OK, I’ve been thinking about this all day and could go into a 20-page rant, but I’ll try to keep it short.
In my experience, the most compelling thing Michael writes is the following:
“But as I would read each of the posthumous books I couldn’t help feeling that they were a little off. Reading them could give you the distinct and uneasy feeling that maybe Bukowski had lost it when he had written this stuff. That the quality of his work began to slip at some point...”
I will admit that I gave up on Bukowski’s work after he died. I looked forward to each new book and hoped it would go on forever. But as I read them, I got bored very quickly. I assumed that he had went the way of Hunter S. Thompson – or in Bukowski’s case, Hemingway, who clearly let Buk down near the end.
Maybe it was switching from a typewriter to his Apple computer (Shadow of the Rose seems like evidence). Maybe it was moving into that beautiful home and living the life that he’d finally earned with Linda. Maybe he just got melancholy as his last years went by.
But if he was actually castrated like we’ve seen in a few poems, it really is a case of identity theft. This guy was my hero and I couldn’t imagine the fire going out until his body went cold. I excused it, of course, when I read those books, because he had already given me so much – who the fuck was I to complain?
But now I feel guilty that I may have given up on the man -- the way he did with Hemingway. But without just cause…
There’s a post that goes back a while where Roni asks for proof. It seems like we’re seeing some of that proof now, but I’d like to see even more so we all know the truth. Otherwise, we can keep on speculating until we give up and give in…