Notes of a Dirty Old Man - all appearances (1 Viewer)

mjp

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

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!
 

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