Holy shit! (2 Viewers)

cirerita

Founding member
Well, I just sat down and did something I've been meaning to do for a while: counting the pages from one of the infamous binders. I counted the ones from the first binder (Uncollected Poems, 1946-1969) and there are 555 pages! And there are binders with even more pages. I bet the one with the uncollected poems from the 80's is over 600 pages.

Taking into account there are 21 binders, well, that means there are well over ten THOUSAND pages.

Who's willing to digitize this mammoth? ;) You get a free copy. Ha!
 
Wow, that's a lot of uncollected poems! There's material for several more poem collections..
 
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Well, I just sat down and did something I've been meaning to do for a while: counting the pages from one of the infamous binders. I counted the ones from the first binder (Uncollected Poems, 1946-1969) and there are 555 pages! And there are binders with even more pages. I bet the one with the uncollected poems from the 80's is over 600 pages.

Taking into account there are 21 binders, well, that means there are well over ten THOUSAND pages.

Who's willing to digitize this mammoth? ;) You get a free copy. Ha!

I would turn them all over to the dog with the bow tie. He will know what to do, for sure.
 
Estimating 575 pages/binder, that's 12,075 pages. Assuming one page a minute, that's 201.25 hrs, or about a month of 50-hour weeks (pissing, shitting and eating excluded).

You know, just to put it into perspective.

On another note, put me down for a copy of the series!
 
Taking into account there are 21 binders, well, that means there are well over ten THOUSAND pages.

Who's willing to digitize this mammoth? ;) You get a free copy. Ha!

Yikes!

When you say "digitize," do you just mean scan or do you mean scan and convert everything to text?
 
Estimating 575 pages/binder, that's 12,075 pages. Assuming one page a minute, that's 201.25 hrs
One page a minute is way more time than it would take. I have a couple of Dell scanner/copiers at work that will take a stack of 100 pages at a time and auto feed them at about 30 a minute, dropping pdfs or jpgs into a directory on the network. It's ridiculous how quickly it can be done when you're just dealing with text on a page.

So you're looking at about 7 hours of work. Not counting organizing the resulting files, which could also be automated. But I'm sure there are bigger commercial machines that would do the job even faster. It is far from an impossible task.

The question would be what to do with the files that you would generate...8 or 10 GB of pdfs don't travel very easily over the wire. You'd have to send a USB drive through the mail or something. It would be a difficult thing to "distribute."

Assuming someone wanted to distribute it.
 
The question would be what to do with the files that you would generate...8 or 10 GB of pdfs don't travel very easily over the wire. You'd have to send a USB drive through the mail or something. It would be a difficult thing to "distribute."

Good quality single-layer DVD-Rs (4.7 GB) cost about .30 each (if you buy 100 at a time) these days and take about 5-10 minutes to burn. Not such a problem.

The hard part would be if he wanted everything converted to text. OCR technology still has a ways to go before it can output anything near 100% accuracy.
 
7 hours? ha ha, that was a good one. Not by a long shot, man. Not even with the fastest machine on earth. Remember, you have to personally handle the material. You know, opening the binders, carefully grabbing the pages, feeding them into the scanner, putting them back in the binder, etc. Then you have hundreds of pages with illustrations, drawings, etc. Those take way longer to be scanned than the ones with text only. If you want to put those aside to scan them at a higher resolution, then you would need at least 7 hours to do so ;) Then you would have to organize the resulting files -though the binders are already organized somehow. That would take a few hours as well. You would also have to take a look at the material from time to time to be sure everything's fine. You don't want to end up with twelve thousand of badly done files, do you? And, of course, as I'm NOT going to do this, you would need a lot of time to put everything into large boxes and have them shipped to the crazy person willing to spend hours and hours to do a good job. Not to mention the fact that we're talking about simple scanning here, no OCR involved. OCR'd files would take a lifetime or more.

I might as well "donate" this to the Huntington :D
 
12,000 pages means many more "last, final" collections of Bukowski. And that's good news. But what a massive chore, digitizing those. Worth doing, for sure. What an impressive feat, collecting all that, cirerita.
 
