B
BicycleTragedy
...I just read the part in Hollywood where he calls Kerouac a "writer who couldn't really write, but got famous because he looks like a rodeo driver," or some such.
Now, I will admit that after my 16 years (age 17 -33) of Jack Kerouac-worshipping...Bukowski, when I first discovered him earlier this year, dethroned Kerouac in my life. But... I am mystified why he would make such a comment denigrating Jack like this. I've picked up on the fact, by now, that he wasn't Kerouac's biggest fan, and I've heard the little potshots he's made here and there, but this statement really blew me away when I read it, it seems so over the top. I mean, to say he couldn't write???
Their styles are totally different, and yet some of Kerouac's books, where he retains a pretty accessible narrative and doesn't go off on surrealistic tangents of made-up words and things that have nothing to do with the story at hand (although, I like when he does that stuff) are quite similar to Buk's style. I mean, Vanity of Duluoz is very Buk-like..very funny, detached without being unemotional...very straightforward narrative, very honest...
Maybe it's like a Smiths/Cure thing...both being fantastic in their own ways, both being staples of a certain kind of artistic genre, and both being so important to the same general audience, yet so different from one another, that an inevitable rivalry forms. Morrissey could never write Disintegration...The Cure could never have written The Queen Is Dead.
Yet both are great great works, just like Ham on Rye versus Maggie Cassady. How can one compare the two? Better to read both.
"The Massachussetts River flows by her house."
...couldn't really write?? Nah!
Now, I will admit that after my 16 years (age 17 -33) of Jack Kerouac-worshipping...Bukowski, when I first discovered him earlier this year, dethroned Kerouac in my life. But... I am mystified why he would make such a comment denigrating Jack like this. I've picked up on the fact, by now, that he wasn't Kerouac's biggest fan, and I've heard the little potshots he's made here and there, but this statement really blew me away when I read it, it seems so over the top. I mean, to say he couldn't write???
Their styles are totally different, and yet some of Kerouac's books, where he retains a pretty accessible narrative and doesn't go off on surrealistic tangents of made-up words and things that have nothing to do with the story at hand (although, I like when he does that stuff) are quite similar to Buk's style. I mean, Vanity of Duluoz is very Buk-like..very funny, detached without being unemotional...very straightforward narrative, very honest...
Maybe it's like a Smiths/Cure thing...both being fantastic in their own ways, both being staples of a certain kind of artistic genre, and both being so important to the same general audience, yet so different from one another, that an inevitable rivalry forms. Morrissey could never write Disintegration...The Cure could never have written The Queen Is Dead.
Yet both are great great works, just like Ham on Rye versus Maggie Cassady. How can one compare the two? Better to read both.
"The Massachussetts River flows by her house."
...couldn't really write?? Nah!