Database updated (4 Viewers)

Someone who shall remain nameless (Pogue Mahone), pointed out that the page that displays the books chronologically wasn't exactly accurate.

It wasn't accurate because the database only knew the year a book was published, not the month, or the exact date. So when multiple books from the same year were listed, they were listed alphabetically, rather that in the order they were published.

I won't bore you with the gory details, but that's fixed now.

There are some things that had to be "ball parked." For some publication dates all we have are seasons, like "summer," so I kind of arbitrarily assigned August 1st to anything that was "summer," "spring" is April 1st, etc. I used December 1st for anything that we only had a year for (that way they are listed last for that year). It's imperfect, but it's better than it was.

---

Oh yeah, I'm also going to add Barfly and the letters books, and I removed 4 poets, since that wasn't a Bukowski book.
 
It's in there...

But I don't really understand the Earth Rose post. You show what I assume is an inside page with True story, then a separate True story page?

The pictures that show the cover are folded twice, the pic that shows the inside is folded three times...maybe I'm an idiot, but I don't know what I'm looking at.
 
Math is hard for me and my hands shake when I take pics.

It is different than Earth -- only 2 poems.

These pics from the interweb might help.

1767_0.jpg
Fuck_Hate___zappa.jpg
download.jpg
 
There were 265 broken forum links in the database (pointing to the old bukowski.net/forum domain), they've all been fixed.

I also added back 22 links (and restored the threads they pointed to) related to the New Censorship issues that the publisher previously asked to have removed (and then immediately said I could put back - which was what I think the kids call a "dick-waving" episode).
 
Thanks for the links to the New Censorship. Yesterday I read the poem 'Nobody but you' (in Sunlight Here I Am), checked the database but couldn't find a link. Now I can. The poem in Sunlight is, no surprise, a completely fucked up version of the magazine appearance from 1992, later published in one of the posthumous editions. To which Sunlight referred to. With "warmest thanks to John Martin". Well, that was back in 2003.
 
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In the never-ending quest to appease the Gods (a.k.a. Google), I have made some changes to the database code to add the poem, book, magazine, recording, etc. titles to the URLs on the results pages.

Like so:

greatman.png


To get that to work I had to update the code in pretty much every file that the database uses, and I think I've tested all the options, but if you notice something that doesn't seem to be working as you'd expect in the database, please let me know.

Thank you for your kind indulgence.
 
I thought that I'd run some checks and got over to the Wormwood site here (database/lists/Wormwood Review Appearances). The first poem listed there is Thank God for Alleys. If I click the link, I am brought to the page that lists books, magazines, manuscripts, etc. All of those headers are present, but they are not populated (everything is grayed out). Conversely, if I search for the same poem at the main database search page, I get the a hit and when I click that link, I get to the same page, but it is populated with book and magazine appearances that are links to further info.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm assuming that searching through Wormwood should bring up the same info that comes up from the main search page. I also tried this for the NYQ and I found the same issue, so perhaps the links through the individual magazines (and/or other routes) aren't connected somehow. I tried the "Books" link and that seemed to work OK.
 
Yeah, I fixed the lists that rely on database queries, but the lists that are static pages are going to take more time.

I made a temporary fix to prevent the blank results, so they should all work now, they just don't have the title URL.
 
Two things:

I changed the database search result page to not show items that don't exist. Previously the results page listed every possible result, whether that item was available for the work or not (recordings, broadsides, forum items, etc. - those lines would be there, but they would just be blank if there was nothing available). Now it only returns what it has a link for.

Second, there is a new "external link" field for things like this.
 
That last link is to a poem, by the way, but above the poem is a review (sort of) of Bukowski's first readings at The Bridge in Los Angeles, and it was written by John Thomas who says he taped both nights.

Everything I've read said he had about a million tapes in his house though, so it's unlikely those will ever be found. If they were even saved.
 
