The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way. Charles BukowskiЧитать онлайн книгу.

       Charles Bukowski on Writers and Writing

       David Stephen Calonne

      Although many modern authors have made writing itself a central theme in their works—“metafiction” is a ubiquitous example—Charles Bukowski was particularly obsessive in defining himself constantly as a writer in his texts while simultaneously questioning what this might signify: he exists in a purely literary universe that spins out of and around the idea of writing. Experience exists in order to be turned into poetry and prose, but he also is constantly mocking himself and the pretensions of the “artist.” In The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship, he tells us: “Old Writer puts on sweater, sits down, leers into computer screen and writes about life. How holy can we get?”—a scene masterfully portrayed by R. Crumb.¹ The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way: On Writers and Writing presents a variety of Bukowski’s introductions and essays on authors, explorations of his poetics, and other samples of the ways he continually incorporates writerly themes in his fiction.

      The earliest work included here—Bukowski’s 1957 story “A Dollar for Carl Larsen”—is an example of his experimentation with combining fiction and illustration: he submitted several “graphic fictions” to Whit Burnett’s celebrated Story magazine. While it ostensibly treats an encounter with a “big blonde” at the racetrack, the tale begins and ends with mysterious literary, extra-textual allusions. The epigraph reads: “dedicated to Carl Larsen, owed to Carl Larsen, paid to Carl Larsen,” and at the close we are told: “I thought about Carl Larsen down at the beach rubbing the sand from between his toes and drinking stale beer with Curtis Zahn and J.B. May. I thought about the dollar I owed Larsen. I thought maybe I’d better pay it. He might tell J.B.” Larsen was actually the publisher of Existaria, a little magazine in Hermosa Beach, Southern California, hence the “sand from between his toes”; three Bukowski poems appeared in the September/October 1957 issue. Later Larsen would launch Seven Poets Press, which published Bukowski’s Longshot Pomes for Broke Players (1961).² Readers are left to speculate that Bukowski may have owed money to Larsen, perhaps for a subscription to Existaria. In any case, it is noteworthy that the intertextuality here to the little magazines is brought directly into the narrative, indicating Bukowski’s later practice of constantly foregrounding the fact that for him, reality exists in order to be turned into literature. Another person mentioned—Curtis Zahn (1912–1990)—had been incarcerated for a year as a conscientious objector against WWII and was a journalist and playwright; John Boyer May (1904–1981) was the editor of Trace magazine—which began as a little magazine directory in 1951 in Los Angeles—until 1970.³ Bukowski submitted several letters/brief essays to Trace, which was extremely important for him during his early career because this directory provided outlets to which he would send his poetry.

      Bukowski also produced a number of literary “manifestoes,” and “Upon the Mathematics of the Breath and the Way”—first published in Tony Quagliano’s Small Press Review in 1973—is one the strongest essays in this genre, in which Bukowski explores the connections between daily life and the transformation of experience into poetry.⁴ And in his several introductions to fellow poets’ works, he often takes the opportunity not only to praise the author, but also to adumbrate further aspects of his own poetics. For example, in his introduction to Doug Blazek’s Skull Juices, Bukowski declares:

      It is not easy to realize that you are dying in your twenties. It is much easier not to know that you are dying in your twenties as is the case with most young men, almost all young men, their faces already oaken slabs, shined puke. They only imagine that death might happen in some jungle war of nobody’s business. Blazek can see death and life in a shabby piece of curling wallpaper, in a roach wandering through the beercans of a tired and sad and rented kitchen. Blazek, although he would be the last to realize it and is not conscious of it at all, is one of the leading, most mangling, most lovely (yes, I said, “lovely”)!