bukowski and the hot water life

"Hot Water Music", Charles Bukowski, 1983.

It's mind-boggling to me, first of all, how one author can be so prolific. Bukowski wrote, I mean he must've done it all the time, a chronicler of all he saw, and a lot of what he saw was the gutter (from what I know). I put off "Hot Water Music" for a good while, but this reading was exactly what the doctor ordered in my current ordeal with my job status and the ugliness of this world. It is what it is, that's the way Bukowski seems to put it through this mass collection of short stories/vignettes.

One to the next, I would almost forget what I had read previously and need to refresh my memory. Ahh yes, Hot Lady, that's the one where the woman sets herself on fire to prove you could do it and not scream, Joan of Arc style. What's it mean? That people are crazy, it must mean that with the nonchalant, OH WELL ending (very common in these stories). And what else? Some Hangover, that's the one, yes, about a man getting extremely drunk then molesting two of the neighbors girls in his closet. ("She told you what?" "That you took her and Cathy into the closet and took their panties off and sniffed their peepees.") The man was a drunk, and somehow, someway, the neighbors decided to _help_ him, not call the cops. The moral? Hell, that one's tough...the terrible is terrible in isolation, but in totality it's the fucked crooked way of life. Terrible is subjective. And so on. These stories, especially exemplified by Some Hangover, could probably cause discomfort (as could lots of Bukowski from what I understand) if not taken at the bent he was trying to go for, exposure of a dirty world.

It's hard to isolate my favorites, so now I scroll through. Scrum Grief was a hilarious rub on modern poetry. Victor Valoff, the poet, was performing, and recurring Bukowski alter-ego Henry Chinaski, is sitting in with his girl and gets nauseous over the lines like, "East of the Suez of my heart / begins a buzzing buzzing buzzing / sombre still, still sombre", and so on repetitious, saying very little with a lot of words, the opposite of what poetry is supposed to be if you think about it. The Man Who Loved Elevators is a dark tale of a maybe or maybe not rapist (OK a probably rapist) who could only get excited about fucking women he didn't know on elevators. That one hit me because of the savagery of his final act, against an unwilling woman (the past one was all for it), and his inability to become intimate in bed, properly, the tale of a man too scared of the moment, his inhibitions only becoming, absurdly, sprung on elevators. It's sort of a crooked tale of sexual alienation. Beer at the Corner bar, shows a man being angrily brow-beaten by a corner bar crowd for his beliefs ("Hey, here's a guy who says he didn't feel a fucking thing when he read about those 50 little orphan girls burning to death in Boston!"). It's a staunchly Nihilistic bent, playing these sort of beliefs against a sentimental mainstream society. I liked Home Run, just for the bartender getting his skull cracked by the baseball bat, the bartender who is this sort of "in" world screwing over the bum drunk in the bar over, then getting his later on. I'd've had joy writing that one. Those might've been my favorite, who knows? There was only 30 some.

I guess I underplayed the comedy of these stories, too. The reactions to the absurd tales are hilarious. "So I've got this vase. It's a perfect fit for me. I put it into this vase and started thinking of Bernadette. I was going good when the damn thing broke. I had used it several times before but I suppose this time I was terribly excited. She's a sexy-looking woman..." Then the doctor, "Never never stick that thing into anything made of glass." That's just funny to me. Poor guy wanted to get his rocks off, but whoa, what a way to go about it. Had to get stitches. Anyhow, those are the types of situations Bukowski likes to write his characters into in "Hot Water Music". And what does the man do after he gets stitched up? Went grocery shopping. Another day.

So that's my first grand Bukowski experience. The guy is a master storyteller, especially with the brevity of these episodes (4-6 pages for most of 'em) he can really paint a situation, color it with dirty raw life and humor, and seemingly say fuck it, you do what you want with it.

kerouac being kerouac

"Mexico City Blues", Jack Kerouac, 1959.

This is strictly Jack as Jack; his Bhuddochristian beliefs, his love for bop, his retrospectives on his brother Gerard and father, and of course, the automatism taking over for the scattered and lovely imagery he delivers here. Of the poems I've read, this book encompasses what Kerouac was as a poet, the nonsense, the automatic, the golden heart.

