Something You May Have Missed

The Literary Vagabond

Bukowski, Charles.  Hollywood.  Santa Rosa, CA:  Black Sparrow Press,
     1989; 239pp, hardbound, $25.00.
 
 
     One would’ve had to have been unconscious the last twenty-five years to have been unaware of the literary phenomena of Charles Bukowski.  Indeed, during the ‘80s and ‘90s, it bordered on the cliché to see Gen-X’ers traipsing about the countryside with the obligatory copy of a book of Bukowski’s poems tucked under one wing or the other; it often seemed to me then that it was carried not so much as a source of reading material (for the specific title rarely, if ever, changed, even over the course of months), but rather as sartorial accoutrement, as a fashion statement, if you will.  (I once carried a copy of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae for months for similar reasons.)  Though this observation may be simply a case of sour grapes:  it is rather a bitter pill to swallow, after all, that so unmitigated a wastrel, not unlike yours truly, for example, should attain to literary mega-stardom by simple dint of the discipline to keep himself endlessly in front of his “typer” over the course of an implausibly long life.

     So it was that my arrival at Bukowski’s doorstep was delayed for many years, nay, decades; I distained to read anything so fashionably “hip,” particularly among people who seem to read so little else.  But then I met Skip the mail man, who, though not a reader himself much, had had a copy of Bukowski’s Post Office foisted on him by some friend of his;  Skip in turn foisted his copy on me, avowing that the book was hysterically funny and true to his career’s experience.  Absolved from any personal responsibility thus, I read the book, and found to my grudging amazement, that the man could really write—I laughed my ass off the entire way through.  And a convert was born.

     Which explains how I came to read a later Bukowski “novel,” Hollywood, just recently.  Like his other novels, Hollywood, leans heavily on autobiography, the writer’s life itself the whole of the story.  In this case, it relates Bukowski’s involvement in the making of the movie Barfly, from his initial commission by French director Barbet Schroeder to write the screenplay, through the manipulations and maneuvers necessary to get the movie made, and on to its somewhat tepidly received premiere.  All the names, of course, have been changed to protect the innocent (and to cover Bulowski’s ass viz. libel suits, no doubt), so a good deal of the fun in reading this book is in identifying its characters with their real-world counterparts.  As with Post Office, this book is immensely funny and keenly observed; Bukowski’s droll, Wildean bon mots are alone worth the price of admission.  A brief sample:

            We got back to the place and I opened a bottle of good red wine.
      The blood of the gods.
            The news was on tv.  The news was bad.
            We sat and drank and watched tv until Johnny Carson came.  There
      he was, perfectly clothed.  His hand kept darting to the knot of his
      necktie, he was subconsciously worried about his appearance.  Johnny
      went into his monolog and Ed's booming false laughter could be heard
      from the sidelines.  It paid well.



The Literary Vagabond says, check it out.  Bon appetit.

                                                            ms oliva

Ambit

                                                    Ambit

                                   Morning springs electric,
                                   the runed choirs of these trees
                                   bearing green spears of song;

                                                                               summer’s boy in sun—
                                                                               liquefaction of this pool
                                                                               so quick behind him;

star-shot, crisp, silent,
earthshroud night-still in white, in-
dissolubly one.

                                           evening falls quiet—
                                           in the dry eyes of old men
                                           dead leaves swirl to red;