New Bukowski blog (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter Erica C.
- Start date
no problem. I'm like that. I'm a giver.
bospress.net
www.bospress.net
What I have seen with MOST blogs is someone posting the minutae of their life and NOBODY even caring enough to read it. In many cases it is like a diary that not even your little brother cares enough to read. Blogs are using technology to allow people to broadcast their lives. That is super. The problem, in most cases, is that no one cares what they have to say. With the 300 Trillion blogs out there most of them get as much attention as putting a love letter in a bottle and throwing it in the sea...
I'm going to add some documentation here.
on the subject of the truth of his work (and this is an interesting coincidence, because the same segment also touches on his rapport with so-called feminists):
"Yes, it's pretty close to what's happened. Yeah, it's ninety-five percent truth and five percent fiction. It's just polished up a bit, around the edges. But you see, a lot of women hate me, because they've heard that i do all of these bad things to the female ... but very few of them have read my works. But if they did, they'd realize that often i was the one who got pissed on or mutilated by the female." p.26 in Laughing with the gods (pivano interview, 1980, response to the question: "but is what you have written so autobiographical that it might give an image of your life?").
On p.101 of that same interview book, bukowski says that "(one of his favorite classical american authors) is a homosexual, Walt Whitman, he was pretty good."
in "you get so alone" there is a poem called "I meet the famous poet" where he talks about a meeting with a gay guy. Then he mentions homosexuality again in the same book in the poem "longshot" (to me one of his better poems).
on the subject of the truth of his work (and this is an interesting coincidence, because the same segment also touches on his rapport with so-called feminists):
"Yes, it's pretty close to what's happened. Yeah, it's ninety-five percent truth and five percent fiction. It's just polished up a bit, around the edges. But you see, a lot of women hate me, because they've heard that i do all of these bad things to the female ... but very few of them have read my works. But if they did, they'd realize that often i was the one who got pissed on or mutilated by the female." p.26 in Laughing with the gods (pivano interview, 1980, response to the question: "but is what you have written so autobiographical that it might give an image of your life?").
On p.101 of that same interview book, bukowski says that "(one of his favorite classical american authors) is a homosexual, Walt Whitman, he was pretty good."
in "you get so alone" there is a poem called "I meet the famous poet" where he talks about a meeting with a gay guy. Then he mentions homosexuality again in the same book in the poem "longshot" (to me one of his better poems).
I wrote a Marxist analysis of some films for my dissertation, but over a decade after handing it in I've never gone back to it. I realised that when you start down that wobbly path, which will lead you nowhere, you come out with something which may offer a small amount of insight (doubtful), but will end up saying more about you than the subject.
Even if Bukowski was still alive today to ask, you would still struggle to get a true reflection of what his views were. Everyone carries a myth of their existence, some of that is created, and some is just a construct of what we perceive to be the truth of who we are. My gran didn't realise she was a rascist, but she was. Celine thought he was an anti-semite, but his earlier work suggests he wasn't (at that point in time).
You will write a paper, a handful of people will read it, no one will enjoy his writing more, some may enjoy it less, a library will archive it, ten years down the line someone will quote it in their paper to support their own 'unveiling the myth'. If you do carry on with this (which I guess you will) at least make it poetic, don't write like the dust is already suffocating the line.
Even if Bukowski was still alive today to ask, you would still struggle to get a true reflection of what his views were. Everyone carries a myth of their existence, some of that is created, and some is just a construct of what we perceive to be the truth of who we are. My gran didn't realise she was a rascist, but she was. Celine thought he was an anti-semite, but his earlier work suggests he wasn't (at that point in time).
You will write a paper, a handful of people will read it, no one will enjoy his writing more, some may enjoy it less, a library will archive it, ten years down the line someone will quote it in their paper to support their own 'unveiling the myth'. If you do carry on with this (which I guess you will) at least make it poetic, don't write like the dust is already suffocating the line.
Thanks everyone for all the support. I'm just about to begin the MRP now and my ideas have changed a bit over the year. I really want to focus on Bukowski's work in place of his personality/celebrity status but he makes this very hard to do. Essentially, I think I'm going to show how his work abjects normative relationships in order to expose the flaws in conventional modes of being together with others. With women, his work favours crass sexual encounters to long term courtships. With men, his work erupts in fists fights and violence before healthy male bonding takes place. In so doing, he exposes and pokes fun at the problems inherent in human relations, abject or otherwise.
i thought fist fights and violence were healthy male bonding.
Ha! Exactly. That's where I'm going. Bukowski flips traditional models of human social relationships on their head, calling their value into question and offering alternative systems instead.
Even if Bukowski was still alive today to ask, you would still struggle to get a true reflection of what his views were.
