{"id":836,"date":"2011-06-15T12:15:03","date_gmt":"2011-06-15T16:15:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/wpblog\/?p=836"},"modified":"2012-07-15T20:12:33","modified_gmt":"2012-07-16T00:12:33","slug":"all-the-assholes-in-the-world-and-mine-in-praise-of-bukowskis-asshole-aesthetic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/all-the-assholes-in-the-world-and-mine-in-praise-of-bukowskis-asshole-aesthetic\/","title":{"rendered":"All the Assholes in the World and Mine: In Praise of Bukowski’s Asshole Aesthetic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Woke up this morning and it seemed to me,<\/p>\n

That every night turns out to be a little bit more like Bukowski.
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

And yeah, I know he’s a pretty good read.<\/p>\n

But God who’d wanna be?<\/p>\n

God who’d wanna be such an asshole?<\/p>\n

God who’d wanna be?<\/p>\n

God who’d wanna be such an asshole?<\/p>\n

–\u201cBukowski\u201d by Modest Mouse<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Being an \u201casshole\u201d worked for Bukowski. Doing so made him the \u201cPoet Laureate of Skid Row,\u201d the acclaimed \u201claureate of American low-life.\u201d Being an asshole made him famous, and more interestingly, it garnered him heaps of admiration. Even after his death in 1994, poet, short story writer, novelist, and cultural outsider, Bukowski continues to fulfill the role of the much-beloved anti-hero, to epitomize it, a beacon of bone-bare honesty that repels some readers and simultaneously draws a loyal coterie of admirers.<\/p>\n

Born in Andernach, Germany in 1920, Henry Charles Bukowski and his family immigrated to the United States when he was two years old, settling permanently in Los Angeles. Bukowski described his childhood, a period in his life depicted in Ham on Rye<\/em>, his semi-autobiographical novel, as a time of \u201cutter grimness,\u201d a \u201chorror story with a capital \u2018H.\u2019\u201d His abusive father beat him frequently with a razor strap for absurd peccadillos such as failing to trim every hair on the family\u2019s lawn, and his mother, a \u201ctypical German woman\u201d was passive and obedient, an espouser of the motto, \u201cyour father is always right.\u201d<\/p>\n

During his younger years, Bukowski also suffered from acne vulgaris, <\/em>an agonizing condition that implanted boils on his face, neck, back and chest and induced ridicule from his classmates. In an event that he would later recall as \u201cmagic,\u201d his friend invited thirteen-year-old Bukowski over to his father\u2019s wine cellar where he had his first encounter with alcohol. He studied journalism, literature, and art at Los Angeles City College before dropping out and moving to New York, marking the beginning of a period that Bukowski deemed, his \u201cten year drunk\u201d in which he quit writing, worked a plethora of small jobs, and travelled across the country, a period that inspired a great deal of his writings. In 1952, Bukowski resettled in L.A. and worked for the U.S. Postal Service, an occupational position famously depicted in his novel, Post Office. <\/em>After nearly dying from a bleeding ulcer in 1955, Bukowski returned to the typewriter.<\/p>\n

Bukowski began his career publishing in small presses and in local papers such as Open City, <\/em>gaining attention via word-of-mouth.<\/em> He published his first story, \u201cAftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip\u201d at the age of twenty-four and began writing poetry at thirty-five. While Bukowski stated that he realized he was a writer at a very young age, he only became a full time writer at thirty-five, when John Martin from Black Sparrow Press offered to give him $100 a month for the rest of his life for Bukowski to quit his job and write full-time, for a living. Even after he gained fame, he remained loyal to the tiny magazines that published him in his early career.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

