The Pleasures of the Damned (2 Viewers)

It's strange that this piece and the Happy 86th Birthday piece cannot be found on ABE.
Normally a few booksellers will turn them around pretty quickly.

These ecco oddities are like the genius of the crowd... well sort of.
 
Just curious... why two copies of each?

One copy to venerate and another to fold, spindle and multilate.

I actually prefer to have things in threes, so this is a bit of a comedown for me.

Alternative reason:

Do you remember Buk's comment on his father's Theory of Property Accumulation?

Buk Senior thought that a man should buy a house and pass it on to his son, who would then buy another house, thus having two houses, and then pass those two houses on to his son, and so on. Slow and steady. He would mix this housing philosophy up with an adherance to the family, church, a little patriotism and a steady job and presto, you've got all the ingredients for conventional morality. Buk would have none of that shit. "I want a thousand houses, now!", he wrote. Or something like that.

And that's why I have two copies of each.

chronic said:
Are the signed broadsides also numbered? If they are, use uv coated glass... that red ink they use for numbering will disappear over time.
Yes. The HAM ON RYE BROADSIDE is 63/100 and TALKING TO MY MAILBOX is 68/100. I believe the "frame panes" are some type of plastic.

What to do?
 
Do you remember Buk's comment on his father's Theory of Property Accumulation?
That's a workable theory if you buy the right things, but I can't imagine that something like Pleasures of the Damned will ever sell for more than the sticker price. But what do I know. In 20 years maybe they'll be rarer than Write magazine.
 
I Want A Thousand Houses, Now!

You're absolutely correct, but I have no intention of selling my Buk stuff, except for some excess HARDCOVERS and BROADSIDES and CRUCIFIX, because I dislike the cover colour and the Rockmore illustrations. Ughh!

I'll also be getting rid of ORO MADRE and some other magazines because they are poor examples of the printers art. Some are no better than mimeographed sheets of paper stapled together. Wait a minute, that's why it was called a mimeograph revolution....

Speaking of WRITE magazine I have 2 goals:

1) Smoke a cigar and drink whiskey outside of Delongpre and N. Mariposa

2) Spend a summer looking for WRITE magazine.
 
That's a workable theory if you buy the right things, but I can't imagine that something like Pleasures of the Damned will ever sell for more than the sticker price. But what do I know. In 20 years maybe they'll be rarer than Write magazine.

Mr. Debritto tells me that Write might not be that rare in the near future...
 
You can't drop a vague comment like that on us!

Does he have a copy? We all want to know the details.

Still, one or two copies of one of the first Bukowski appearances is still wicked rare in my book. I'll never own one..

Bill
 
Bill,

you just don't know Mr. Debritto. He can be very elusive and vague. I'll ask him about this again, but don't hold your breath.
 
Mr. Debritto is a most serious fellow -much like Steve Richmond. Alas, he tells me, he has no copies of the Write issue with Bukowski stuff. He can confirm you, though, that Bukowski was NOT in v.1 no.1, 1940. He's a very busy person, but he will probably be able to double-check the other Write issues sometime soon.
 
And more...

He is something strange and offers something different and perhaps even entertaining, but if you want a truly challenging read, might I recommend Wallace Stevens. Monsters & Critics.com

One of the benefits of a career retrospective is that it allows us to see how a writer has progressed, how themes and styles are continued or discarded. This collection, though, shows no real growth. A poem from the 1950s reads no different than one from the 1980s; they are part of the same lifelong binge. "I've got this room upstairs overlooking the harbor," Bukowski noted in 1979, describing his method of composition, "and I drink 2 or 3 bottles of wine and tap it out." But reading "The Pleasures of the Damned," you begin to wish there had been a little less "tapping" and a little more development. David L. Ulin - LA Times
 
"...perhaps even entertaining..." Monsters & Critics.com

"[...] A poem from the 1950s reads no different than one from the 1980s[...]" David L. Ulin - LA Times

I suppose that the critics will always be critics. That second comment seems very short sighted to me. The subject matter is sometimes the same, but seeing no development, for better or worse, is just blind arrogance.
 
exactly.
I hope he doesn't assume they are presented chronologically.
I personally think it's a very strong collection.
 
