As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can’t believe it.
what do you mean
like
going to work?
What do they do it for? Sex?
what
no
that’s not why people go to work and you know it
TV?
i mean that’s not the primary reason
An automobile on monthly payments? Or children?
yes
obviously
that is why most people go to their jobs
is to pay their bills and also feed their families
Children who are just going to do the same things that they did?
are you honestly asking me to explain the circle of life to you right now
“Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?”
yes
we all realize that
There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
oh?
but I’m too tough for him
oh
well
that’s good
I say, stay in there, I’m not going to let anybody see you
that seems
okay
you can trap birds in your heart if you want to
i guess
there is a place in the heart that
will never be filled
i thought that was where the bird was
no
that’s a different place
a different place in my heart
in my next life I want to be a cat
to sleep 20 hours a day and wait to be fed
you do that already
well
sometimes i have to wait to get drunk
im sad
i’m sorry to hear that
sad like a christmas tree
would you like me to come over?
i’d rather stick my head up an elephant’s cunt
If I had been born a woman I would certainly have been a prostitute
oh, well
you know
you can still
be one
if you want
a man can love a woman he never touches
only writes to, keeps little photographs of
do you mean like celebrities
there’s no lie in her fire
which fire
not like all those other fires
which fires
those lying fires
those fires that lie to you when you’re talking to them
what matters is how you walk through the fire
the lying fire?
NO
the walking fire
that’s a different fire
You know, we’re monstrosities. If we could really see this, we could love ourselves…realize how ridiculous we are, with our intestines wound around, shit slowly running through as we look each other in the eyes and say “I love you,” our stuff is carbonizing, turning into shit, and we never fart near each other
you fart near people all the time
you farted in the middle of that sentence
never fart near each other
that’s what’s wrong with this country
and Disneyland is the opposite of a graveyard
that’s not what it is at all
you can go to Disneyland and still accept that you’re going to die
not even allowed to fart in Disneyland
The crowd is the gathering place of the weakest
true creation is a solitary act
also can you come over and bring dinner
and also bring whiskey
can you come over and clean up and then bring dinner
the ones who love you, that’s pretty hard to take
“Oh you are so great, Bukowski! Oh, you saved my life! Oh, Bukowski! Oh, Bukowski!” It makes me sick
oh
i’m sorry to hear that
i didn’t have any friends at school
didn’t want any
well
that part’s good, i suppose
if you didn’t want them
you can put fifty thousand dollars in my bank, I still don’t like the rich.
I may eat dinner with them in the same cafes, the maitre d’ might know my name, but I still don’t like them.
why don’t you eat dinner somewhere else, th–
Because they are dead. I don’t like dead people, even if they have one million dollars. I take their million but I don’t take them.
why don’t you not take their million
nothing ever works
the whole Left in America is just glorious bullshit hype-nothing
Tags: charles bukowski, poetry, texts from
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Mallory, I have to stop you.
GO AHEAD AND TRYYYY
One of your best articles yet, I’m stuck in a line wrapped twice around the dmv cackling like a moron attracting the most amusing collection of stares.
Maybe 20 years ago when I was a trembling youth I bought some terrible English music magazine because their last-page interview was with Nick Cave, it was all smirky in the way of the English music journalist of the time and one of the questions was something to do with what advice he would give to the youth of today. I remember every word of the interview but particularly of the answer to this one, which was: “Stop reading Bukowski, and stop listening to people who tell you to read Bukowski.” He was, as in everything, correct. I have a lot of time for a great many discarded white men of Yore but not for this one. no.
I would never have expected such common sense to come from the mouth of Nick Cave. My estimation of him has increased manyfold.
Nick Cave, despite all appearances, is actually a pretty sensible guy. Especially since he gave up the drugs.
