Recent content by Nightbastard

That's really interesting, thanks. This time around I noticed something I don't remember thinking much about last time, which is the way that the narrative in Factotum starts off quite linear as we follow Hank through the beginning, middle and end of each town and job he experiences, but with...

There's a bit in Factotum where he's going through a good spell on the horses and he starts drinking good whisky. I think he was only in his twenties at that point though and there's a lot of hard liquor being drunk, mostly cheap stuff but not always. The book is full of great anecdotes. As he...

I see you point. I suppose I am a man of leisure haha A dumb man of leisure at that as Purple Stickpin has nailed it and I was wrong too! This makes me think it was possibly intentional as the scene can still make sense this way.

That's what I thought. In one of his letters about John Martin, Bukowski made it clear that apart from the odd typo or grammar mistake he has the books just how he wants them when he sends them off, and you would assume, like most gamblers, his mental arithmetic is pretty good too. I know it's...

Just to be clear, the protagonist's name is Hank Factotum right? :p

Seems to me that at 7.30pm, 19.5 hours have passed since midnight last night, not 7.5 like he starts with. If the clock gains 35 minutes per hour that would be 682.5 minutes ahead, so it's about 8.07am? Even if he didn't make that mistake, he still messes up adding 17.5 to 245, coming up with...

On my second reading of Factotum and remember this moment from the last read many years ago, and from the film. This time around though I noticed that he makes mistakes every step of the way and missed the final answer by about half a day. Am I missing something obvious here or is it a joke that...

More or less how he describes this guy in the above examples then. I guess that settles it. Good find!

A sightly different telling of the same story is in About My Very Tortured Friend, Peter, a poem in The Roominghouse Madrigals, so seems like it was based on a real event. Or maybe he was just really proud of this punchline haha