What other writers have you read because Bukowski told you so? (1 Viewer)

I've tried many of Buk's favourites. I didn't like some of them, found them dull. I liked Fante's Ask The Dust. Buk said many times Fante was his god. Fante laid the line down cleanly and unpretentiously, and so did Buk.

I enjoyed Hamsun's Hunger. He also wrote a thin book, a love story, can't remember the title...Valerie? I liked it, too. Tried to read his others and found them dull.

Celine's Journey had two magnificent parts. One takes place in a Detroit car plant in the 1920s, and the other takes place in a public loo in New York City circa the 1920s. The writing about the loo is sheer, explosive poetry. Phenomenal disgust. Literary vomit with bright yellow bile. He was a volcano of rage & hatred & repulsion. I loved it.

I believe Journey influenced Henry Miller's writing to a very large extent. He redd it after he published Tropic of Cancer but before he wrote Tropic of Capricorn. And Cancer sucks but Capricorn kicks ass. I think Journey helped Miller find his own voice and trust it.

Mind, this is all intuitive conjecture in conjunction with past consumption of various letters, novels, and bios by & on Miller. (Belch) And that's good enough for me.

I'm gonna try Death on the Installment Plan. Looked at it once years ago and saw how fat it was and said no thanks. But I'm hankering for some angry writing so I'll give it another go.
 
I enjoyed Hamsun's Hunger. He also wrote a thin book, a love story, can't remember the title...Valerie? I liked it, too.
Victoria? or maybe Pan?
But I'm hankering for some angry writing so I'll give it another go.
Have you tried Hamsun's Mysteries? Its angry enough.
Why not: Tired Men (or was it Weary Men?) by Arne Garborg. Better than most of what Hamsun wrote, in my opinion.
 
buk also mentioned, maybe a couple of times in correspondence, and in poems, cesar vallejo. he was a tough nut to crack. i'm particularly enthrall to the posthumous stuff.

li po. i kind of connect b.'s "don't try" with the taoist's wu-wei - living spontaneously as opposed to acting with self-conscious attention.
 
sermon on barbarism. payroll of bones

césar vallejo is a true master of the word...

yes! only wish i could read him in the original. what are we missing? i love the paradoxes, the earnest playfulness. the animal repose, the indigenous intellect.

anyone interested in celine wouldn't go far wrong in hunting down milton hindus' fascinating sketch the crippled giant.
 
A note on Hamsun

Keep in mind though that Hamsun was a Nazi and a traitor to rival Quisling.:mad:

In an online game of chess, this guy from Israel asked where I was from, when I replied he immediately typed; Oslo, Norway? Land of Nazi Hamsun!. I wish poets stayd the hell away from politics.

As I understand it, the Hamsun-scholars agree that there is no trace of anti-Semitism or Nazism in Hamsun?s literary work.

Both Bukowski and John Fante considered Hamsun to be the best writer ever. I can?t remember if it was in an interview or in one of his books, where Dan Fante (son of John Fante) describes standing in his father?s office, looking at the bookshelf, where Hamsun?s books had a special section.

By the way, Hamsun won The Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1920, for his work; ?Growth of the Soil?.
 
Hamsun , one of the greats , it seems by the time the nazis rolled into view he was an old man and just did not comprehend the full extent of what they were trying to do (like quite a few others) - Mysteries, Dreamers, Hunger, Pan - all really good books. And his last one - a kind of bittersweet ode - On Overgrown Paths - is autobiographical and speaks of the nazi part of his life. He was a great artist.

Jeffers - a fave of mine - could be said to be crueler than Hitler or any of them. He didn't even believe in going into ww2. He was just extremely disillusioned by humanity (you can't really say that about Hitler, can you?)

Fante - very human, very enduring.

That's all.
 
Sherwood Anderson

I've been looking for some Sherwood Anderson

I read Fante, Celiné & Anderson... cause BUK told me to :rolleyes:

Here is my favorite from the one book I have read by Anderson;


The old man had listed hundreds of truths in his book. I will not try to tell you all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and profligacy, of carefulness and abandon. Hundreds of hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.
And the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.
It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.
Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941)
Excerpt from (?The Book of the Grotesque?) Winesburgh, Ohio (1919)


WORD!
 
I think I've mostly been disappointed by Bukowski's influences and the ones I've liked I read, like McCullers and Dos, before I knew he liked them.
 
two writers i've found through my interest with b are edward bunker and harry crews. they were mentioned in a b fanzine. there's a character in a poem in dangling who awakes every morning with the words, "how do you like your blue-eyed boy, mister death?" that made me think of crews, who has that quote tattooed to his arm.
 
how about ben hecht? he's mentioned in a funny little poem in Mockingbird.
can't remember the title (and we're visiting folks for xmas), just remember, "who's forshafts, ma?"
"somerset maun, yo asshole!"

something like that.
 
The usual suspects...