Here's the full LA Times review:

Ordinary madness; The Pleasures of the Damned Poems, 1951-1993; Charles Bukowski Edited by John Martin; Ecco: 556 pp., $29.95
David L. Ulin. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: Nov 25, 2007. pg. R.1
Abstract (Summary)

[...]'s this, about the aftermath of lovemaking, from a poem called "Like a Flower in the Rain": later we joked about the lotion and the cigarette and the apple. then I went out and got some chicken and shrimp and french fries and buns and mashed potatoes and gravy and cole slaw, and we ate.
Full Text (1577 words)
(Copyright (c) 2007 Los Angeles Times)

Charles BUKOWSKI may be a Los Angeles icon, but reading "The Pleasures of the Damned" -- the new volume of his selected poetry edited by John Martin, his longtime benefactor at Black Sparrow Press -- it's impossible not to ask some hard questions about his status and whether it is deserved. I've often thought his place in this city's literary pantheon was more a matter of opportunity than of talent; when he started writing full-bore, in the mid-1950s, few people were creating an authentic local literature, which, for better or worse, is what he did.

Back then, most L.A. writing was the work of outsiders, with a small indigenous poetry scene, leftist and oddly formal in its aesthetics, centered around such journals as Coastlines and the California Quarterly. Although Bukowski published in such venues, he stood against all that; a loner, avowedly apolitical, he focused on the small degradations of daily life. "there is a loneliness in this world so great / that you can see it in the slow movement of / the hands of a clock," he wrote in "The Crunch," describing "the terror of one person / aching in one place / alone / untouched / unspoken to / watering a plant." He was trying to articulate a vision of Los Angeles as an urban landscape, not exotic but mundane, where we not so much reinvent ourselves as remain unreconciled.

And yet Bukowski was hardly the first writer to look at L.A. through this filter. One thinks of his great hero John Fante, whose superlative 1939 novel, "Ask the Dust," evokes the city in similarly existential terms. It's no coincidence that decades later, Bukowski was the one who brought Fante's work to the attention of Martin, or that when Black Sparrow reissued the then-long-out-of-print "Ask the Dust" in 1980, he would write the preface. "Yes, Fante had a mighty effect upon me," he wrote. "Not long after reading [his] books I began living with a woman. She was a worse drunk than I was and we had some violent arguments, and often I would scream at her, . . . 'I am Bandini, Arturo Bandini!' "

Fante makes an appearance about three-quarters of the way through "The Pleasures of the Damned" in a pair of poems inspired by his death in 1983. "the writing of some / men / is like a vast bridge / that carries you / over / the many things / that claw and tear," Bukowski writes about his mentor in "The Wine of Forever," but the bulk of this 500-plus page collection highlights the fact that his own work is not up to such a standard -- not even close. Rather, the 274 poems here affirm a sense of the author as a hit-or-miss talent, capable of his own brand of small epiphany but often stultifyingly banal.

" . . . when I opened the / newspaper / and read of the fire / which / destroyed the / library and most of / its contents," he writes in a poem about the 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Central Library, "I said to my / wife: 'I used to spend my / time / there . . . ' " The library fire becomes a metaphor for loss, for aging, for the slow closing of possibility, but the poem has no real payoff. Then there's this, about the aftermath of lovemaking, from a poem called "Like a Flower in the Rain":

later we joked about the lotion

and the cigarette and the apple.

then I went out and got some chicken

and shrimp and french fries and buns

and mashed potatoes and gravy and

cole slaw, and we ate. She told me

how good she felt and I told her

how good I felt and we ate

the chicken and the shrimp and the

french fries and the buns and the

mashed potatoes and the gravy and

the cole slaw too.

Here, Bukowski means to tell us about the solace of simple pleasures -- sex, food, companionship -- but he ends up with uninspired details, a disconnected litany.

Part of the problem is the Bukowski persona: the dirty old man, the drunk, the layabout. For a lot of readers, especially younger ones, this is the draw -- the idea of the artist as outsider, unbound by social stricture and thus available to tell the truth. To be sure, it's an attractive image, but Bukowski is no Louis-Ferdinand Celine, to cite another of his role models, which means that often what emerges is empty posturing.

--

"THE Pleasures of the Damned" includes poems about failure, about drinking beer in the afternoon, about lust and bodily functions and going to the track. It also features other, later poems about "being" Bukowski -- not songs of experience but something much more contrived. In "Gold in Your Eye," he describes driving his BMW to the bank to "pick up my American Express Gold Card"; what might have been an interesting meditation on money and how it does (or doesn't) change us becomes, instead, a taunt at those who expect him to live a particular way. "Poetry" relies on the tired homily that "it / takes / a lot of / desperation / dissatisfaction / and / disillusion / to / write / a / few / good/ poems."

Even when Bukowski pierces the facade, there's the sense that he could have mined his material more deeply, that he could have excavated something more. "Oh, Yes" reads, in its entirety:

there are worse things than

being alone

but it often takes decades

to realize this

and most often

when you do

it's too late

and there's nothing worse

than

too late.

