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friends (?) of mine, and then at night, pjSfhafcs a bottle of wine and a watercress sandwich, followed by a wailing letter of their penury and/ greatness to somebody somewhere. Anything but writing, working, get-1 ting it done, getting the word down. Well, I guess it beats working/

punch press. The wives and the mothers will work the punch press,/ y j don't worry about that. And the poets, having not lived in the^>out-/ side world in reality, they will then reaKty~,have nothing totwrite ^about, which they do with great ego and mubq dullness. *S

It is almost impossible to write about writing. I remember once giving a poetry reading I asked the students, "Any ques- tions?" One of them asked me, "Why do you write?" And I answered. "Why do you wear that red shirt?" Beincr a w*-''•¦-¦

. ..nuer is damning and difficult. If you have a tal­ent it can leave you forever while you are sleeping one night. What keeps you going in the game is not easy to answer. Too much success is destructive; no success at all is destructive. A little rejection is good for the soul, but total rejection creates cranks and madmen, rapists, sadists, drunkards and wife-beaters. Just as too much success does. I too have been misled by th» p.-—-- ¦

__, wie Komantic concept of writing. As a youth

/

j. oaw too many movies of the great Artist, and the writer was always some tragic and very interesting chap with a fine goatee, blazing eyes and inner truths springing to his tongue continually. What a way to be, I thought, ah. But it isn't so. The best writers I know talk very little, I mean those who are doing the good writing. In fact, there is nothing I duller than a good writer. In a crowd or even with one other person, he is always busy (subconsciously) recording every goddamned thing. He is not interested in speech-making or being the Life of the Party. He is greedy; he saves his juices for the typewriter. You can talk away inspiration, you can destroy God-given genius with your mouth. Energy will only spread so far. I too am greedy. One must be. The only juices th*1" ~-~ ' only time that can simn'" '— '

..__ ..an ce given up, the

... -j ~e given away is the time for Love. Love gives it breaks down inbred hatreds and prejudices. It makes the writ­ing more full. But all other things must be saved for the work. A writer should do most of his reading while he is young; as he starts to form, read­ing becomes destructive—it takes the needle off the record.

A writer must keep performing, hitting the high mark or he is down on skid row. And there's no way back up. For after some years of writing, the soul, the person, the creature becomes useless to operate in any other capacity. He is unemployable. He is a bird in a land of cats. I'd never advise anybody to become a writer, only if writing is the only thing that ceeps you from going insane. Then, perhaps, it's worth it.

.~c--, xl's worth it. ,

FROM ABSENCE OF THE HERO: UNOOLLECTEO STJFHE3 AND ESS/ir3, VOL. 2/ IQ46-IQQ3 f)Y

OH/RLES BUKOWSKI, TO BE PUBLISHED BV O/TY LIGHTS PUBLISHERS IN RIL. \,

BUKOWSKI: TEE LEGEND AND

MIS UNDER STANDINGS by barbet schroeper

The direct'or of Barfly pays tribute to thb

BEHIND THE MYTHS

Misunderstand­ings and opposing opinions about Charles Bukowski never cease. ln . Germany he is \ considered one \ °f the great V writers of * our time, and his col­lected works

have sold

more there

than those

°f any other

writer. The American East Coast literary establishment, however, has yet to take him seriously.

One common misconception about him is that he was one of the Beat poets. Nothing could be further from the truth. Los Angeles has pro­duced very few great men; Charles Bukowski is one of them. A product and chronicler of the world of the workingman, he was far too shy and proud to have joined a bohemian movement—which he could not have afforded anyway. Instead, he submerged himself in the working/drinking class, all while reading authors who had writ­ten honestly about what he, himself, was also witnessing: Dostoyevsky, Celine, Hemingway, Knut Hamsun, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, etc.

He created a legend

-»^^iiu mm based on his weekly columns: "Erec­tions, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Mad­ness" in the L.A. Free Press and "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" in Open City, which were based on his own "improved" real­ity. This legend-making is not uncommon for an artist, especially for a writer who avoided using third-person narration and wrnt-<= r----1

».ULe mostly about him­self as a combative and often antic drunk. But in Bukowski's case it hides one of the most important elements of his personal­ity: an extreme, almost feminine sensitivity, accompanied by a great

sense of decency and respect for the Other. He could often be cruel in his blunt comments about people, but otherwise, he would liter­ally not have hurt a fly.

In my DVD The Charles Bukowski Tapes (50 of his improvised monologues filmed in 1983-84) there is a very revealing moment in the seg­ment entitled "Nature":

"People are indifferent. They don't get them­selves in with the spider and the fly. I got myself in. I am the fly," Bukowski confesses.

This is the Bukowski you discover when you read his most beautiful poems, for instance, the ones from the colie^<--'~- '

.,»*^^uiuij hove Is a Dog

from Hell (one of his 25 books of poetry). His admirers are divided equally between those who prefer his poetry and those who prefer his prose. For many, he completely changed the nature of poetry in the United States. As for his prose, he was condemned to fol­low Hemingway but had a darker and funnier voice. One of the best of his six novels, Women, the prose complement to iove Is a Dog From Hell, starts like this: "I was 50 years Did and hadn't been to bed with a woman for four years." In thf r,o~«- ¦>""

..=au juu pages, using his

newfound celebrity, he catches up at a rapid, hilarious pace to end up in a durable rela­tionship with the only woman who at first refused to sleep with him.

When I think of Bukowski, the title of a book by Sartre keeps popping into my head:

~w..uji. benet, Actor and f Martyr. I also find myself thinking of the ancient Greek philoso­pher Diogenes and the images of his hundreds of followers who in repudiating Plato and his idealizations, in holding fast to Cyn­icism, nature and extreme asceticism flourished for over 500 years until the triumph of Christ. Using his madness, Bukowski was forever trying not to be seen as a Wise Man, although that impres­sion often stayed with those who met him. A consistently dark and devastating humor was his armor (concluded on page 117)

BUKOWSKI

(continued from page 46) against anyone who chose to take him too seriously, and yet he was very serious and lucid about his talent.

Even in his drinking there was a form of wisdom that kept his writing fresh and allowed him to continue to sidestep his own destruction. Slowing down the drink­ing, for example, was done in a graceful way. I saw him in East Hollywood as he was starting to come down, at the age of 58, from hard liquor to white wine—albeit wine in very large quantities. During our early days working on the film Barfly, 12 empty bottles of cheap German white were often lying on the ground by three a.m. A year later, he never drank before sunset. Later still, he switched to red wine, and then, much later, drank only one bottle every other day.

He went back to hard liquor on rare evenings—once at a fancy dinner party for a music industry event at the Beverly

Hills Hotel. At a table behind us sat Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom Hank tried to provoke into a fight. "If you're really so tough," he said to him, "come outside and show us." In a panic, Schwarzeneg­ger's press agents were discreetly signaling Arnold not to respond. Later, Hank stole a carving knife from the kitchen and "went after the rich" with it, spitting on arriving Rolls-Royces.

For his chemotherapy, of course, he had to stop drinking altogether, even the reduced form. First, though, the doctors checked his liver to see if it could withstand the chemo. The test revealed he had the liver of a young man. He was a force of nature. He used a short remission to finish his last novel, Pulp, and in the midst of his pain, kept on laughing until the end about the human comedy he was sharply observ­ing in the hospital around him.

New York, 11/5/2009

"/ would never do a nude scene unless it was done tastefully and was an integral part of the party."