Well, those 12,000 pages include uncollected & unpublished poetry and prose, as well as unpublished correspondence and reviews. There are six poetry binders.

And, oh, I forgot something: there are some 1,000 additional pages sitting on my desk waiting to go thru' that boring paper punching process.
 
7 hours? ha ha, that was a good one. Not by a long shot, man. Not even with the fastest machine on earth.
Well, as someone who used to run big Xerox copiers for a living, and as someone who uses the Dell to make PDFs every couple days, I respectfully disagree. 10,000, 12,000 pages - that's a couple cases of paper. If you have any organizational skills at all it's easily do-able in a day. Unrealistic? Okay, double my estimate. Two days. Big deal.

Who cares anyway? Send it to the Huntington. Bury it in your yard. Float it down a river. Why bother dick teasing everyone if, as you say, "I'm NOT going to do this"? It seems perverse.

If you sit on a collection like that, or give it to some institution, you've wasted your time compiling it. If you're angling to sell something - a book, a volume of 10 books, a DVD - then come out and sell it.

I always enjoy reading the stuff you've tracked down, but the way you sprinkle out the crumbs from on high while boasting of your riches rubs me the wrong way. What can I say. We look at these things differently.
 
Well, I'm surprised you didn't call me a troll and banned me from your board for not having scanned those 12,000 pages in a couple of hours while sipping a cup of tea and then mailed them to you in a USB drive via priority mail.

If you want to insult me, why don't you simply do it? If you come up with a good one -as you did in the past with other forum members- at least we'll all have a good laugh.

But let me stick to the facts. I'm working on a Bukowski bibliography. Everybody on this board knows that. Hopefully, the book will come out. Just be patient. The longer you wait, the more interesting, never-seen before stuff you'll see.

You obviously read what you want to read, but I guess we all do that. When I said "I'm NOT going to do this" I also said that someone else could do it. I said in some other thread that I would be willing to ship the binders to whoever would feel like scanning the whole thing. But maybe you missed that part, I don't know. So I'm willing to share this, but don't expect me to scan the whole thing and upload it here for you. I guess that would be the only way to rub you the right way, right? But, you know, I have other priorities.

And, yes, indeed we look at things differently. If the binders ended up at the Huntington or some other institution, they would be way more useful than if I sold them to some Bukowski collector.

Now, bring on the cavalry :D
 
are you going to sell it or not? you can't come out and accuse others of misrepresenting you when you yourself have made a persona out of being coy and bragging about the bukowski stuff you've unearthed.

no one is asking you to give it away for free or to donate your time to feed us hungry slobs the food over which you've labored lo these many years (i'd hate to get another self-important diatribe about how that makes you feel). but christ, just quit bragging about it- if you want to show stuff out of it, then do it. if you have information, then spill it. we appreciate it, we really do. but if you just want to TALK about what you have and then goad people into kissing your ass, begging you to turn it loose, then please spare me.

and look, don't come out all direct at me and tell me how ungrateful i've been or whatever. A) your occupation is this research. mine is designing medical kits. i bet i could blow your mind with all the info i've collected about medical kits, but you don't care. point is, that's what i do, and i don't expect to have my ass kissed about it all the time. B) there are specific instances when you've mentioned a "HINT" of information and then politely withheld, so i'm not pulling this out of thin air. remember when "Mr. Debritto" knew what was going on with the huntington archive, and you kept blathering on about how "Mr. Debritto" was a reticent guy and you'd have to talk to him more before you could give us any information? i guess that was before we all knew your last name, but goddamn that was annoying.

good luck with your binders and with your research- you're certainly gifted at what you do, but you utterly lack any humility about it, and to be totally honest, it's grotesque.
 
