Buk's Love of Cats but Use of Dogs in Autographs/Art (1 Viewer)

hey guys, I was looking around at signed buk stuff/art and noticed that Buk often liked to sign works with BUK - then sometimes the little buk figure drawing and a dog drawing as well as painting dogs in his art. I know there are a few dog poems out there, but his affections seem to lie squarely with cats, so I found it strange that he would not sign/paint with cats more. Perhaps he has, and I just have not found them. I figured since you guys are the gold standard in all things Buk that this was the place to come. Any opinions or feedback would be much appreciated.
 
Maybe the fact that cats are harder to draw than dogs has something to do with this mystery.

Also bear in mind his famous quote: "Find what you love and don't draw it."
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Maybe Buk pictured himself more of an old dog than a cool cat.
Like in this poem:
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That's a good point zobraks...hadn't read that quote from him before but makes sense concerning his love of cats.

Erik - one of my favourites of Buks...and yes, this one features a dog as opposed to his many cat ones.

hey mjp - they look like dogs to me, specifically the tails, but I could be wrong.

Does anyone know where I may find any Buk cat paintings/signed figures out there if they exist?
 
Yo BUKFAN78 you'll be interested to know that Buk did have a dog at one point. He loved his dog like crazy. He also used to give stale bread to starving dogs in the 1930 and the dogs would walk away wondering at such fine luck. So he liked dogs but in his later years he became a cat fanatic and wrote numerous poems about his cats.
 
Hey Danny Mac, thanks for the info - I did not know Buk had a dog but I did remember that he mentions being left with a dog at a girlfriend's place (likely Linda King) in Mockingbird, as well as having to bury a dog the neighbours' killed in another poem ("silly damned thing anyhow," I think) - wasn't sure how much of this one was artistic license, as well as the dog that follows him to the supermarket in Pleasures. But yeah, definitely fancied the felines in later years (along with Linda Lee)!

Also, cool pic Ghado - thanks for posting it!
 
I did not know Buk had a dog
Open Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life and you'll find an old photo of him and his "magic dog."
On the back of the picture he wrote: "... long ago on a deserted beach with a fine and beautiful dog."

Edit: I see MJP posted the picture while I was trying to find it. :p
 
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Great photo--that canine meant a great deal to him and that beach looks familiar...Back in the Fifties when I was a child, those beaches and that water were still clear and clean...Buk witnessed all those huge changes to L.A. from 1920's to 1990's...Imagine no smog, no traffic, no billboards everywhere and telephone lines and strip malls and...
 
Buk witnessed all those huge changes to L.A. from 1920's to 1990's...
A relatively new column in the timeline called Los Angeles gives you some perspective on the way things were around here during Bukowski's lifetime. Changes, yes, you could say that.

no billboards everywhere
If you look at pictures of Los Angeles (or any American city) from 100 years ago there were actually more billboards than there are now. A lot more. Everything that didn't move (and some things that did) had advertising on it.

As for the coasts off Los Angeles, they may have seemed clean to you, but in the 40s and 50s we still we dumped raw sewage and industrial waste into the bay, so I think if you look at it objectively things are much better now than they were 75 or 100 years ago.
 
MJP, you I am sure are right about this, but I still prefer the LA of 1958 when I was five to the LA of when I left for Austin in the late Seventies. But it may indeed be delusional nostalgia. In any case, by the mid-Sixties my family had moved to bucolic Thousand Oaks. Cf. Robert Crumb...

 
It really is that bad, but the reason it isn't there is because when it came out it didn't really come out. You had to message someone on Facebook or something to get it. There's no point in adding something like that.

I see now it's available on Amazon so I'll probably add it at some point. I'm still not crazy about linking people to it and having them spend good money on it, but I suppose it's caveat emptor, isn't it.

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One of the few five star reviews on Amazon is by the author. She is, according to herself, "one of the most extraordinary women who ever lived..."
 
True, it's not as well written as it could have been, but she's still an important person in Buk's life and the book does contain some interesting info about their relationship plus some letters from Buk to her. Badly written as it is, it's still worth having for us Buk nuts, I think. Yes, it's caveat emptor alright and people in the forum know what they're getting into if they decide to buy it since we have discussed the book here and we have´nt exactly given it a 5-star review.
Right, it's on Amazon and it was on Amazon almost from the time it was released.

One of the few five star reviews on Amazon is by the author. She is, according to herself, "one of the most extraordinary women who ever lived..."

That's hilarious! Actually, it's a review by Joan Jobe Smith posted by Linda King on Amazon and there's no doubt Joan Jobe Smith went too far trying to hype the book in that review. Here's another hilarious bit:
"A Utah-California cross between a straight-shooting, fast-talking sock-it-to-you Annie Oakley and a
let-it-all-hang-out voluptuary Aphrodite..." :D
 

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