You could say the nonsensical gives contrast to the (even sometimes solid) imagery Kerouac delivers. I'll go with that. The topics ebb and flow, choruses follow each other up or drift happily into new territory without warning, and that spontaneity is exciting and interesting. The transition from college to hospital to pondering severe drug addiction in the vain of William Burroughs is a dangerous ride, and you keep your eyes open at all times as Kerouac delivers, "Doctor gave me a mainline shot / Of H grain - Jesus I / thought the whole building / was falling on me / went on my knees, awake, / lines come under my eye / I looked like a madman." These are, on the surface, simple lines, but they paint bleak and real pictures.

We all know from reading his take on writing (especially if you have The Portable Jack Kerouac) that he hated the bullshit. Hated it! The idea of "blowing" like a jazz poet was the ideal behind this book, and if that meant some nonsense, it'd be soul nonsense, mind-chatter. But genuine. So do I crucify him for his naivete, lines like, "Moll the mingling, mixup / All your mixupery, / And mail it one envelopey: / Propey, Slopey, Kree. / Motey, slottey, notty, / ..." and so on, you get it. So do I? Well, no, probably not, but I have to say it makes for a cumbersome read at times. I understand what he's doing but my attention is pulled away, and only in retrospect can I appreciate the let-looseness. But I must admit, it pulls me away from my sometimes-dependence on linearity. It's hard to go back and forth, from Kerouac and even what I've read of Joyce and their values versus those of, say, Norman Mailer or Charles Bukowski, who were by no means conventional, but also not of the mind to placate the nonsensical regions of the mind nor spirit. They are all great, though.

So before I go, I wish to put out there, in the air, that it is a pleasure to be able to read all these works. To come closer to humanity before I perish. This is the portal, the gateway, to the heart. All I do in this blog is ramble, ramble, 30 minutes of free-flowing thought, starting points to contemplation on great literature. Not reviews nor opinions, really, just starting points of thought that will branch out on every work until the day I die, and hopefully intermingle with other people's thoughts, if I knew anyone who gave a damn. I don't know if I'll keep this things going, I am very self-conscious about it. Not because people can stumble upon it (no one reads this thing, nor do I care if they do or don't), but because I don't think it brings out the best of my analysis. We'll see.

my kafka morning and afternoon

"The Metamorphosis", Franz Kafka, 1915.

La da da da. This work, this Kafka, so many people imitated, tried to grip the inner us, the being of alienation, and I won't say they failed, no, many do just fine, but now that I have dipped into the Kafka experience, I can see how he is such a beacon to existential literature. "The Metamorphosis" is one of the most gripping, true stories I have read.

The Bantam Classics edition comes equipped with so much extra, especially in the ways of critical essays, you could take a small college course on "The Metamorphosis" in these 188 pages. I read one, but really, I just wanted to read the story. And now I want to give my reaction.

UNFRIEND: So, Gregor Samsa turns into vermin, a beetle...what did you think about his transformation?

ME: Well, I had a notion, through the little I've read of the story beforehand, that "The Metamorphosis" was about alienation. However, after reading through Kafka's background, it really hits you how his day job really detracted from his true passion, writing, and how his inner-self was at such odds with everything around him, his perception of what it means to be alienated is astounding. Turning into the beetle, the true self, and being disgusting to all around you, even to your self, that's profound.

UNFRIEND: If that was his true self, though, why was he so disgusted?

ME: I suppose he was unprepared for truth of his situation. Of what lingered in him. I have long thought that if we were exposed to ourselves, we would be horrified. In one of my unfinished novels, a young man is nakedly exposed to visions, regular visions of horrible, routine things he did, and proclaimed in glee, only after having gotten used to all he'd done and his ability to change, "I AM awful!"

UNFRIEND: How do you think he adapted to his metamorphosis?

ME: Again, he was completely unprepared. As time went on he learned to function as a beetle, but his mind was still so preoccupied with his family suffering, for him not being able to provide any longer. Of course, that was untrue when he saw his mother, father, and sister start to earn, and in the end he discovers how obsolete his existence was in regards to their comfort. It really makes you question a person's relative importance in that way. It also brings into question the value of altruism -- are good deeds really just someone else's perception of doing something good, when in reality, it could be done by the actual person being helped, and in turn is the do-gooder nothing of the sort, just a guy or girl to get over on, to be pimped?

UNFRIEND: How did you _feel_ reading "The Metamorphosis"? Did it evoke a special emotional reaction within you?

