The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, Calif. (1 Viewer)

This story is contained in The Most Beautiful Woman In Town.

Every so often I will read a Bukowski piece that will make me say, "Okay, enough already. This was just done for the shock value."

That's how I felt about Copulating Mermaid. I mean, necrophilia with no context, social or otherwise? Where's the redeeming value in a story such as this? Granted, I never look to Buk for redemptive stories -- though they are there by the dozens -- but stories like "Mermaid" strike me as simple pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Your thoughts?
 
Social context - in all things - is self-supplying.
You write a story and, if enough people read it, it has all the necessary requisites for existence.

Aren't you Hemingways Shotgun? Great title.
To steal a line from Michael Clayton - When did you get so sensitive?

I liked the story... hell, I liked The Fiend.

Hello... I'm the lowest common denominator :)
 
The Notes of a dirty old man column ran for 87 weeks. I
believe that, at least in a few cases, Bukowski knew his
audience.

The other thing of course is that he was his own best
audience.

Those are my thoughts. Off the top of my head...
 
hell, I liked The Fiend.

Me too! It's great, because it's not often that you read a story about rape told from the viewpoint of the rapist!
Buk showed guts when he wrote that story!
 
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So much for my sensitive, withering flower pose. I'll just go back over here in the corner and read some Burroughs. Or maybe some J.G. Ballard ...
 
...stories like "Mermaid" strike me as simple pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Your thoughts?
I think things came into his head and he wrote them down. A lot of us have ugly or outrageous passing thoughts, things we would never do in real life, but we think about them. Then we forget about them. He wrote them down.

It isn't pandering. It's saying, "Look at this." What your reaction is is up to you. I do NOT think he was trying to turn on necrophiliacs or child molesters with mermaid or the fiend.

He wrote a lot of things to get a specific reaction, but a lot of those shorts are just fantasy and creation.
 
All above true. A writer writes. Buk had some tough times, as we all know. Around the time of City Light's stuff, he was just exiting some boxcar shit and jumping into an unknown cauldron, for $100 a month. The Dirty Old Man and all that stuff was rent, food and Cutty Sark.

He knew his shit was what it was. He knew when it was brilliant and he knew when it was for the readers of street rags.

It's all good or great in it's own way, and much of it is great in it's own unique way.

If the gift Buk had needs to be manifested in pure literature, then why did he have it? No. It's the ugliness of his earlier days that made him capable of expressing his voice later. That the whole world didn't get it fast enough for him to eat made it necessary for him to invent a new dimension of "pseudo-porn."

Hell, even his most base stuff is far better than [insert name of any poet here] on his/her best day...
 
It isn't pandering. It's saying, "Look at this." What your reaction is is up to you. I do NOT think he was trying to turn on necrophiliacs or child molesters with mermaid or the fiend.

I completely agree. I love mermaid and it's not because I'm a necrophiliac. It has a kind of Of mice and men quality, to me, or, at least, that is one comparison that comes to mind, not that it's ever very good to compare Buk to other writers...

I think Bukowski is almost never pandering--what's that thing Neeli said once about how, even in the 60s, even in the columns, Buk didn't use slang?
 
Hold on a second now. Perhaps my choice of words was hasty but when I wrote "pandering to the lowest common denominator" I did not mean to imply that Mermaid was written for the lurid appeal of necrophiliacs or The Fiend, for that matter, to pedophiles. It was probably a piece written for Open City, one of the "street rags", we all know, that Stickpin references above. Hell, there are several Buk stories that are about the contempt he felt for some of the rags he wrote for. Street rags = lowest common denominator.

Sorry.

I should've been more clear.

Kalli, I like your Of Mice and Men comparison.
 
Along those lines.....When I first started reading Bukowski I was shocked by The Life Of A Bum and thought he might have really pushed a guy in front of a bus. As I read more and more of Bukowski's stories and poems I noticed in that afore mentioned story the main character was Harry not Henry or Hank. This at least shows some separation from the brutal act. I think the story-Oh what difference does it make what I think about the story I may be wrong- the story is a good story, in spite of the crime.
 
I think I'd agree with Carv concerning the fact, that Buk DID write for some magazines who Wanted the sensation (esp. sexual sensation) and thus wrote mediocre prose sometimes.

And I do agree (if I got that right from him) that especially THESE stories are amongst his weakest. They were a job, that's my impression.

Like in the 'Twelfe flying monkeys...'-story:
"Now let's see. Gotta make it good. To get rid of a story you gotta have fucking, lots of it, if possible. Better make it twelfe monkeys..."

Maybe it's just me, but I think That is the context, in which we have to see a lot of Buks short-stories (esp the 'early' ones, by which I don't mean the 1940s but the 1968-1972s.).

This doesn't mean, I don't like his stories! I DO!
I ADORE them - most of them.
Only - there are Some, that (to my oppinion) Lack Value. Mermaid is one, Fuck-Macine is one.
The Fiend is NOT - because it needs a big lot of guts to write/publish such a thing (even though it is NOT pro-child-rape At All, like some surface-readers may think! - a fact that only few people got! [the KEY-sentence in this story is: "Martin's eyes looked into her eyes and it was a communication between two hells!"]).
 
The Copulating Mermaid is one of my all time favorite stories. I mean, it's right up there with The Little Taylor and The Fiend.

Those stories are the best ones if you ask me. Yeah, I love all the autobiographical stuff but man, he's a very great imagination.
 
I think I'd agree with Carv concerning the fact, that Buk DID write for some magazines who Wanted the sensation (esp. sexual sensation) and thus wrote mediocre prose sometimes.

And I do agree (if I got that right from him) that especially THESE stories are amongst his weakest. They were a job, that's my impression.

I think you're right about that, Roni. Especially what his Dirty Old Man columns are concerned. He constantly needed new story ideas. Sometimes he wrote his stories in the last minute and the result was not always good. I think some of his Dirty Old Man stories are great, but some of them seems "weak" or "pointless" and that's probably because he lacked good story ideas. It's tough coming up with a great story week after week for 500 weeks!
 
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yeah bukfan, thats very true. So, it's safe to say that with some of those stories, he was scrounging for change in the bottom of an old tin can. Yes, that's true but certainly not with The Copulating Mermaid, or The Fiend, or The Fuck Machine, or any of those amazing stories. I would say more along the lines of the few dull, uneventful stories in Tales Of Ordinary Madness. I've read it more than once, but some of those pieces just put me to sleep. Notes of a Dirty Old Man has some really great stuff in it. So Buk was hit and miss at times, but more often hit.
 
I think I'd agree with Carv concerning the fact, that Buk DID write for some magazines who Wanted the sensation (esp. sexual sensation) and thus wrote mediocre prose sometimes.

He also speaks about this in the letter-collections somewhere, probably in "Reach for the Sun".

Don't have it now, but it was something like: of course he tended to the sex-bit a lot at times, but that was because mags like "Hustler" and "Adam" were an important part of his income after he'd quit the p.o. - and he claimed "fooling" them by writing what he wanted anyhow but throwing in some wild and bizarre sex-scenes. Something like that.
 
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That's exactly right, Johannes! He said in an interview (or was it in one of the letters?) that he "fooled" them by writing a real story around the sex stuff they wanted. "The Fiend" is probably one of those kind of stories...
 
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