All Right, So Camus Had to Give Speeches before the Academies and Get His Ass Killed (1 Viewer)

[hank solo]

mjp, Hope there's no problem in posting this transcript. Seasons Greetings to All

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All Right, So Camus Had to Give Speeches before the Academies and Get His Ass Killed in a Car-Wreck

met this guy, somewhere, hell his eyes looked like a madman's
or maybe it was only my reflection of...
well, forget it, anyway, he said to me, uh uh you read Camus?
we're both in a very womanless bar looking
for a piece of ass or some way out of the top of the sky...
it wasn't working"”there was just the bartender wondering why he'd
ever gotten into the business
and myself, very discouraged with the fact that I had been translated
into 6 or 7 languages
and I was known more by more skidrow bums than college profs,
and this guy kept going on"”

The Stranger, you know, that depicts out modern society"”
the deadened man"”
couldn't cry at his mother's funeral,
killed an Arab or two without even knowing why"”

he kept on and on
on and on
telling me what a son of a bitch The Strange
was, and I kept thinking, maybe he's right"”
you know, those speeches before the Academies"”
you couldn't tell whether Camus was talla and laughing out of the
side of his mouth or
whether he was
insane. he talked the same as the guy next t me at the bar and we
were only looking for
pussy.

it was very sad"”
all along The Stranger had been my hero
because I thought he'd seen beyond trying
or caring
because it was such a bore
so senseless"”
that big hole in the ground looking up"”
and I was wrong again:
hell, I was THE STRANGER, and the book hadn't been written the way
it had been meant to
be.


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Chicago Review (Univ. of Chicago) 1970​

 

[HenryChinaski]

thats a good one.
makes me want to read Camus. I believe I have the Plague around here somewhere.

 

[hoochmonkey9]

do it.
you'll thank France in the morning.

 

[the only good poet]

what's that line in the outsider - the moment meursault (sp?) shoots the arab: "and the bullets sank in without a trace. it was like giving three sharp knocks on the door of unhappiness." something like that. the novel "the fall" is also good. camus wrote it after his wife's suicide, i believe.

 

[Paul B.]

yes ,

"the plague" is a great book. please, evryone should read this book. perfect thing for the new year.

paul

 

[Skarving]

what's that line in the outsider - the moment meursault (sp?) shoots the arab: "and the bullets sank in without a trace. it was like giving three sharp knocks on the door of unhappiness." something like that. the novel "the fall" is also good. camus wrote it after his wife's suicide, i believe.

Yes "the fall" is great or the sisyphos mythe the essay over the outsider for a bit of philosophy;)

 

[the only good poet]

i couldn't really get into his philosophical works: i've tried time and again to read THE REBEL - basically an exposition of the various forms of rebellion through the ages. interesting subject though.

 

[Skarving]

The interesting part about the Sisyphos mythe is that Sisyphos is faced with punishment of having to pull a stone or rock up the mountain and when reaching the top it roles down the other side. And he has to start all over. Again and again.(and again)Camus claims that this process is the real goal. Not reaching the top(as it is impossible maybe)
The outsider, when judged, sort of acceptes his destiny as the criminal and hope that peole will regard him as one and really hate him at the hanging...:eek:

 

[Erik]

A favorite Camus-quote from one of his novels:
"Most people use their time to gain money, I use my money to gain time..." (or some such)

 

[the only good poet]

i believe camus used the sisyphus myth as a metaphor for, as he saw it, the absurdity of human life: the struggle in the face of impending death. like sartre, he breathed life into his ideas through fictional characters. some of their plays are quite intense.

 

[Skarving]

I think you're right. As I think the rockpulling is absurd. However not absurd as in meningless...:confused: I think he meant that there was a mening ,at least, in trying to face absurdity over and over.

 

[Ponder]

I read la Chute (the Fall) when I was 16. My first real book.
Still impressive.

 

[jordan]

the plague was the first book i read cover-to-cover in french. it's good. although i found the revelation of who the narrator is at the end to be pretty anticlimactic.

 

[HenryChinaski]

read the Stranger in one setting. it's a very melancholy book.

 

[hanzpolilla]

just chicago review?.....
some ####.....?