Actually, since it first appeared in Poetry Now, Vol. 2, No. 2, it probably should be circa 1975. But I know well that the management here appreciates watchful eyes on the database. The idea of getting it perfect seems impossible, but that would seem to be the goal.
 
For a while I was adding "circa" dates based on the collection publication date (when there wasn't an earlier magazine appearance to date a work by). That's why you might see that kind of error here and there. It happened when magazine appearance info was added later and I neglected to update the "written" date.

I'll fix this one, but otherwise the database is perfect!

Or it gets more perfect all the time. Depends on how you want to look at it.
 
I love the teamwork here. Purple Stickpin: great catch. I should have noticed that.

When I said "wading," I really meant "immersing." Or maybe "spelunking," as I do enjoy rappelling down deep into its caverns. I could spend days, weeks, prob years, in the database. Like it's the Matrix.

The database, and this site, is an amazing achievement. I appreciate it very much. Thanks, mjp, and everyone else who assists in maintaining its awesomeness.

With that said, I made an upward swing from Piano to Septuagenarian Stew (1990).

The Burning Of The Dream - pg. 42 - manuscript - circa 1991-1994
Talk - pg. 92 - manuscript - circa 1991-1994
Rags, Bottles, Sacks - pg. 13 - manuscript - circa 1983-1994

Are the 90s date ranges okay for these entries?
 
"talk" should have been 1983-1990. That's the date range for the IBM typewriter.

I changed "the burning of the dream" to 1986, since that's when the library fire happened.

I put that wide date range on "rags, bottles, sacks" because I didn't have a date, and I thought it could have been typed on a manual typewriter. But now that I look at it, I think it was done on the computer. I haven't yet seen any other computer poems that used a courier font (or whatever it's called on a Mac).
 
Thanks, mjp. You are supremely satisfying my OCD...

Query: If Stew was published May 1990, shouldn't rags, bottles, sacks be at least circa 1990 or earlier, rather than 1991--1994?

New observation:

The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992)
Confession - pg. 138 - circa 1993

Should this be 1984, as per its first appearance in Wormwood Review 96?

Sorry. I've been "hittin' the 'base" hard, one could say....
 
Don't apologize for improving the database, hombre.

"Rags" had to be written before 1990, yes. That's why I took the date off the results page.

I don't know what to make of that "rags" manuscript though. It doesn't match anything from 1983-1990, when he was using the IBM Selectric. It still looks like computer to me (the underscore on those few lines looks a little too smooth and perfect to be a manual). That and there's no match for the typeface in any other manuscripts. I'll have to look and see if I have a better image of that one from Santa Barbara of the Huntington that just isn't on the site yet.

He re-typed older poems a couple of times, for what purpose I don't know. But I've seen two that I can think of. I'm wondering if he didn't re-type "rags" on the computer for some reason, even though it was old(er).

The date on "confession" is fixed.
 
Good to know. I didn't want to be a pain, still.......my last 2 db observations for a while:

--The Sept Stew poem list has some titles in italics. I'm assuming not intentional.

--Prob my laptop settings, but when I click on any jpg links in the Timeline, nothing happens...well, except for the concentric "thinking" circles appearing, then the screen image goes kind of faded, but no jpg image appears.

If I right click on the link, I can "open in new window" and see the image I don't have another computer handy to check if it's indeed my system settings.
 
Titles in italics are stories/prose.

The timeline images work everywhere I've tested them (desktop/tablet/phone), but maybe a setting/browser thing on your end...
 
(Now that I think of it, I recently blocked the timeline from phones since I couldn't come up with a good way of displaying it.)
 
Re italics: Embarrassing fail on my part. I should've picked up on that!

Re "my last 2 db observations for a while": I lied. I love the db. If I see something, I'll say something...
 
Most of why the DB is so good is mjp's tireless devotion to it. But without our input and some cross-checking by him to verify our musings, it wouldn't benefit from the variety of input and thus be of the scope it has now reached. Which is more or less a wind-bag way of saying "all input welcome."
 

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