Notes of a Dirty Old Man - all appearances

mjp · Mar 26, 2019

Okay, all of the Notes of a Dirty Old Man columns are in the database.

"Notes of a Dirty Old Man" columns

Bukowski's "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" column appeared in alternative newspapers from 1967 to 1976.
First in the weekly Los Angeles paper Open City, then in the New Orleans bi-weekly NOLA Express, and finally in the weekly Los Angeles Free Press.
The Free Press circulation of nearly 100 000 gave Bukowski the largest consistent audience he would ever have.

Open City

NOLA Express

Los Angeles Free Press

* Pre-Notes of a Dirty Old Man column appearance.

1967-1969 Los Angeles weekly paper Open City. 89 issues. Circulation: 35 000/week. Paid $10 per column.
1969-1973 New Orleans bi-weekly paper NOLA Express. 77 issues. Not paid initially; eventually $10, then $25 per column.
1972-1976 Los Angeles weekly Los Angeles Free Press. 187 issues. Circulation: 95 000/week. Paid $25 per column.

"Notes of a Dirty Old Man" was also syndicated (starting with its move to NOLA Express in 1969) through United Press Syndicate, which meant that any underground paper that was a UPS member could print the columns. Those syndicated appearances are not listed here, as they are duplicates of the columns as they appeared in the “home” papers.

Most of the columns have been collected by City Lights Books:

Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969)
Erections, Ejaculations and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (1972)
Tales of Ordinary Madness (1983)
The Most Beautiful Woman in Town and Other Stories (1983)
Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook (2008)
Absence of the Hero (2010)
More Notes of a Dirty Old Man (2011)
The Bell Tolls for No One (2015)
The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way (2018)

I say that knowing full well that one or two (or 10) more will show up, but I'm quite sure that we now have the most comprehensive list that's ever been compiled (for the public, anyway). Everything is cross-referenced, of course, and includes excerpts consisting of the first four lines.

89 columns in Open City, 77 in NOLA Express, and 190 in the Los Angeles Free Press. There is overlap between NOLA Express, and the Los Angeles Free Press (37 issues by my count), so the total number of unique Notes of a Dirty Old Man columns is 319.

Of those 319 columns, 248 are stories, 69 are (one or more) poems, there's one interview and one article about how to beat the horses.

Working with those columns, going through them, cross referencing and all that, it really hits you just how much of the Bukowski mythology, or what we know about his actual life, was contained in the weekly columns. We knew that, of course, but when you get into several weeks of looking at those papers it really becomes apparent. I can only imagine the kind of picture we'd have of Bukowski if we were relying only on the novels and poems.

We now have a total of 1397 magazine appearances. I know we don't have everything, but that's still 600 less than the 2,000 number that gets bandied about. I'd be very surprised if we were missing 600 magazines, so I believe we're very close.

The Notes of a Dirty Old Man list we have now exists solely because of Digney in Burnaby. He did the initial manual drudgery of microfilm searches, and he recently pointed us to the incredible online resource for NOLA Express and Los Angeles Free Press, which really (really, really) helped with the organization and database work. (Actually, d gray pointed us to that resource first.)

I would have never considered trying to get all of these into the database without his research, so respect due!

Purple Stickpin · Mar 26, 2019

Thanks to both you and Digney in Burnaby. Yeoman's work to be sure.

roni · Mar 27, 2019

I will repeat now, what I said before:
You are absolutely sick! But good-sick; beautiful-sick; perfect-sick!

in other words: Thanks again!

zobraks · Mar 27, 2019

As I said to mjp many years ago:

I can't stop thanking God for you (and some other people here) not being in your right mind.

Notes of a Dirty Old Man - all appearances

mjp

Purple Stickpin

roni

zobraks

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