It doesn't help that "The Pleasures of the Damned" has no editorial structure; there's no introduction, and except for a few small thematic clusters -- a handful of poems about cats, and another, toward the end, on dying -- the material seems arranged with little thought to order, chronological or otherwise. To find out where these poems first appeared, you have to flip to an "Alphabetical Index of Poem Titles" at the back, a process so unwieldy as to be useless.

Martin clearly put the collection together that way on purpose. The idea, I suppose, is to let the poetry stand on its own merits, without intrusion, but in the end, a bit of intrusion might not have been so bad. After all, stacked together as they are, the poems here quickly run together into one long, unchanging reverie. The voice, never the most expressive to begin with, flattens out. What lingers are a few impressions: Bukowski's tendency to reach for the broad, overdrawn image ("it is indecent to search him out," he writes in "Goldfish," "indecent like the burning of peaches / or the rape of children" as if the two had anything to do with each other) or the abstraction posing as a profound statement about life.

One of the benefits of a career retrospective is that it allows us to see how a writer has progressed, how themes and styles are continued or discarded. This collection, though, shows no real growth. A poem from the 1950s reads no different than one from the 1980s; they are part of the same lifelong binge. "I've got this room upstairs overlooking the harbor," Bukowski noted in 1979, describing his method of composition, "and I drink 2 or 3 bottles of wine and tap it out." But reading "The Pleasures of the Damned," you begin to wish there had been a little less "tapping" and a little more development.

To his credit, Bukowski seems to have recognized that; "this then / will be my destiny," he writes in "The Poetry Reading," originally published in the 1972 collection "Mockingbird Wish Me Luck":

scrabbling for pennies in dark tiny halls

reading poems I have long since become tired

of.

and I used to think

that men who drove buses

or cleaned out latrines

or murdered men in alleys were

fools.

So why, then -- in L.A., anyway -- does he remain a sacred cow? Partly, I suppose, it's personal; when I first arrived here in the early 1990s, he was known for giving work to any start-up 'zine that asked for it, and he was a tireless supporter of younger poets. That goes a long way in the indie lit world, where rivalries can be especially vicious because the stakes are, by and large, so low.

Even more, it has to do with Los Angeles, where writers remain uncertain about their significance, which makes us reluctant to criticize our own. It's a garrison mentality, but the truth is that we as a literary culture have outgrown it, just as we've outgrown Bukowski, and the ordinary madness of these poems. "There are so many . . . who go by the name of poet," he wrote in his 1983 short-story collection "Hot Water Music." "But they have no training, no feeling for their craft."

He's right, of course. Yet the most telling thing about that statement may be what it anticipates about "The Pleasures of the Damned."
 
Clearly they let a person write a review who dislikes his writing already. This is as unfair as having me write a review. Never trust a review from someone that has an agenda for or against as the review will be tainted. Just like this one....

At least the NY Times one was honest, if a bit snobby and insulting to us "nitwits".

Bill
 
David Ulin is looking for something that just isn't there. How telling that he bemoans the lack of a "payoff". Ulin obviously believes that a poem should follow a certain form, but, as we all know, when the form appears...
 
To find out where these poems first appeared, you have to flip to an "Alphabetical Index of Poem Titles" at the back, a process so unwieldy as to be useless.
Now that's funny. I guess he's used to reading all those poetry collections where the date of creation and place of original publication are there, along with notes on the author's thoughts and mood at the time of the poem's conception are printed before and after each poem.
 
here's an exerpt of the Publishers Weekly starred review, which I guess means they recommend it...

http://cruelestmonth.typepad.com/cruelestmonth/2007/10/pw-starred-revi.html

EDIT: I stopped being lazy, and found it on PW's website...

The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993
Charles Bukowski, edited by John Martin. Ecco, $29.95 (576p) ISBN 978-0-06-122843-8

Bukowski's chatty free verse (and fiction) about disappointment, drunkenness, racetracks, flophouses, lust, sexual failure, poverty and late-life success amassed an enormous following by the time of his death at age 73 in 1994. Billed as the last book with new Bukowski poems in it, this hefty collection also culls from his prior books, and it is all of a piece: the warnings about lost potency, the ironic takes on ailments of mind and body, the comradeship with everyone down at the heels, down on his luck, or down to his last shot of booze. Bukowski's best poems have an exaggerated, B-movie black-and-white aura about them. One new poem warns "that/ nothing is wasted:/ either that/ or/ it all is." In another, "hell is only what we/ create,/ smoking these cigarettes,/ waiting here,/ wondering here." Near the front of the volume comes a page-and-a-half-long verse manifesto, "a poem is a city," that might describe what Bukowski could do: "a poem is a city filled with streets and sewers," it begins, "filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen... banality and booze," and yet "a poem is the world." (Nov.)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
from Booklist:

Copyright Booklist Publications Nov 1, 2007

Poetry The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993. By Charles Bukowski. Ed. by John Martin. Nov. 2007. 576p. Ecco, $29.95 (0-06-122843-5). 811.