 

[hank solo]

Chicago Review Vol. 22 No. 1 1970 and now a slightly different version is published as "all right, Camus" in the
recent The People Look Like Flowers At Last (p. 179 ecco 2007)

 

[David]

Buk mentions Camus in the essay "Should We Burn Uncle Sam's Ass"?--Bukowski discusses Camus and World War 2 and writes: "Camus, who justified the war in 'Letter to a German Friend,' Camus ran around giving speeches at the Academies unitl the car crash saved him from that kind of life"---which echoes the poem quoted above. The story "20 Tanks from Kasseldown" also reminds a friend of mine of Camus' work and ideas.

 

[scribbler]

read the Stranger in one setting. it's a very melancholy book.

I've read the Stranger many times and I find more humor in it each time (good god, the part about the ol man and the dog). Camus was tuned to a condition or affliction of conciousness and consequence that was detached from society and culture. By this he was not french. The sentences were injected with a careful pertinence that, yes, could get sluggish, yet were never transitory, never filler, never wasted. That short book stands antithetical to the "down and out" offering, yet was easily embraced by all the anti-heroic pursuits of writers who wished for an intellectual POP to their gutteral celebrations. I bet Buk was influenced by Camus much more than he would ever admit. The "frenchness" would have disagreed with his personna.

Other Camus efforts saw him taking-on responsibilities, rising to his growing importance...never a good thing. But he's still there, especially in The Fall.

Just my two cents.

 

[Koya Volkovich]

The interesting part about the Sisyphos mythe is that Sisyphos is faced with punishment of having to pull a stone or rock up the mountain and when reaching the top it roles down the other side. And he has to start all over. Again and again.(and again)Camus claims that this process is the real goal. Not reaching the top(as it is impossible maybe)

I apologise to take this thread back up...seeing as it seems to be about 2 years old, but it was just the ideas i was looking for.

Skarving- your correct to some extent. However, if im to understand correctly, Sisyphus' rock did not roll down the other side of the mountain (as Camus describes), but back down the way it came. The real goal (again, if i am to understand it correctly), was the walk Sisyphus had back down the hill, unburdened by his rock.

the comments above regarding "absurdity" also ring true. Camus' looks for the absurd side of life. absurd repetition- an idea set forth (albeit in a different context) by many before Camus- e.g: Marx' idea of 'driving to work to make money to buy petrol to drive to work'.

The parallels between Camus' ideas in 'Sisyphus' and Bukowskis' work is startling. I mean the 'absurdity' of Chianski: in Factotum its a string of monotonous, servile jobs. In Women (you guessed it folks) its women...in all of his books its his constant struggle with alcohol, his constant writing.

'Sisyphus' tackles one big subject (through tons more tinier subjects, and this is even written on the back of the book!wow!)- and that is, basically; "why dont we all just kill ourselves if life is so shit(absurd)"(and again, this comes into the little amount of Buk that i have read)

Sisyphus pushes his rock up the hill, Chianski drinks, fucks, works, fights, writes...Sisyphus has his time walking down the hill, back to the rock, to take in the view, have a breath of air, squint into the sky- what does Chianski have??

i apologise if ive gone horribly off topic here....

Koya

 

[scribbler]

The problem with Camus' Sisyphus is that he used a myth that portrayed "action" and "process" as a punishment, travail, drudgery or monotony. He would have you think, that a man (an individual, a perceiver, a possessor of heightened awareness) is not only not being fulfilled by a given burden, but was miserable by it. So he must be talking about "man" the species, instead of "a man". This presupposition enables a chain of philosophy that, for me, is far less pertinent that what he had so recently loosed-upon us in The Stranger.

The visual arts had already begun to see the absolute supremacy of the willed action, detached from history, function and narrative. It came later for writers. Camus would have you become desperate and challenged, by your "modern struggle" as part of an awakening brotherhood of the doomed. The "absurd" became the umbrella for all that was undesirable or incomprehensible as this philosophy mainstreamed.

There are ways that an unusually illuminated individual can attain absolute and continual fulfillment by self-motivated intensities; mostly variations of creative acts. It is not all the ordinary or out-of-the-ordinary things that Bukowski writes about that are the subject of his work...his singularly unique "way" of addressing/assessing them is always the subject.

Plot-schmlot...Camus and Buk had way better things happening in their works than plot.
And as Sisyphus goes...well, I'm an ironworker, independent - no slave, and I suspect there could be great satisfaction getting that boulder up that moutain again and again and again. Hell, if I were him I might be regarding myself a better man each trip up. What might seem like torture to a mere scribe could be revelation for an individual of heightened motivation. So lets do it again! The HARD way.