Fante and Celine, Hamsun (I liked Mysteries best), and Dostoyevsky. Notes from underground is an amazing book, quite possibly the best I've ever read! I heard some mentions of Hesse... he's a fantastic writer. What about Sartre? Always like reading him. I'd put him next to any of the above... and I'm going to read James Thurber next. Any thoughts on him?

Anyway, been trying to post a thread for two articles, but for some reason they're coming up "Invalid." So I'm giving up... but if you want to read something interesting, check these out:

a) Newyorker.com article called "Smashed" (interesting take on Buk)

b) Exile.com article called "A Million Pieces of Shit" (by John Dolan, about James Frey's book... anyone who appreciates literature will appreciate this article)
 
Anyway, been trying to post a thread for two articles, but for some reason they're coming up "Invalid." So I'm giving up...
FYI - new users cannot include URLs until they have more than 5 posts. When you try to post a URL, the post goes into a moderation queue and is not visible on the forum.

I understand that that may be an inconvenience for some new users, but it keeps the lowlife, shit-eating, scumbag, pig-fucking spammers at bay. I clear 20 spam posts a day out of that moderation queue, but no one ever sees them becasue of the no URLs until your 6th post rule.

And no, I'm not afraid that the spammers will read this, because they aren't here to read, just to post. And for some reason they all post in "Unpublished and Uncollected." Every one of them. Go figure.
 
'Crime & Punishment' is certainly a masterpiece.

'The Hunger' by Hamsun is also rather good.

Ditto anything by Hemingway. I really enjoyed his last unfinished book, 'The Garden of Eden' Highly recommended.

By far Hemingway's best in my opinion. Fuck, he left it unfinished. No wonder why. The writing was on the wall long before his brains were.
 
I read Celine's , Dostojewski (funny, we write Bukowski in every language the same, but Dostojewski it's in English Dostoevsky or Dostoyevsky), Hemingway. Soon I'll read Fante's Ask the dust and Celine's Death On The Installment Plan. It's true, Celine it's genius, Dostojewski too. Hemingway's most famous book - The old man and the sea was in my opinion boring. I prefer The green hills of Africa or For Whom the Bell Tolls. A lot of his book it's very good but i don't know how The old man... get a Nobel price.
What's about Walt Whitman? I though that Whitman was on list. Whitman for me its one of the greatest poets in history, really.

Perhaps, if not Bukowski I've never read those writers.
 
I clear 20 spam posts a day out of that moderation queue, but no one ever sees them becasue of the no URLs until your 6th post rule.
Another reason to thank god, there's an mjp to help us all make our lifes bearable!
Baby, I dunno, how many hours a day you spend, just to keep this place clean and keep yourself informed of all posts and answer questions and add to the forum yourself and so on, but it sounds like a HELL of work!
You're amazing! Thanks.
 
Ok, I'm a little drunk right now so I skipped the most recent posts, but I bought a Fante book last week (I think), but I haven't even touched it. It's Ask the Dust I think with the intro by Buk.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I picked it up because someone took the ONLY COPY OF FACTOTUM my university library carries. I wasn't hapy with that, but it will allow me to take a Buk break so I don't burn out all of his good fiction in a year.
 
I first heard of John Fante from Bukowski, so I read 1933 Was A Bad Year because it happened to be the easiest of his books to get when the mood struck me. I think it's a great book, has feeling and is truly hilarious, too. I laughed out loud alot. It's a short novel published after Fante's death. I'll read more Fante eventually.
 
I've been meaning to start reading Fante.
I think I had read most of the writers mentioned in this thread before reading Bukowski.
 
Anybody have a preferred English translation of Celine's Journey to the End of the Night? Mine is by Ralph Manheim and I never got interested enough to work through more than 50 or 60 pages, though I'd be happy to reconsider since I still own it.
 
"Ask The Dust" is a book that nobody would have read if it weren't for Hank. Dan Fante is alive & well and writing the kind of thing that Dan Fante writes.
 
Anybody have a preferred English translation of Celine's Journey to the End of the Night? Mine is by Ralph Manheim and I never got interested enough to work through more than 50 or 60 pages, though I'd be happy to reconsider since I still own it.

I have the New Directions, Ralph Manheim translation, but I've not seen another. Hard book. Wicked freakin' hard. I bought it because Buk mentioned it as being his only good work, although "Death on the Installment Plan" is a great title.

Someday, I'm a-gonna call in sick to work and get through that fucker. Someday.
 
I think I need to go back to Crime and Punishment. I missed it. I think i lack patience. I want a writer that kicks me in the bollocks first. Fydor didn't do that to me. Who kicks you in the balls (other than hank)?
 
Funny... I actually found out about Fante BEFORE Buk... Random rec from someone I was chatting with online. Read Buk because he intro'd Ask the Dust... Read Dostoyevski because Fante mentioned him in... Brotherhood of the Grape, I think.

Read Hamsun because of his numerous mentions in Fante... I dunno if I've read anything specifically because I read about it in a Buk poem. Yet, anyhow. There's time though. At least 30 other books of poems to go still.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top