Bukowski is still a treat. What does that say about me?
I am not an acolyte. I neither aspire to write the poetry of Bukowski nor to live the life of his poems. My one substantive, if passing, brush with Los Angeles was years and years ago when I took two days to walk the length of Sunset Boulevard from Union Station to the Pacific Coast Highway before hopping on a plane to New Zealand.
But he is getting harder to read, maybe because I am seeing less of the wink and the nod and more of what seems to be the very real struggle and difficulty and hardness in the life portrayed.
This struggle and pain -- raw but also masked by no small bit of bluster -- is set off in The Pleasures of the Damned by the oddly (and uncharacteristically) surreal pieces, and those others -- equally rare and uncharacteristic -- that betray a real tenderness and vulnerability.
What does that say about Bukowski?
I think that he tried.
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