But since it is now lunch time I must go and get some “fuel!”

Bukowski is certainly an interesting cat. Some have called into question details of his life as he has reported them, but the man was a storyteller, and if his face is any indication, it seems he lived pretty hard. While Bukowski is sometimes criticized for his prose, I always found it to be satisfyingly simple and clean. One of the wonderful things about his fiction is that, for the most part, it is so straightforward, but there is much poignancy there… a man living in quiet desperation; a man trying to quell his demons… In his own way he had a bit of Thoreau in him, only he found his solitude in skid row bars and with women of ill repute… I like that quote about pretense, and I think he was very much motivated by ideas of that sort… ideas about selling out, or being a cog in the machine… perhaps brought on by his strict German father and the regimentation in the household? No, he didn’t necessarily blame “the man” as you say, but he sure railed against it, howling at the moon like a coyote… I think he kicked up plenty of dust in his time, which was probably his intent all along… One of my old favorites is Ray Carver, who was reportedly friends with Bukowski in the latter years of his life… I can imagine they knocked a few back together.

I watched a some of the Charles Buchowski Tapes by Schroeder and I recall Buchowski stating that as a child he had the pretense beaten out of him which I suppose is a pretty sad commentary on his early life. I am not completely certain what he meant by that but I do know that Buchowski loathed pretense and it was very evident in his writing. I think this penchant that Buchowski had for exposing hypocrisy has much to do with his appeal.

I agree with your comment about Bukowski and the counter culture forming a sort of a strange marriage. I haven’t read enough of Bukowski to be able to label his politics but I don’t think he saw himself as a victim despite the fact for a good bit of his life he was a skid row drunk. He made a conscious choice to live the way he did and not only accepted the consequences but he embraced the consequences both in his writing and in his persona. He never blamed “the man”.

Travis