1953 Unpublished letter to Judson Crews - Read this gem! (timeline stuff) (2 Viewers)

I don't know if I take the Red Cross job as fact. It's far too colorful (all that red, you know ;))) and there is no corroboration - that I am aware of - aside from Bukowski's own stories.
 
mjp,

the 9-22-53 and 10-9-53 letters from B. to Crews are postmarked from his Coronado Street address. The nov. 1957 one is from the PO Box 75-451, Sanford Station, L.A. address.
 
268 4/6? That's interesting. I'll have to find out where the Ocean View address came from - I was pretty sure of that one, which makes me believe it comes from a letter as well...
 
Well, that puts him at the Coronado address for at least a couple of years during 1951 through 1953 then.

I adjusted the timeline to move Westmoreland up a year. I still have to dig up the Ocean View address. And now that I look at it, 334 S Westlake Ave, 90057 doesn't fit in the time period it's in either. I think I got that from Sounes? But it doesn't make sense with 503 Union on either side of it...
 
In the Buk-Tapes, where he's talking about the bar in Philly, he states:
"FIRST I went to New York."
- in the same piece he claims:
"I waited two-and-a-half years - I went away a year - and I came back and waited two-and-a-half years ..." - that sounds a little long to me. But what I think, we CAN believe is, that he was there TWICE, having a kind of intermission somewhere else.
 
Reminds me in a small way of the mythology versus the reality of L. Ron Hubbard's life (though, of course, Hubbard's real and imagined lives were many times more malignant and bizarre). Yet both extracted the banality from their lives by transforming them through their fiction into the timelines of a quest for truth replete with fantastical stories of wanderings to faraway places where they ran with wolves in Hell then touched the clouds with gulls, if not with eagles in Bukowski's case.
 
Maybe. Point is, he applied coconut - somehow - to the cakes.
 
Funny (since this thread wound up containing a lot of "10 year drunk" and "ramblin' man" posts), I was reading bits of War All The Time yesterday, and there are two poems in a row where he talks about traveling to New Orleans as a young man.

In the first ("on being 20") he says he was 20 years old, and left from the (Temple Street?) rooming house (after a visit from his mother, which is also telling). In the second ("the troops"), he says he went after WWII broke out, which would make him at least 21, and possibly 22, if he left later in the year, after August 16.

Seems he can't keep his stories straight. ;)
 
In the first ("on being 20") he says he was 20 years old, and left from the (Temple Street?) rooming house (after a visit from his mother, which is also telling). In the second ("the troops"), he says he went after WWII broke out, which would make him at least 21, and possibly 22, if he left later in the year, after August 16.

WWII started Sept. 1939 with the invasion of Poland. The U.S. got into the war in Dec. 1941. Maybe Buk did'nt think of 1941 but of 1939 or 1940? Just a thought...
 
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Sure, but World War II started for America in December of 1941, with the attack on Pearl Harbor. The vast majority of people here didn't give a rat's ass about the invasion of Poland or Hitler or anything else happening in Europe until Americans started getting killed. That's just the way it was, and I'm sure that it was not only Americans who were guilty of having blinders on when it came to horror and atrocity being visited on "someone else." So American "Troops" wouldn't have been pulling innocent people off buses and beating them until 1942. Assuming that even happened, which is doubtful.

Bukowski did not leave Los Angeles until 1942, I think we can say that with some certainty. Exactly when in 1942, we don't know. Though it was probably early, and it was probably at least partly in reaction to WWII. People on the west coast thought they were next, after Pearl Harbor. San Pedro is full of old military bases, tunnels and huge canon batteries. The people on the west coast fully expected to be attacked, it just never materialized. I think part of the reason he left was to put some distance between himself and the coast. Probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Especially if you weren't real keen on putting on a uniform.

Anyway, in another poem in War All The Time he says that he spent 7 years on the Philadelphia barstool, which we know is impossible. Not that it matters. He was a poet, not a journalist. ;)
 
a good non-journalistic poem about World War II is "ww2." It was written in 1961 or so and published in Mica and then collected in Mockingbird...
 
I don't know why, maybe it's the dancing or the way he "sings," but that's funny as hell. "I'm the coconut man" will be going through my head for days, I'm sure.
 
Ah, that's it. They are doing a DEVO "tribute" (but their audience is probably too young to realize it).

I'm the coconut man!
 
Ha, Ha,. man, those were the days! wreck your friends car, then go back to his place and trade girlfriends for the night.....( I still think that them rorer's were an anti-radical govt conspiracy. I mean, a drug that just makes you fall down and feel horny!? and christ there were trainloads of 'em everywhere I went.) :cool:
 
They were marketed as sleeping pills. The problem was that, once they took effect, who would want to waste that feeling on sleep?

I first took them around '72-'73 in High School when they were still a new-ish drug. A friend was selling them at 3 for a dollar so, assuming that they would be similar to reds (same price, same strength, right?), I took 2 at lunchtime then went to my drafting class. When they came on I couldn't stay on the stool... just kind of kept melting off of it. Luckily I sat at the back of the room and when the teacher's back was turned managed to sneak out and walk home.

I always thought it was funny that, when you took ludes, you could be walking through a door and suddenly have the wall next to it jump out in front of you and bash you in the face. Damnedest thing, that.
 
thanks chronic, there goes another gap in my drugKnowledge



ehm..you have any similar info on "reds"? low methamphetamine-pills for a diet or something like that?
 
Naw, "reds" were secondal, another sleeping pill/tranqulizer, you know, kind of like "yellows"..(nebutal) or carbotals, ("blu-birds")... the diet pills were "black beautys" or "whites". damn such pretty names.......
 
In the letter (to Crews) bukowski talks about a few poems...
What was the destiny of these ones?
Were the same poems published in 1993 or 1994 as Cicerita said on the beginnings?
Is really that we can only talk about 3 poems between 1944 to 1955?:
- Hello (1946 in Matrix)
- Voice in a new York subway (1947, in Matrix too)
-The look (1951, in Matrix too, and the unique recovery in "the house madrigals")

?

Thanks

H
 

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