That’s sage advice, and in fact I can come up with a pretty decent list of names to replace “Bukowski” in it.
god, fuck bukowski so much.
i once dated a guy who told me, as if he was letting me in on some big secret, “sometimes i feel so much i can hardly stand it, and i have to, like, scream, or cry, or something.” i was quiet for a few seconds before i said, “i think that’s just being human” and he got mad at me for invalidating his special snowflake-ness. the next (and last) time i saw him, he was reading bukowski. i was like, oh.
There’s a reason screaming and crying are things people do and have words for.
yeah, the sentiments bukowski expresses, so far as I have been unable to keep from becoming aware of them, are not wrong as such, a lot of them, just dumb and dumbly articulated. Work IS the worst and people DO do stupid and unnecessary things because they are too dull to imagine alternatives, and we ARE all going to die. all very true. but I don’t need this idiot to tell me any of that, and I especially don’t need some other random guy to tell me that when he couldn’t even figure it out for himself at twelve like the rest of us, he had to read Bukowski saying it, at which point it blew his mind.
This is precisely how I have always felt about The Catcher In the Rye. Like, duh, kid. Get over yourself.
But Salinger’s good! Not, you know, consistently, but that book’s good. He is the fourth and highest benchmark in my Discarded White Men of Yore – what is the opposite of pantheon. That. It goes: Salinger: entirely acceptable; Kerouac: acceptable if you got over it; Bukowski: Not Acceptable; Henry Miller: DON’T TOUCH ME
so, i know this comment was months ago now, but I entirely approve of this reverse pantheon and it is brilliant.
Co-signed! Though I’m heartened that a lot of the younger generation of high school students also seem to think he’s an annoying whiner.
When we read it in English class I had a teacher who STRONGLY SUGGESTED it was an unreliable narrator and the kid has some kind of toxic personality disorder.
Like, I don’t think that was the author’s intent but it’s the reading I stuck with to get through that damned book
I didn’t realize how similar he and I were until I read that 3rd one.
I am always reminded of the MST3K robots singing a Jingle Bells parody about LA in the ’60s that ended with “Charles Bukowski is pukin’ out the window, and Santa’s on his way!”
That was The Girl In The Gold Boots! A rare non SF/Horror movie for the Sci-fi years, and one of the rare “Valley Of The Dolls”/Exploitation films they had. It’s one of my favorite episodes “Who knew the sex and drugs industry had a seamier side?!”
I watched it years ago, and really need to dig it up again. That line just made us laugh so much it’s always stuck with me.
There would be many more typos.
cn u bring moero whiskkkyyy?? 😉
ur teh bestttttt
lol
I freakin’ love this so much. It’s actually hilarious *just* how many terrible guys read Bukowski, and all of them think they’re so unique – they don’t even realise what a cliche they are. Bukowski is just one of those authors*, that when you see even just one copy on a potential romantic partner’s shelf, you are 100% justified in fleeing into the night, never to darken their door again.
*Another prime example being Henry Miller. “Oh, is that Tropic of Cancer you have there? Buh-bye!”
Also: ‘you can go to Disneyland and still accept that you’re going to die’
Why do so many wannabe existentialists refuse to accept that getting on with life is not some kind of horrific COMPROMISE OF THE SOUL?
‘The crowd is the gathering place of the weakest
true creation is a solitary act
also can you come over and bring dinner
and also bring whiskey
can you come over and clean up and then bring dinner’
MADE BY YOUR SOULLESS CAPITALIST-COMPROMISING HANDS
Yes. This. That was my favourite line of the whole piece.
Your thing about fleeing into the night reminds me of my absolute favorite quote of all time:
“We need to make reading sexy again. If you go home with someone and they don’t have any books, don’t fuck them.” — John Waters
I think John Waters would probably agree that sex is also contingent on the lover not having shit taste.
I read Tropic of Cancer because a boy I liked suggested it to me, and when he asked what I thought of it, I said, “I honestly couldn’t get past all the child rape” and then he never spoke to me again. (Good!)
You were a better person than me: I’m embarrassed to admit that I pretended to like it in order to impress a boy. But even in that state of stupidity, I reeled in horror at the racism.
