RealityStudio.org

2.45am here. Sitting drinking Beck's here and listening to Morrissey on my fonez. Going to bed would be a better option. But here are a few quotes ("It's a miracle I've even made it this far" sings Moz, and I could hardly agree more with him) from the letters book Screams From The Balcony by Charles Bukowski about our Patron Saint and Sinner, WSB:

(Dated March 17, 1963)

"More thunder. Burroughs, of course, is important because he keeps the air-holes open. We need a Joyce or Burroughs or Gertrude S. every age to keep us loose and let us know that everything needn't be so, the way it seems or the way the herd-writers want it to seem. These people are valuable, in a way, beyond their work - icebreakers, knockers down of policemen..."

(October 1, 1963)

"Now Ginsberg bothered me a long time, and then somebody told me Burroughs got a regular check from the Burroughs adding machine co. and some of the floss fell away, let alone the homo bit which DOES bother no matter how humanitarian you try to get."

(November what 18?, 1966)

"Burroughs, Ginsberg...how does it feel to be communicating with the Lights of the Age, and also with me. B. and G. have disappointed me at times, but let's admit that they have done things, and that no man creates pure Art day after day."

(January 28, 1967)

"Burroughs. all right. he is reaching, shuffling into a NEW DIMENSION. he is bored, mad, pissed with the ordinary product. rightfully so. any sane man is, any sane insane man. but Burroughs in mixed and mixing new paints, combos, finds flicks, colors, discoveries...surcharged with butter and fire, much of it not bad Art. fine, but he is sliding off the horizon. in trying to discover a New Reality he is losing the actual REALITY. this is his failure. let me illustrate - the only true forward-moving art is an art that discovers new form by still retaining actual reality - perhaps the best example of this is Finnegan's Wake by Joyce. he moved the word out of the concept of the word but still gave us the actual world. the instance came not by accident but by the force of innards and the lonely madness of luck and the way. Burroughs pasteups of the clipped-up London Daily Herald or whatever, or standing on his knees upside down reading the bible through a film of boiling skimmed milk is often entertaining and REAL but more often a trick, a falling together of an insignificant world by tricks and a lot of glue. now it is possible to to get a FREE WORLD WORD, a REAL SHOT FROM THE SKY BY WORKING THE TRICK, but down in us we know, finally, that the only way is to slug it out down the river. not because our masters and schoolteachers taught us this but because the masters and schoolteachers must go, and Burroughs is only pasting their dry canine flicks upon our murdered brows IN DIFFERENT ORDER. not enough. we need new blood, new miracle - not the mixing of old soup. and now that I have killed Burroughs, enough of that."

(November 2, 1968)

"But pros seem to turn to turn to pricks, finally. See Mailer, Genet, Burroughs, Ginsberg, who the hell else?"

3.10am. Wasted 25 minutes on this nonsense. Off to pish and then to my bed. Good night.

"Don't gimme anymore" - Morrissey.

Fascinating stuff. Thanks for typing it up. I keep asking Jed to write up the definitive take on the (non-)relationship of Buk & WSB. It's astonishing that nobody has done it yet.

I think Bukowski gets unfairly lumped in with his generation of writers when he was really just continuing he line of thought Hemingway started once Hemingway gave out. I have never found Bukowski particularly innovative or compelling, despite quite liking his poetry. He's like the literary equivalent of candy corn, in my mind: fun enough but not very filling and as soon as someone offers you a steak you drop it run for the steak.

Guess Bukowski didn't feel much kinship with Burroughs either. Here's a quote from a letter to Carl Weissner of January 28, 1967, that I wasn't going to copy out cos it's not hugely interesting, but in the context of the previous couple of replies here it's pertinent:

"the reason I am reading this mag which is a kind of sex-sadist outlay is that somebody sends it to me, regards an article, a portion of which reads: 'It's possible that the New Bohemia stands on wobbly legs so far as terminology is concerned. It's possible that the New Bohemia is not avant-garde at all, but merely an appendage of beatism at best, and perhaps even the 'rear guard' of that social phenomena. Take a look at the heroes of the beatniks of the sexy Sixties have chosen. They include Timothy Leary, Norman Mailer, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Henry Miller, LeRoi Jones, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Dylan, Bertolt Brecht, John Cage, Eugene Ionesco, W.H. Audn, Anais Nin, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski, to name a few.' so there I am put in my place, but of the names mentioned I am only partially in tune with a few. Genet in portions when he doesn't creampuff out in love with his writing, Brecht in portions, and the very early Auden. and I doubt very much if I am any man's hero."