Martin, Bukowski's publisher for ages at Black Sparrow Press, has put the last previously uncollected poems into what is otherwise his selection of his most successful author's poems. It makes for a nice, long read that still takes only a couple of sittings because of Bukowski's predominant short line and perfected spieler's diction. Actually, it is less than twice as long as two of Bukowski's other collections, and many who love Buk-a remarkably easy thing to do, despite and because of his roughneck brusqueness and general raffishness-may opt to go through a couple of those again rather than this book. Martin's choice seems light on the barroom, lovers'-quarrel, and lunatic-encounter poems that show what a genius of a raconteur Buk was. Of course, that gift is also highlighted in his short stories; perhaps that's why there's a higher proportion of reflective poems here than one recalls in the previous collections. But quibble, quibble. We're lucky to have so much Bukowski to winnow, and for that, all thanks to Martin. -Ray Olson
 
I liked it too. It is an interesting dichotomy; whether to thank the writer or the publisher, or both. I'll do both. Certainly Martin made a move in 1970 that paid off for both.

"Pleasures" may not be the greatest compilation of all time, but it is a prodigious volume, albeit of some of his generally softer works, IMO. I would have liked it if Martin could have convinced Ecco/HarperCollins to put out something limited (I know that Jeff Maser bought out Martin's collection several years back, but wouldn't you think that there could have been 400 limited edition copies paw-printed by one of Buk's cats (posthumously, of course) or something?). Just for us crazy-types.
 
Negative review of Pleasures of the Damned

In the L.A. Times (pardon me if this has already been posted):

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-bk-ulin25nov25,0,4326589.story?coll=la-books-headlines

I think the reviewer mistook this last, grab-bag collection as a retrospective.

A line in the review that struck me as highly questionable: "...and he was a tireless supporter of younger poets." Really? I've seldom heard Bukowski say a good word about younger poets. Generally, he had scorn for them.

Well, I'll still buy Pleasures. Even the poems quoted that are supposed to show how lacking Buk was worked fine for me. Simple is too good for some folks. They want to be dazzled by complexity. The academic poets can help them out with that.
 
Some people need to justify their existence by explaining to others what a poem means, apparently. When people can actually relate to a poem's message, there ceases to be a "need" for those types.
 
I may go by the name Gerard Love, but I am going to send hate mail to Mr. Ulin. You are right he is trying to justify something. He seemed to complain that there was no introduction to the book....Why? I am a novice to poetry so maybe I'm missing something. No he is missing a ton.
 
I would have liked to see an introduction, just to read some unheard anecdotes about Buk. I dont care too much about some editor's literary analysis of the author's poems and his impact on culture but am more curious about how the work came to be, the author's state and the editor's choices. For example, Oliver Harris' introduction to Burroughs' "Yage Letters Redux" was quite illuminating, you put it down with a completely new understanding of the anatomy of that text. The same could have been done with this collection: "I first came across Buk's work..." we all know the story but surely there is much more that hasnt been said!
I havent had a chance to see "Pleasures" though I plan to get a copy. Which ones are the 'new poems'- or does it say? It is interesting that his texts would be presented non-chronologically... it is better that way, I feel...
 
I havent had a chance to see "Pleasures" though I plan to get a copy. Which ones are the 'new poems'- or does it say?

It does list the uncollected poems in the back of the book... among all the other poems and which book they appeared in... in alphabetical order.
 
Having the index with poem sources in the back sure beats not having the information at all. I recently read a literary biography that included tons of new information on the author and made all kinds of claims and pronouncements but included no footnotes, no sources, no index, no clue as to where the author got all that material. Now there's a book that needed something in the back besides a blank page after the text.
 
Let me guess, it was written by Ben Pleasants, and claimed that Hunter Thompson sacrificed and ate newborn babies that he bought in the Philippines...
 
LA Times review of Pleasures of the Damned

Here Published on Nov 23, not sure if people had seen it.

First sentence:

"Charles Bukowski may be a Los Angeles icon, but reading "The Pleasures of the Damned" -- the new volume of his selected poetry edited by John Martin, his longtime benefactor at Black Sparrow Press -- it's impossible not to ask some hard questions about his status and whether it is deserved."

The reviewer pretty much comes down on the "not deserved" side of the fence....
 
i think i'm climb in bed with the book and finish off those last 50-70 pages,
i've been saving it.. dragging it out, bukowski books always read so fast.

i'll be sad that there wont be anymore new books,
but i guess that's all part of dying.

some things have to stop.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top