Sorry, i guess i'm not done. your first post says this: "Who's willing to digitize this mammoth? You get a free copy. Ha!" you're taunting us with how much information you have, insisting that it could never be digitized. this is not a practical offer trying to solicit a buk.net member who wants to undertake the project for you. so again, spare us your bullshit.
 
well, now that we know where everyone stands...
here comes the tap dance, sponsored by Xerox.

abel, the research you do is important. the people here are interested in what you do. but the people here also like straight shooters. be a straight shooter. if what you dig up is going towards a project you are working on and want to keep private, keep it private. don't allude to it and then ignore or dance around the questions to your allusions. it makes people feel like assholes, and they don't like that.

believe me, I know. I've spent 96% of my life feeling like an asshole, and I hate it.

much respect, but play fair.
 
ok, guys, you're entitled to have your opinion, and you can insult me all you want, no matter how subtle you try to be about it. You know, English is not my mother-tongue, but the things you say are not hard to understand.

If you mean I'm an asshole and a bullshitter, ok, that's fine by me. I know where I stand, and that's enough by me.

But you just use a few "hints" -which were used in a "comical" tone, if you wish- and turn them into your big argument against me. Wow. I'm speechless at how elaborate your thinking is. Glad to know English is your mother-tongue. That should explain it all.

Look, I said it in the past and I'll say it again: I'm not going to digitize the binders, but I'm willing to ship them to someone who wants to scan them properly. Is it that hard to understand? That's what I've been saying all along. Either my English is too poor or you read what you want to read.

Re. my bragging about the material I've found and giving you just a few "crumbles", let's put it another way: go to the unpublished & uncollected forum and mentally delete all my posts. Count the remaining threads. Go to the other forums and delete all the threads where I posted reviews, pics, drawings, etc. I guess I should have never posted any of that material and you would be all the happier because you wouldn't know I have all these fucking binders, right? "What you don't know, won't hurt you", or something like that.

And sorry to disappoint you, but my occupation is NOT this research. I have other priorities in my life.
 
I'll do it. Send the lot at your expense, I'll do all the scanning and negotiate whatever distribution is legally appropriate.
I'll pay to send everything back and you can send it all to whomever you please.

Let me know.
 
No problem. But as I already said, this should be done when I'm done with the biblio. You know, I'm still using the material as we speak.
 
You're welcome.

We'll work out the details whenever I'm done with the biblio. I think to recall that Roni also said he would be interested in scanning the whole thing for the German Society or something. I really don't care who tackles the digitizing thing as long as it's properly done.
 
so kids, can you all calm down again please?


I find it understandable, when someone is working with all these copies all the time, which we all know is a solitude-job, that he feels like talking about it from time to time. We all do. We talk about the books we write, the jobs we had, the database we keep running, the letterpress we feed ...

It's not modest of course. But one has the right to talk about these things to people who, he thinks, feel a little alike. We're all human, okay. (Sometimes my friends are listening to me talking about how I did this or managed that for hours. When they take their turn, I am listening.)

Sure it's a little teasing sometimes, when reading about 'The Binders' and of course it's a little game somehow.
But it's also true, that he has given away a lot of stuff the last years.
 
I'm not going to digitize the binders, but I'm willing to ship them to someone who wants to scan them properly.

I'll do it. Send the lot at your expense, I'll do all the
scanning and negotiate whatever distribution is legally appropriate.
I'll pay to send everything back and you can send it all to whomever you please.

Let me know.

We'll work out the details - -


Cool.
 
But it's also true, that he has given away a lot of stuff the last years.

Crumbles, man, crumbles! Those are but crumbles here.

Yes, I'll admit to some teasing on my part, but not that much. But I find it really funny that the people who criticize my supposedly humble-less attittude are probably the most humble members on this board :D You know, the old "to see the mote in one's neighbour's eye and not the beam in one's own". Yes, I had to look it up in the dictionary.
 
Please don't fight, guys.

Cirerita nobody can or want to deny that all your work and research is one big part which makes bukowski.net as unique and lively and thrilling and interesting, as it is. It's also very understandable, as roni pointed out, that one wants to talk about his work, especially with peers who share the same interests. Nobody of us would even know about all the things out there, without you.

On the other hand, for x3489032bfewf!?!!!`s sake, it's simply envy, and lust, and whatnot, speaking for my humble self only, of course: Knowing about these binders and all that fantastic material out there (The Whit Burnett correspondence alone!) and not knowing what the hell what the hell ...