I also wondered if Miller actually understood how female genitals actually work. I don’t wonder now. [Spoiler: He didn’t]
Tropic of cancer was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me when it came to midcentury asshole male writers.
There’s this moment, quite early on, when he says “I will ream out every wrinkle in your c*nt” and I just couldn’t take it any more. So I threw the book across the room and didn’t pick it up again. I was/am just so tired of the misogyny, the silenced women, the arrogance, the male writers who indulged their every desire, who treated everyone around them like garbage, who just took whatever they wanted from people less powerful than themselves and called it revolution. Who claimed they were breaking down repressive social norms but who just reenacted their white, male, heterosexual privilege over and over and over again because their revolution wasn’t about solidarity, or building a new society but was instead about their own selfish desires. And I said to myself that I just couldn’t take once more book about middle class white men being assholes to everyone around them and calling it deep, of them thinking that they are the only ones with feelings and then shoving their incredibly banal feelings down our throats like a small child screaming for attention or that one dude in your first year philosophy class who had to explain everything to you terribly slowly in tutorial because the only possibly reason you could be disagreeing with him was because you didn’t really understand the *profundity* of what Nietzsche was really saying.
So I don’t read any of them anymore, and my life is much better. (Sorry about the rant, I apparently still have a lot of feelings about this!)
No apologies necessary, the rant was glorious. My feelings exactly.
These ‘rebel’ male writers are always so conservative at heart, too. They wouldn’t know a real revolution if it came up and kicked them in youknowwhats.
This is very good, but on the other hand, work is definitely bullshit.
I feel this is a good time to bring up this article: http://www.xojane.com/relationships/men-who-love-…
I’m not going to lie, I haven’t read many xojane articles on dating that I thought were good and smart, but that one is great. And true. when I had an OKC profile, I quoted a bit of poetry to explain my username, and many were the dudes who seized this as an opportunity to quote Bukowski at me. And, yeah, even the ones I took time to get acquainted with were pretty much of the same flock as the ones she describes.
oh god though I am now traumatised by clicking on the video link in that article of him assaulting his girlfriend. What a pathetic scumbag. Suggest showing this to anyone who thinks he’s worth anything at all… :((
Also he looks like some ghastly rotting toddler.
And this
You know those victim-blamey don’t-get-raped “safety guides” that always pop up around spring break? THIS should be on those guides.
WHERE WERE YOU WHEN I GOT TOGETHER WITH MY MISERABLE SOD OF AN ABUSIVE EX? He had all three of those writers on his shelves, and I’d never read them so I had no idea what it meant. I was just thrilled to meet someone who read a lot. I was less thrilled when I caught him trying to throw out my possessions in order to make space for more bookshelves, some years on.
I still can’t go into one of the local charity bookshops, because despite whining for five years about how much he hated running it – and by whining I mean coming home and threatening to beat up the elderly volunteers, then eventually leaving me for a rather vulnerable young employee of his – he’s still there.
And also this
(last one I swear I just really hate Bukowski)
That is so damn excellent.
I’m now picturing Bukowski as a wannabe standup comedian getting an utterly flat reaction from the audience. In reality, I guess he’s actually the catalyst for a lot of wannabe standup philosophers getting utterly flat reactions from their friends?
Laughing so hard.
That’s in the same genre as people who get this smarmy look on their face when they say, “Why drive to the gym? Why not run, or walk, or bike?” Because, dumbass, sometimes it’s raining, sometimes it’s winter and there’s snow on the ground, sometimes it’s dark out, sometimes the gym is too far away, sometimes it’s too close and not really much of a workout, sometimes it’s not cardio day, sometimes you don’t want to work up a sweat after you are done exercising, all of this would be pretty obvious if you had the slightest fucking idea of what you were talking about.” (Bumped up by an order of magnitude if you’re taking kids to the gym.)