You are right BedsitBukaroo, I don't intend to commit fallacy of authorial authority. I don't and can't possibly know Bukowski's views, beliefs, or positions. I only know what his work is doing on the page and what his poetic performance is saying as a speech act.
Even if Bukowski was still alive today to ask, you would still struggle to get a true reflection of what his views were.
You are right BedsitBukaroo, I don't intend to commit fallacy of authorial authority. I don't and can't possibly know Bukowski's views, beliefs, or positions. I only know what his work is doing on the page and what his poetic performance is saying as a speech act.
His poetic performance fits into the abjection piece; affronting audiences with insults, foul language and drinking rather than conforming to the accepted social conventions and literary elitism of an invited speaker. I think that meaning breaks down for Bukowski's fictional characters when they confront homosocial male relationships and heteronormative courtships. Thus, they abject both through hypermasculine performance. In the same way, meaning breaks down for Bukowski -the man- when he faces the literati, thus he abjects them in his poetic performance on the stage.
I wish I hadn't skipped my reading of Kristeva ^^
I can really relate to you when you say "I really want to focus on Bukowski's work in place of his personality/celebrity status but he makes this very hard to do."
Sometimes it seems his whole (late) work was meant to be hermetic to critical work. I also get the impression that creating this larger than life persona was a way to draw the attention away from his work. In any case, I do believe that Bukowski is one of the most challenging writer to study.
I can really relate to you when you say "I really want to focus on Bukowski's work in place of his personality/celebrity status but he makes this very hard to do."
Sometimes it seems his whole (late) work was meant to be hermetic to critical work. I also get the impression that creating this larger than life persona was a way to draw the attention away from his work. In any case, I do believe that Bukowski is one of the most challenging writer to study.
jordan
lothario speedwagon
fantastic job bending bukowski's "work" to fit the thesis you came up with. i suppose we just chuck out the last 20% of it (after he married linda bukowski), because the following no longer applies?
("With women, his work favours crass sexual encounters to long term courtships. With men, his work erupts in fists fights and violence before healthy male bonding takes place.")
right, the performance where he breaks down crying while reading a poem about cupcakes is about the most hypermasculine thing i have ever witnessed.
("With women, his work favours crass sexual encounters to long term courtships. With men, his work erupts in fists fights and violence before healthy male bonding takes place.")
right, the performance where he breaks down crying while reading a poem about cupcakes is about the most hypermasculine thing i have ever witnessed.
Which one? Which one?
My claim is that Bukowski's fictional characters are hypermasculine in the texts I'm discussing. His real life poetic performance abjects literary celebrity in quite a different way.
I can bend a whole lotta things. You are right, my argument does not encompass Bukowski's long term relationship with Linda Bukowski or any biographical data outside of poetry readings. Good thing I didn't write it so as to suggest it did. Whew, that was a close one!
Not sure if it's "backing up" in that case. It can be very difficult to sum up the content of a whole thesis in a few sentences on a forum, so every flaw we might find in her arguments might be actually explained in her thesis, which obviously can't be exposed in its entirety on the forum.
I'm saying that even though I consider the whole "masculinity-gender-feminism" approach not that relevant to understand Bukoswki's work, but I still find it interesting to know what people would think of it.
That said, Jordan I find your 'debate' quite interesting. And you haven't answered my question about the cupcakes reading ;)
I think Jordan had a point here- even though Bukowski's readings were real life, you still call them performance. On the other hand, you talk about the hypermasculinity of his fictional characters.
The question could be: to which extend was Bukowski embodying a fictional character while performing on stage?
I have no answer to this question. It's just that if one starts getting outside of the TEXTS to examine the Bukowski persona in "real life"- esp. in the context of public readings-, then one has to deal with tricky concepts such as that of autofiction, performativity etc. at least so as to avoid the confusion between the characters and the author, as well as taking into account the way they are so connected that readers often confuse them.
Maybe you're doing it, Erica, but I just wanted to give my two cents.
Seems that I start sounding like an old bore.:nw: Whatever...
Digney in Burnaby
donkeys live a long time
This poem?
Dora, you are right. There are some seriously muddy waters when one starts to look at a writer's art off the page, as well as on it. Where do we draw the line between artist as performer and artist as person. Like I've set out, I'm not interested in doing an MRP on Bukowski's life. There is enough work out there on Bukowski "the person" that, I think, hijacks attention away from his art. My MRP is about his work and his work encompasses the poetry/prose written on the page and in performance. Obviously, I will have to define, if somewhat artificially, where the boundry between artist and person lies for me in terms of his poetic performances. I'm only interested in studying his work. While his life is fascinating and much great work has and can continue to be done on it, it is not feasible to do a focused study of his work and life in 40 pages in any meaningful way.
