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Charles BukowskiIn moments of grouchy introspection, I’ve divided the cultural detritus of my world into two categories: (1) things annoying pomo hipsters love that I also love; and (2) things annoying pomo hipsters love that I despise. In the latter category I would include Will Oldham, Andy Warhol, Douglas Coupland, Tortoise, Michel Foucault, Tom Robbins, Tom Waits and anything that says “Free Mumia.” Whereas the former category often surprises me with the its cornucopia of riches. Yo La Tengo, Belle and Sebastian, Martin Amis, Shuggie Otis, Nick Hornby, Pierre Bourdieu, Ralph Nader, Sleater-Kinney, Jackson Pollock, John Woo -- this is some great stuff! Perhaps I should just drop the act and come out of the closet as a pomo hipster. I don’t think I’d make the grade though, not when the pomo paratroopers start soliciting loyalty oaths and brainwashing me into buying a new Radiohead EP.One artist beloved of pomo hipsters who I’ve alternately loved and hated is that strange drunk old man of the century: Charles Bukowski. Hank. The ugliest, drunkest, stinkiest, least complicated, wordiest, narstiest little poet this dang country has ever offered the world. Back in the moonbeams of my youth, while I squeezed pimples, slouched my way past the girls, and cautiously stood with my back to the locker, I thought ol’ Hank was a delicious transgressive force. He didn’t give a shit what anyone thought. He banged out poems about fucking and fighting and drinking, without regard to meter or rhyme. His was the freest verse the world had ever seen -- almost as if he drunkenly hit the carriage return by accident every time a synapse flashed in his stormy brain. And he was funny as hell -- a rare quality among poets. Later, pretending to be jaded, world-weary, and misanthropic, I tired of Bukowski. All the most annoying hipsters I knew had his Black Sparrow Press books carefully displayed on their shelves, and you can tell they only took ‘em down as a prop to seduce gullible girls. His poems struck me as repetitive and too straightforward. Maybe he was just a charlatan, a phony, a drunk hack! Certainly he was a one-trick pony. I dismissed him. Now I’ve come full circle -- I crave simplicity and authenticity. I dig any poet that speaks for the working classes. He’s engaging and surprisingly clear-headed. Reading his work aloud is invigorating. I think the key is to hear him as a fun poet, rather than a Great Poet. His poems are more in the tradition of Ogden Nash or Dorothy Parker -- witty, droll, smirking, simple, memorable, exuberant. The sorts of characteristics that make literary theorists go spastic with sneering discomposure and fussy nonchalance. Sure, Hank probably wanted to be taken seriously. But he never tried to take his poetry to the next level -- never tried to be ponderous, formal, or ambiguous. He kept everything very basic, and he churned this stuff out on autopilot. He was a decadent, anarchic machine. Browsing through my local library branch this week, I came across a book, Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, by Howard Sounes. The definitive biography! I was entranced, first of all, by the photographs, which feature a hideous, heavy-lidded, pot-bellied man in various stages of decrepitude. And then the pictures of his various lovers, all of them (except for his deformed first wife) beautiful and intriguing. One such lover, Joanna Bull, merits the following caption: “Joanna Bull felt so ill after having sex with Bukowski she threw up.” Well, hey, for that reason alone I needed to read the book. How could a man so hideously ugly, so pockmarked and dissipated, so full of shit, so perpetually drunk and boorish -- how could he be so lucky? And why would women risk digestive trauma to sit in this dirty old man’s rocking chair? Unfortunately the book doesn’t give any insight into this fascinating line of questioning. But the answer is obvious -- he was a god among hipsters even in the sixties, and fucking him was a pretty attractive thing to add to one’s resumé. The carnal mysteries of Hank are pretty lame, despite the bait in the book’s photographs. Still, I wanted to know the essence, the real key to his appeal. Because his truckloads of words don’t reveal it. His adolescence does, though, and I was shocked by the self-evident answers. He had an abusive father and a mother who was constantly going pie-eyed and putting her hands to her mouth whenever dad and son got into one of their one-sided knock-downs. His dad is a frequent topic of his later poems -- a boring and obvious motif. But I think Hank had much bigger, more powerful foes during his adolescence: homeliness and acne. The boy was ugly. He looked like a heavy-browed missing link, a gurgling simian target for anyone who wanted to smack the ugly out of a slouching teenager. On top of that, he had one of the worst cases of acne ever to erupt in America. The poor boy had to go to special medical treatments, with tolerant nurses wiping oceans of pus flooding from lanced pimples throughout his face and down his back. He would wake up in the morning with a new ruddy ostrich egg between his brows, tender and painful to the touch, keeping everyone from looking him in the eye, forcing him to the shy corners of his school. He was an exaggerated version the quintessential ugly, socially awkward kid from a bad family. He stared vainly at the girls. Boys made fun of him. Would he ever transcend this? No, he never would. Adolescence has a set of rituals -- heavy petting, male bonding, glamour, competition, phoniness, sex. Hank never experienced or understood these rituals, not while he was a teenager. Only later, when he lost his virginity as a young adult and began to write seriously, did he see that life could have the glistening crescendoes that teenage Hank missed. As an adult, working at the post office, he was so shy, ugly, and quiet that at least one co-worker thought he was mentally retarded! Writing was his other self, his liberating force, his grounding in reality. And in his writing, adolescence became his literary identity. Despite the pretense to worldly wisdom that his later work adopts, he always remained an enthusiastic, decadent, rebellious, word-spinning teenager. He craved sex like a teenager. He drank like a teenager. He banged his head in jealousy like a teenager. He smirked like a teenager. He started unnecessary fights like a teenager. This is the key to his appeal. He is Dick Clark in reverse: an American adolescent whose body grew nasty and disgusting while his brain and gonads trundled along at a loping teenage gait. The deep scars from his teenage bout with severe acne not only weathered his face prematurely, but they inscribed him as Our Teenager -- the ultimate annoying and inspiring little troublemaker. It’s no accident that between the caps-lock and the free verse, many adolescent boys tend to type or scrawl poems with the same bloodshot vigor and unembarrassed simpleminded fury that was Hank’s trademark. If Bukowski has any meaning for Culture, I think that’s where it is: stay young, think simple. Too many poets and poetasters embrace the ponderous, puritanical, frowning mindset of Adulthood, and the result is boring and tedious crap. I would rather read absorbing and funny crap. And that’s what Bukowski tended to write. As he memorably intoned in a moment of jocular wisdom, “The more crap you believe, the better off you are.” Still don’t believe me? Listen to the man himself:
with our minds and pockets full of dust like a bad boy just out of school--- you tell me, you who were a hero in some revolution you who teach children you who drink with calmness you who own large homes and walk in gardens you who have killed a man and own a beautiful wife you tell me why I am on fire like old dry garbage. |