While some would like to write Bukowski off as a base misogynist, his work is significantly more nuanced than his critics assert. Bukowski\u2019s literary alter ego, Henry Chinaski, never commits the most horrific acts of violence, rape, and murder against women. Bukowski reserves these crimes for lower-lives, the truly banal.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile reading your book Women<\/em>, one could get the impression that for you a woman is nothing more than a behind and a pair of tits,\u201d a Belgian reporter once told Bukowski in an interview. Watching the video of the two men sitting together on a couch in Bukowski\u2019s home, facing each other in uncomfortable proximity, Bukowski looks discernibly puzzled by the reporter\u2019s assumption, a blank expression marking his face, bewilderment wiping away all other emotion.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, c\u2019mon, you read it and that\u2019s all you got?…I mean no, there are many moments in there where I look like a complete asshole, and I felt like one. No no. I just wasn\u2019t jumping into bed and fucking and jumping out of bed. I\u2019m sorry. It would be nice for me to say that and pretend that I\u2019m a tough guy, but I\u2019m not that tough.\u201d The reporter continues to enlighten Bukowski with his own interpretations: \u201cBut in your stories, love is always a synonym for sexual intercourse.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere do you get this crap, baby? Love is a dog from hell. That\u2019s all. It has its own agonies. It brings its own agonies with it. But I don\u2019t know where you get your concepts from man. You really fucked up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bukowski\u2019s poetry is perhaps most demonstrative of his emotional and intellectual complexity, which when philosophizing on concepts such as loneliness, love, and the mire of everyday life in conjunction with boozing, violent, and graphic depictions of the low-life lifestyle, form a disconcertingly realistic, contradictory corpus of literature. One poem, \u201cThe Genius of the Crowd\u201d is an angry, a fearful thing that depicts his distrust of people. He writes,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

beware the average man the average woman<\/p>\n

beware their love, their love is average<\/p>\n

seeks average<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

but there is genius in their hatred<\/p>\n

there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you<\/p>\n

to kill anybody<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

His fears of relationships and people arise throughout his work. In \u201cAlone with Everybody,\u201d he writes,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the flesh covers the bone<\/p>\n

and they put a mind<\/p>\n

in there and<\/p>\n

sometimes a soul,<\/p>\n

and the women break<\/p>\n

vases against the walls<\/p>\n

and the men drink too<\/p>\n

much<\/p>\n

and nobody finds the<\/p>\n

one<\/p>\n

but keep<\/p>\n

looking<\/p>\n

crawling in and out<\/p>\n

of beds.<\/p>\n

flesh covers<\/p>\n

the bone and the<\/p>\n

flesh searches<\/p>\n

for more than<\/p>\n

flesh.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

there’s no chance<\/p>\n

at all:<\/p>\n

we are all trapped<\/p>\n

by a singular<\/p>\n

fate.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

nobody ever finds<\/p>\n

the one.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

As Bukowski says of himself, as much as critics would like to believe that he is the \u201ctough guy,\u201d he is a multifaceted character incapable of being labeled with a tidy brand. He is raging, melancholy, sexual, frightened, confident, bestial. He is a jagged peg that refuses to slide into a neat hole. There is no one quite like him in recent literary history.<\/p>\n

While David Foster Wallace probably comes the closest to achieving the cult-level worship achieved by Bukowski, his page-length-sentenced, footnote-toting style is significantly less accessible, more difficult to embrace for most. Access and appreciation of DFW\u2019s rich work is restricted to the truly stalwart reader. Unlike the scholastic cult-hero DFW, Bukowski was the \u201cwriter for the dispossessed,\u201d for \u201cpeople who didn\u2019t have a voice.\u201d In the words of his publisher, John Martin, Bukowski was the \u201cequivalent in today\u2019s world of Walt Whitman.\u201d He was the everyman\u2019s hero because he was a regular \u201casshole,\u201d a man and not an inviolable god. Hero is most definitely the wrong word. He was just an artist.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Listen to Buk reading \u201cDinosauria, We\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Woke up this morning and it seemed to me, That every night turns out to be a little bit more like Bukowski. And yeah, I know he’s a pretty good read. But God who’d wanna be? God who’d wanna be such an asshole? God who’d wanna be? God who’d wanna be such an asshole? –\u201cBukowski\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,214,219],"tags":[137],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=836"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3290,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836\/revisions\/3290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}