ME: Yes, a feeling of sadness and of some bitter confirmation. The images of Gregor having to hide under a sheet when his mother and sister were around, ones that loved him and did their best for a good while to take care of him despite his transformation, those images will haunt me forever because there are so many times I want to crawl under the same sheet, my true feelings and thoughts end up there, I cannot show everyone what I am. When I show my dad my poetry, he says he feels dumb and doesn't get it. Neither does my mom. Nor my psychologist. Very few do. But we can talk about basketball. That's my relation to the vast majority of the world, perhaps the whole thing, it's a struggle to let out the true realizations of the mind in the face of a wholly non-understanding world. However, as he hears his sister playing violin, he is snapped into a transcendent state that music can bring, and he forms a plan to take back his family, but even with that he fails and the apple episode with his father ensues. Because even though he can feel the music's spirit, he cannot erase what he is. A dreamer, perhaps. An ugly, creepy, out-of-the-order dreamer.

UNFRIEND: Why do you think Gregor's family turned on him?

ME: They were working to restore order to the house, and in such an equation he is not part. They were, after all, going through no metamorphosis themselves. His metamorphosis inconvenienced them to an extent, but they adjusted to keep their planet in orbit and not challenge the unknown, and he could not be part of such an equation. There was bound to be a time either they changed or he had to go...when in reality the inevitability was to be...he had to go.

UNFRIEND: Do you buy his metamorphosis and death as liberation, as suggested by one of the critical essays in the Bantam Classics version of the story?

ME: I don't sense liberation within the transformation. It is hard for me to wrap my mind around his being liberated because as an insect he has a stronger reaction to his sister's violin playing, to music. But perhaps. Perhaps it opens his mind to the poetry of those strings, however, can that save him from being alienated from his family, especially his father who plays this particularly unforgiving role? That is a contentious point. If we assert that his role within the family was obsolete anyway, that his relationships to his family were, in the sense of his role in the family, superficial, then perhaps the music was the pinnacle of his be. But there was still love flowing from his mother and sister to him, at some point, that he could not properly reciprocate, and that was torture he never overcame to his death. His dying was, perhaps, the liberation unwittingly, playing his final role in the sick little dance of his household, allowing his family members to continue in their illusion of who they are, and allowing him to rest in peace.

UNFRIEND: All right, I'm out of questions, any parting thoughts on "The Metamorphosis"?

ME: I question whether Kafka intended all this psychological role play in "The Metamorphosis", or was he just feeling so damn separated from the ordinary way of things that this was how he described such a feeling. I don't think fiction can be merely autobiographical, fiction writers' minds roam n wander oh so much and are illuminated with new ideas in the most abstract inexplicable ways, but with that in mind, perhaps Gregor Samsa in his transformation, is the angst of being in a world that can't conceive of you as you are. That alone is bold, profound, and the way Kafka presents it is mesmerizing. I loved this story from the get-go, when I could conceive of Samsa as this feeling of great angst through alienation and lack of empathy, by a world that wants business as usual and cover-ups of the gut-truth, I fell in love with Kafka for the first time.

when your therapist gives you a book to read, you read it

"Exit Ghost", Phillip Roth, 2007.

I have about as much respect for my therapist as I do for any living person, so when this one in a million Phoenix intellectuals gave me "Exit Ghost" by Phillip Roth to read, I said, OK. No prob. Gotta be something to it. All righty.

So why give this to me? I believe she thought I'd love the style, the introspection offered by serial character Nathan Zuckerman, now a 71 year old semi-recluse finding his New York all over again 11 years after leaving. Perhaps she thought he could impart wisdom on me, also, give the trials and tribulations he finds. And to show me life doesn't end after you turn 30(?). OK, I'm probably reaching now.