Now you gathered and collected all that through hard and ungrateful research and work and have every right in the world (of course) to say "fuck you, I'm doing or not doing everything I want with it". There's no discussion about that. But we out in the fog are only human and sometimes short-tempered and and AND.

We have been at that point before and will probably get there again, until the situation has changed fundamentally: You feeling sort of mistreated after you contributed so much and us feeling sort of teased and hold out of material or what. And that's fucked because it shouldn't be "you" and "us" but WE, like it was and is.

So, thank you very much cirerita, your work and contributions never ceased to amaze me. It's one hell of a miracle, really. And it's sad, that we have to come to this point every now and then, but then, probably only human and therefore unavoidable(?)

How's the biblio doing?
 
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$$$$$$

I've always had trouble with
money.
this one place I worked
everybody ate hot dogs
and potato chips
in the company cafeteria for
3 days before each
payday.
I wanted steaks,
I even went to see the manager
of the cafeteria and
demanded that he serve
steaks. he refused.

I'd forget payday.
I had a high rate of absenteeism and
payday would arrive and everybody would
start talking about
it.
"payday?" I'd say, "hell, is this
payday? I forgot to pick up my
last cheek ..."

"stop the bullshit, man ..."

"no, no, I mean it ..."

I'd jump up and go down to payroll
and sure enough there'd be a
check and I'd come back and show it
to them. "Jesus Christ, I forgot all about
it ..."

for some reason they'd get
angry. then the payroll clerk would come
around. I'd have two
checks. "Jesus," I'd say, "two checks."
and they were
angry.
some of them were working
two jobs.

the worst day
it was raining very hard,
I didn't have a raincoat so
I put on a very old coat I hadn't worn for
months and
I walked in a little late
while they were working.
I looked in the coat for some
cigarettes
and found a 5 dollar bill
in the side pocket:
"hey, look," I said, "I just found a 5 dollar
bill I didn't know I had, that's
funny."

"hey, man, knock off the
shit!"

"no, no, I'm serious, really, I remember
wearing this coat when
I got drunk at the
bars. I've been rolled too often,
I've got this fear ... I take money out of
my wallet and hide it all
over me."

"sit down and get to
work."

I reached into an inside pocket:
"hey, look, here's a TWENTY! God, here's a
TWENTY I never knew I
had! I'm
RICH!"

"you're not funny, son of
a bitch ..."

"hey, my God, here's ANOTHER
twenty! too much, too too
much ... I knew I didn't spend all that
money that night. I thought I'd been
rolled again ..."

I kept searching the
coat. "hey! here's a ten and
here's a fiver! my God ..."

"listen, I'm telling you to sit down
and shut up ..."

"my God, I'm RICH ... I don't even need
this job ..."

"man, sit down ..."

I found another ten after I sat down
but I didn't say
anything.
I could feel waves of hatred and
I was confused,
they believed I had
plotted the whole thing
just to make them
feel bad. I didn't want
to. people who live on hot dogs and
potato chips for
3 days before payday
feel bad
enough.

I sat down
leaned forward and
began to go to
work.

outside
it continued to
rain.

from Love Is a Dog from Hell
 
from Love Is a Dog from Hell

Funny, I was thinking of that piece of writing while this thread was happening but I didn't search for it.

I've had my years when I forgot to pick up my pay cheque. Seems like I had two or three stapled together once when I finally remembered to pick it up. There used to be a feeding frenzy line up to the pay windows on pay day.

Now everything gets zapped electronically so it isn't the same situation.

From the Bukowski "$$$$$$" I did learn to keep my mouth shut during a couple elongated strikes. While some were on the verge of losing houses and families I could sit it out on the picket line, not looking for a job, for months on end. Guys were on edge. They'd probably beat the shit out of me if I started gloating about how long I could stay away from work.

Maybe I learned some things from Bukowski. Most days, especially when it comes to money and time, it's best to just grouse about the lack of it along with everyone else.
 
I have a second job now working in a bookstore on Saturdays and it's old school. There's a time clock (I hadn't punched one of those for decades) and they hand out checks once or twice a month. I kind of enjoy that time clock. It makes me feel like I'm really working.
 

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