I really wish the Toast had been around when I was a teenager, to make it clear to me that the male canon was not something I had to attempt or pretend to like. I guess for the sake of diversity it’s a good thing I read a few books by men before almost entirely abandoning them but…is it really? I mean I read like 4 Philip Roth books before I just accepted he was a turd. Think of all the staring into space or watching reruns of the Nanny I could have done instead.
Gah yes, I know what you mean. I do like a lot of works by White Male (TM) writers, and I find it stimulating to read outside my comfort zone, but so much 20th century white male literature is so samey and boring, as well as obnoxious. I too wish I’d known that it’s perfectly okay, nay, necessary, to call out and refute outrageous racism and misogyny in Canonical Works, and that that actually makes you a critically engaged, intelligent reader and not an immature kill joy who hates free speech, as Idiot Men I Have Known would have it.
For a little while when I was 14 or 15 I literally carried around a copy of Howl in my purse, just waiting for someone to notice it and tell me how smart and edgy I was. Spolier alert: no one ever did.
I don’t have any particular rule about what I read nowadays, but I do find that books are a lot more enjoyable when I read them simply to experience their content and not because I “should” or because I want to cultivate some kind of identity through it.
hey, bukowski was a lousy poet, but ginsberg did some tremendous stuff! there’s no shame in liking ‘howl.’
As a young dude, I was utterly baffled and disappointed by some of the books that I thought I was supposed to like. Portnoy’s Complaint? Kid masturbates with a piece of raw liver, thanks, that really lit up my life. The Catcher in the Rye? Some whiner who’s much more irritating than any of the “phonies” he incessantly complains about. On the Road? Yeah, it’s always great to read rambling monologues from people who insist they’re having way more fun than you are. A Separate Peace? If there was someone who could make the case for a WWII-era prep school novel to Chicago public school kids in the late seventies, my English teacher (who, it should be said, was an excellent writing teacher) wasn’t it.
On the other hand, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World were great, especially once I realized that they were those rarest of creatures, science fiction novels accepted as quote-endquote real lit.
YES to the Nanny, NO to Philip Roth!
I had a young man come up to the library desk and ask if we “had any Bukowski”. He was mildly exasperated and smug that I asked “who?” and had to look up where it was on the shelf. I walked him over to find the book and realized why I didn’t know who Bukowski was. I have a strict no Beat poets or free-spirit dude writer policy for my reading list, so I guess we both got to feel mildly exasperated and smug that day.
That’s a good policy.
I’ve got a T-shirt that has “TEAM BUKOWSKI” surrounding a portrait of him by Robert Crumb; I never liked Bukowski that much, and have soured on Crumb, but I keep it because I don’t have enough purple T-shirts.
This should yield some A+ deleted comments.
I think this is the first Texts From I’ve read where I thought “BLOCK NUMBER” by the end of the first section. Hieronymous Bosch can text me anytime, but I think I might actually change my number to stop hearing from Bukowski.
Block number, disinfect phone.
ok but which is worse: men verbally jerking off about Bukowski at you in an attempt to seem cool and cultured, or those same men telling you about all the sex-positive feminist books they’ve read?
Oooooommmmgggg you’re the Ghost of Dating Past.
dang, we got the same Ghost there
Should I send this to the ex with whom I saw not one, but TWO documentaries about Good-Time Charlie, with the subject line “How You Like Me Now?”?
Rhetorical question. Have already done so.
I watched it years ago, and really need to dig it up again. That line just made us laugh so much it's always stuck with me.
I hate Bukowski with the white hot passion of a thousand fiery suns. I read a biography of his, Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, or something like that, cos I liked the title. Thus I learned of his writing child rape fantasies for Hustler. AND HE DEFENDED DOING SO.
Mallory, you may not remember me but our parents made us be friends at that age when play dates were determined by who the parents wanted to hang out with who had kids of similar ages. Here is a text I recently sent to a friend along with a link to some of your writing. Please feel free to use this as praise for the back (or even inside cover) of your current or any future novels:
“This is a girl I was good friends with from ages 3-7. Since then she has become an adult and an author. And very funny.”