Roth's Zuckerman is a direct type of guy who digs into his gut to pick out exactly how he's feeling, and while it's not always profound, it is striking in its honesty while being philosophically intriguing...in this aspect: The concept of the young replacing the old, the old's animosity toward the young and the young's animosity toward the old, and the ultimate despair of the old who know they are to be replaced anyhow (the old represented as Zuckerman, Lonoff, the young represented in a slew of characters, most deviously Kliman, the upper 20s Harvard grad who is running head first into becoming Zuckerman's hero's (EI Lonoff's) biographer). We see Nathan, back in New York to resolve a problem of incontinence, be coaxed back to civilization in NYC, and before you know it he's made an agreement with a married couple to trade places for a year. Bitingly (as I get back to the youth replacing the elderly diatribe) we see Nathan fall head over heels for the young married woman he is to trade places with, Jamie Logan. Though he is old (more than twice her age), impotent, and 11 years removed from his life in the city, he cannot help but to be drawn in by her beauty (showing the old man to shell still vibrant desires) to the point he is tortured into writing a play using "He" and "She" to bring to life their intimate relationship that never existed in but one simple conversation. As this goes on, he is trying to fend off Kliman (who he insecurely asserts is Jaime's lover, to make his angst all the more potent) and his insistence in EI Lonoff's big secret (incest), trying to run him off biographing his reclusive hero and shaming his name (as Zuckerman sees it), and in the meantime he lets loose many a thoughts on this new world from his opinions on cell phones (take away from all contemplation) to elections (couldn't care less anymore). We see a turning of the page with Zuckerman's leaving back to the country, ready to call all off, a page turned on his time and as we get to know him psychologically we see all the hurt that can contain. It's not the change he's scared of...it's the recklessness in which it is performed. The gall of a 28 year old trying to understand and chronicle someone not even alive during his lifetime (no matter his intentions, which are not terrible really)...this young world thinks it knows everything! And yet Zuckerman found himself identifying with the head-first approach of Kliman, the youthful vigor and excitement, recognized it from his younger life. So yes, the page turned, and it is a bit bitter, but there is nothing one can do. We are all young once, right? We all learn. I'm trying, too...maybe that's what my therapist was trying to get to me.

"Exit Ghost" was an enjoyable enough read. The prose are quite direct -- Roth refuses to sugar coat the failure of the mind and body in the aging protagonist, but also allows Zuckerman to retain his immense dignity, and know when to pull himself back and out of the fray of the young and restless. Should I admire Zuckerman? He surely stands his ground, does what he believes in, in protecting the frail former lover of Lonoff (Amy Bellette), as well as what he believed about Lonoff, from Kliman. Should I loathe him? He could be so condescending, bitter, and utterly morose in his contemplations, so out of touch with the world to try to judge it so harshly. But I shouldn't do any of those things. I think I _get_ him. I wonder if Roth'd kick a 26 year old for saying that, but I dug his words, I dug his sticking to his guns and his ability to admit to the aging process and instead of woe-is-me-ing he keeps his notebooks so he shan't forget, he tries to stop up his wang best he can. He tries to improve, too, he admits the biggest lessons come late, he's open to the surprise of falling deeply for this Jaime, yet another muse in a world that can seem so devoid these days. He's not a crotchety asshole -- though I bet if you met him for just a moment in time he could come off like one -- but a seasoned old man who is wary of the bullshit. And he writes and writes before more escapes him, trying to hold it all in. I _get_ that. You can't tell me I don't.

Escaping the walls, somehow

"An American Dream", Norman Mailer, 1964.

Apparently, hiding beneath all of the vanity, fashion, good put-ons, there is something lingering within us that is urging us to strike, kill, and we resist, well, all of us but the insane, innit right?

I have been so ridden with anxiety lately, this has been a hard one to take, so I took and took and took anyway, escaped in some other guy's problems. That guy being Stephen Rojack, ex military, ex congressman, high society intellectual with a television show, a solid university job, and as he built this grandest of block houses, the child made it go KABLOOM, like we'd all like to do. He sends his wife plummeting to her death, fucks her maid after he does it, rationalizes his way out of suspicion, and lingers in this inextricably alive feeling when caught between his conscience and his raw passion to destroy and rebuild, returning something to himself that he felt wilt away in his life of accomplishment. He finds a new love, beats the shit out of her ex (a famous singer), runs around town drinking and trying to figure things out, and what he comes to in an abstract way is the plain cruelty of the high-brow, and the plain cruelty of having cruelty masked in the lavishness.

I'm not so used to stories being told this way, as I am much more interested in bums, low-class intellectuals who have their books and their willingness to suspend morals in search of the IT (like Kerouac would say). But a-ha! Where Mailer's upper-class drama of the callings of the moon and other psychologically acute madness depart greatly from what I'm used to, it is this suspension of morals, the willingness to delve into the uncomfortable passions of the human spirit, the Evil (as he explores such a dichotomy of God v. Devil, through Rojack the philosopher, the existentialist, figuring them to be much more evenly matched than the puritan types might have you assume), which show a close relationship to the beats, the progressives, the generation of rebellion against the obviousness of how things are and will always be. The heat, as he breaks his wife's collar bone and throws her to the street then immediately goes to screw Ruta in the vagina, in the ass, this raw carnal action both disturbing, engrossing, and erotic, this is a heat that dwells in us and leaves our registers as exhaust while we focus on how to live well-adjusted, and Rojack throws it to the wind so he can enter the realm of chaos, exhilaration, fear, and the living.