I'd definitely be interested to read something by Jed on this stuff, if he has anything to say about it.

I have looked into it a bit. The October 1, 1963 letter by Bukowski seems to say it all from Buk end. Class and sexuality issues. From what I have heard from Carl Weissner Burroughs did express much interest in Buk at all. Yet there are tantalizing little tidbits I have come across that may yield further developments. It is a project in the research stages at best. It will take digging around beyond the obvious, readily at hand sources, like the letters. But I have been thinking about it.

For anybody interested in Bukowski and the Beats get a hold of Jean-Francois Duval's of the same name.

http://www.amazon.com/Bukowski-Beats-Co ... 0941543307

It is a good place to start, but the story is far from finished or maybe there isnt a story at all. To be continued? I hope so.

Any idea why he felt this way? In what way did these people "turn to pricks" in his mind? Interesting that he had such high praise for Burroughs in the early 60's but by '68 thought he was a prick...



Fascinating take on the cut-ups.... never thought of it that way. But did he expect someone to create an entirely new language? What would be "enough" ?

Not enough drinking in Burroughs for him.

Seems to me Burroughs drank more than his fair share. Got uresis (sp?), remember? Maybe it was plain jealousy.

There is absolutely no commerce of ideas between the drunk and the druggie, if you ask me, except for in a generalized 'fuck control' (with Bukowksi it was working; with Burroughs the government and media) and 'escape reality through artificial means' (drink with Bukowski, drugs with Burroughs(obviously) way. I dunno. Never really thought much about it; they are just such distinctly separate entities to me that just never crossed my mind. As for jealousy, well, I tend to doubt it. You never got the sense of jealousy from Bukowski of anybody, at least I never did. Misanthropy yes; wanting to be somebody else, or have what they had (he was pretty minimalist, it would seem), no.

I definitely don't know enough about Bukowski to detect any jealousy, but then I only read the poetry and nothing beyond that.

WSB, however, was a fairly serious drunk right up until his death and that generally gets forgotten because he was always doing so many drugs as well. As Wayne P. wrote, "many of the participants were visitors not used to handling guns and not acclimated to William’s booze and dope regimen."

Perhaps because by the late-60s all of the above were visibly involved in supporting anti-gov student protest? I know nothing of Bukowski's politics, though. Just a guess, but I'm thinking he may have been apolitical...or at least unimpressed by student politics/philosophy.

huh? Am i reading that right? Bukowski was anti-gay? What's un-humnaitarian about gayness?

....and... i never thought i'd see Moz mentioned in this forum *lolz

Bukowski was apolitical; that was definitely a stance of his. He writes about politrix very, very little over his lifetime. And he wasn't at all impressed by the student radical types of the 60s either. By 1968 he would be (as memory serves) 48 years old and way too old for their youthful rebellion stuff. He basically regarded humanity in all its ages and stages as a pile of shit, and the new rebellion was just more of the same as the old. He was right. And I think he was partly homophobic because he fucked another man in the ass while drunk one night - he writes of it in Notes of a Dirty Old Man. It's funny as (ass)fuck. He was working for the post office at the time (Post Office, Hollywood and Women and Ham on Rye are the novels of his worth reading, especially the latter) and the column describing that drunken incident, along with others for the LA Free Press he was writing for at the time, got him in trouble with them.

Moz? Yep, me listening to a gay singer, forgot about my staunch anti-gay views again, my image will suffer...damn...

I know that Hank has a line somewhere about how the Beats got bloated and old and are looking more like used car salesmen than poets. This always lead me to think that he saw them as a bunch of sell outs, or at the very least, media whores. Which is funny, considering how shameless he became post-60's:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mODHEvNKpAQ

there's also an article he did in the 50's that criticized jazz readings as a meritless novelty. Which is quite the swipe at Kerouac, as well as the thousands of coffee house Maynard G. Krebses in his wake. Perhaps he saw the whole thing as just a series of publicity stunts, and the Cut-Ups as a showey lazy cop-out sequel to Naked Lunch.

Jed, is that Bukowski and the Beats book any good? Sort of fancy it...but not hugely enthused...could join the queue of a million other books I have to read...