicated the emotion, the sights and the sounds to the reader, and by the time you have completed this the words, sometimes, will not make sense to you as you read them, so many times you re-read them. By the time the book comes out you will have started something and it is all behind you and you do not want to hear about it. But you do, you read it in covers and you see all the places that now you can do nothing about. All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general dying of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you to Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens. You are just as well off without these reviews. Finally, in some other place, some other time, when you can't work an feel like hell you will pick up the book and look in it and start to read and go on and in a little while say to your wife, "Why this stuff is bloody marvelous."
And she will say, "Darling, I always told you it was." Or maybe she doesn't hear you and says, 'What did you say?" and you do not repreat the remark.
But if the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written and reading it over you see that this is so you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work."

Charles Bukowski Mondays

found poems

By Charles Bukowski

I know I shouldn't write so many poems
but
it's a form of self-entertainment which
AMAZINGLY
I am paid for.
I live alone in this large house with 2
cats (there were 3, one died)
and at a my age it's realistic to assume that
I might also die
one of these a.m. nights
after writing 10 or 12 poems
and that's where the laugh
comes in:
before I bed down I place the new
poems
neatly in the center of my desk so that
when the stink gets bad
and the neighbors complain or
when my girlfriend phones and the phone goes
unanswered

the poems will be found.
not that my death will be tragic or
important

(I will be out of
here)

but the poems themselves will
let them know

(those carping little
critics)

that I was good until the end
or maybe even
better.

Charles Bukowski Mondays

Contribution to Voyagers "Poetry in Motion" Series from the 1990's

By Charles Bukowki



Transcript:
"Reading the poets has been the dullest of things. Even reading the great novelists of the past, I said, "Tolstoy is supposed to be special?" I go to bed, I read War and Peace. I read it, I read it, I say, "Where is the specialist in War and Peace?" I really tried to understand. I mean, and then many of the great poets of the past, I've read their stuff. I've read it. All I get is a goddamn headache and boredom. I really feel sickness in the pit of my stomach, I say "There's some trick going on here, this is not true. This is not real, its not good."
You see poetry itself contains as much energy as a Hollywood industry. As much energy as a stage play on Broadway. All it needs is practitioners who are alive to bring it alive. Poetry has always been said to be a private, hidden art. Not to be appreciated. The reason it's not appreciated is because it hasn't shown any guts, hasn't shown any dance. Hasn't shown any moxie. Poetry is generally very dull, very pretensive. Uh, those who say the poet is very private and precious person, I don't agree with. Generally, he is just a dumb, fiddling asshole writing insecure lines that don't come through, believing he's immortal, waiting for his immortality which never arrives. Because the poor fucker just can't write. Most poets, coets, whoets, carrots, can't even write a simple line. Like, "The dog walked down the street."Nothing should ever be done that should be done. It has to come out like a good hot beer shit. A good hot beer shit is glorious man. You get up, turn around, look at it and your proud. The fumes, the stink of the turd, you look, you say, "God, I did it. I'm good." Then you flush it away and there is a sense of sadness when just the water is there. It's like writing a good poem, you just do it. You, its a beer shit. There's nothing to analyze, nothing to say it's just done. Got it?
I really hate reading verse because you're really getting up there. You've written poems that you really meant alone, you know, by you're typewriter, then there's crowd out there drinking beer and all that. And you're reading it to them. The writer has no responsibility. Except to jack off and bed (vet?) alone and type a good page. I continued writing even though it came back and got drunk for 10 years. I felt there was nothing out there. So I had to continue because they were so bad, not because I was so good. And I'm still not so good, but they're still very bad. There is still room for somebody to step in here you see, and I hope he arrives or she.
That should be enough right there, with that bottle of 55 poets, that should cure them. With their melody but it wont. Goodnight, goodbye, and happy reading.