The way in which Mailer presents this is fairly formalistic, and his words dance fashionably across the page, sometimes distracting through all the philosophy, though sometimes he takes a deep breath and goes and goes which is wild and appropriate for the racing mind of this tory. I take issue with the form, at times, to an extent, but I remember then that Norman Mailer was no low-class beatnik roaming the world, and his approach is a product of who it seems he is. Also, the thrills of the escape from the police, the escape from Shago and his blade, these were cheap thrills woven into the plot that draw parallels to Shakespeare's perverse jokes for the lower-income crowd, and can be dismissed as such, but also appreciated as such. Still, through its presentation, there is a Nihilist behind this novel, a man who thrives in the absurdity and the cruelty of the world, and isn't afraid to expose it in a most severe and witty manner.

I can certainly relate to Rojack. I have definitely felt the sting of feeling your whole life was this set-up pit of mediocrity, some gains and some failures, but all failures in that life hasn't been experienced as sharp as one would like it, and while I have never felt the most savage of acts was necessary to turn me back to life, it is this extreme case represented in "An American Dream" that causes one to look around and see the dastardly life surrounding...and perhaps do something.


"In some, madness must come in with breath, mill through the blood, and be breathed out again. In some it goes up to the mind. Some take the madness and stop it with discipline. Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is the growth of madness denied."

One flew east, one flew west...

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Next", Ken Kesey, 1963.

I don't feel like doing this regular today. That's not how it's done in the underground, the counter-culture, when men are trying to find their way around the walls, and end up going through them because we've had, straight-up, enough. Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" is the frustration of going up against the authorities to be turned down, churned into the family of The Normals, fuck it.

Chief Bromden has been moppin' and playin' dumb on that loony ward for ages, who knows how long? Perhaps since man created government, or since man stopped making the God of Norms, the God of Norms started making him, or since we believed the hype about any type of God in the first place and forgot who we were. I'm sure it'd be better to rundown the ensemble of nutbags, so on, so forth, but this story was all about Bromden to me, the grand sad Indian narrator mopping around, remembering the origin of LIFE in AMERICA, and RP McMurphy bringing him back to it with the swagger of a young Jay-Z moving in. The hustler, jolted these kids to life, these brainwashed rejects and made them feel that life didn't have them by the balls, but they could squeeze its genitals whenever they damn well pleased. The nemesis was, of course, Nurse Ratched, the one to fear, the one who used EST and lobotomy as punishment. She was THE MAN crushing cats for nothing, because she could, to keep order, but mostly because she could, you could never assume her agenda revolved around anything wholesome though she leaned on wholesome intentions in the face of equal authorities, and like that, she pulled the wool over the eyes of everyone like grand old God and Norms and The Bullshit. So the showdown was on, but it wasn't just Bromden's soul at stake, you had to feel it was yours and mine and everyone we love and those who are lost who we, of course, don't love. Liberation, in short. So as McMurphy plays within the nurse's norms for the most part, follows ward policy for the most part, doesn't do enough to get himself buried but enough to annoy her, we are cheering for him and ourselves...but what do we say when he does go over edge, when the line he cannot cross become too tempting because he's too righteous, too mad, to toe it, then ends up on a hospital bed with Nurse Ratched's grand solution, becomes a Lobotomy Vegetable and gets smothered out by merciful Bromden...but Bromden picks up that damn immovable object and crashes it through the window, gone and out, the cycle of broken, "I been away a long time" last line, tears, satisfaction, was McMurphy the martyr, HOW DO YOU FEEL? He felt as big as a mountain. HOW DO YOU FEEL?

ALL THIS BOOK MEANS TO ME: That not a soul can touch you unless you let it, let yourself believe you are crazy, that you are not worthy, that there is a way of doing things and either you do it or you are a freak and un un un un un un worthy, right? Fuck them. That the powers are not so secretive but in front of us with a straight face and all the cards in their deck yet we have something in us that trumps it all so they can take our money and run the casino dry and we can take that empty beer bottle and go for their throat though we may be the ones who have the bottle turned on us we've just distracted the authorities for another one of us and we nip and fight like Winston did in "1984" but less foolishly with less to lose just our lives and we will do that anyway screw it. That you can be caught up in your own gloom or you can raise hell.

"There's no more fog any place." BROMDEN.