Charles Bukowski Mondays

Observations on music

By Charles Bukowski

I have sat for thousands of nights
listening to symphony music on the radio;
I doubt that there are many men my age
who have listened to as much classical music
as I have-
even those in the profession

I am not a musicologist
but
I have some observations:
1) the same 50 or 60 classical compostions
are played over and over
and over again.
2) there has been other great music written that we
ignore at our peril.
3) the second movement of most symphonies
is only kind to insomniacs
4) chamber music has every right to be energetic
and entertaining
5)very few composers know how to END their
symphonies
but
most opening movements, like romance, have
early charm.
6) I prefer a conductor who inserts his own
interpretation rather than the purist who blindly follows
the commands of the master.
7) of course, there are always some conductors with so much ego and
"interpretation" that the composer
vanishes.
8) music is much like fucking, but some composers can't
climax and others climax too often, leaving themselves and the listener
jaded and spent.
9) humor is lacking in most so-called great musical
compositions.
10) Bach is the hardest to play badly because he made so few spiritual mistakes.
11) almost all symphonies and operas could be
shorter.
12) too much contemporary music is written from the safe
haven of a university. a composer must still experience life in its raw form in order
write well.
13) music is the most passionate of the art forms;
I wish I had been a musician or a composer.
14) very few writers know how to END a poem like this one
15) but I do.

Charles Bukowski Mondays

Beasts Bounding Through Time
By Charles Bukowski

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief
Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
the impossibility of being human
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
Dostoyevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poison
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human
all too human
this breathing
in and out
out and in
these punks
these cowards
these champions
these mad dogs of glory
moving this little bit of light toward us
impossibly.

To Understand Life and The Sexes I Turn to Bukowski

“Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually dirty kitchen, and 5 out of 9 I’ll show you an exceptional man.” - Charles Bukowski, 6-27-67, over his 19th bottle of beer.

“show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 out of 9 I’ll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.” - Charles Bukowski, 6-27-67, over 20th bottle of beer.


Forget E! Entertainment’s experts. I dump on the Queer Eye Men. I scream turrets at morning talk show relationship gurus. I discredit the so-called how-to “experts” on the world wide web. On matters of the heart of the sexes, I prefer to get my information from Charles Bukowski. The late acclaimed writer and poet takes on the mind-set of the male and female species with straight talk and no inflated bullshit puffery of any kind. According to him, “the state of the kitchen is the state of the mind.”

In “Sensitive,” within the pages of Tales of Ordinary Madness, Bukowski deliberates both men and women and their habits all which seem to be dependent on how they keep their kitchens. As he essays forth his wild mind,

“ ...confused and unsure men, pliable men are the thinkers. Their kitchens are like their minds, cluttered with garbage, dirty ware, impurity, but they are aware of their mind-state and find some humor in it. At times, with a violent burst of fire they defy the eternal deities and come up with a lot of shining that we sometimes call creation; just as at times they will get half drunk and clean up their kitchens, but soon again falls into disorder and they are in the darkness again, in need of BABO, pills, prayers, sex, luck, and salvation.”

While on the other hand he believes the ever-orderly kitchen is the freak.

“His kitchen-state is his mind state...he has let life condition him quickly to a basened and hardened complex of defensive and soothing thought-order. If you listen to him for ten minutes you will know that anything he says in a lifetime will be essentially meaningless and always dull.”

In just a few short sentences, he puts forth genuine thought about the state of mind in relation to how we keep our kitchens. How we function through life. Society sizes one another up by the simplest forms: how we dress, the types of shoes we wear... how clean or impure our kitchens are. We all know what he is talking about, we have experienced or have even let ourselves go at times, even women.
“some women have theories on how to save the world but can’t wash out a coffee cup.” Bukowski adds.

What makes Bukowski’s advice and knowledge about men and women more applicable than the so-called “experts” with letters after their name is that of his no-nonsense, “I don’t give a damn” attitude and perspective. He does not shy away from controversy or the truth. That is why I am fascinated by him. Plus, to many of whom follow his words, he is the literary-equivalent of Led Zeppelin and classic Guns n’ Roses -just to name a few- whose love for the debauchery and perversions of life nearly equaled their genius.
Categorically documenting the sordid details of life living in Los Angeles, Bukowski chronicled what he knew - that old adage of write what you know - he knew his surroundings and the people living in it. He even surmises, “ perhaps I have wandered from kitchens to vindictiveness. There is a lot of snot in each of our souls, and plenty in mine, and i become mixed-up on kitchens, mixed-up on most.”
Bukowski speaks in words on the sexes and on life openly and with scarred but real authenticity and candor. He opens wide his Muse with topics ranging from drinking, women, sex, fighting, the toils of nine to five, and in this example, kitchens.

In a world full of faux know-it-all’s posers bullshitting about the grit and the grind of life on celebrity television and morning talk shows, Bukowski’s words are a haven. An escape.