The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way. Charles Bukowski

Narrative Account of Career

       Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“‘Harry,’ said Doug”)

       Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“I was too early at the airport”)

       Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“They were drunk and driving along the coast”)

       Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“The Great Poet had finished his reading”)

       Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“Hello Mom”)

       Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“Lydia got out of bed”)

       Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“I left L.A. International with a tremendous hangover”)

       Politics and Love

       Dildo Man

       INTRODUCTIONS AND CRITICISM

       Editors (and Others) Write

       Little Magazines in America: Conclusion of Symposium

       Introduction to John William Corrington, Mr. Clean and Other Poems

       The Corybant of Wit: Review of Irving Layton, The Laughing Rooster

       Introduction to Jory Sherman, My Face in Wax

       Lightning in a Dry Summer: Review of John William Corrington, The Anatomy of Love and Other Poems

       Another Burial of a Once Talent: Review of John William Corrington’s Lines to the South and Other Poems

       Foreword to Steve Richmond, Hitler Painted Roses

       Essay on Nothing for Your Mother-Nothingness

       Who’s Big in the “Littles”

       The Deliberate Mashing of the Sun (d.a. levy)

       Charles Bukowski on Willie: Introduction to The Cockroach Hotel by Willie [William Hageman]

       Introduction to Doug Blazek’s Skull Juices

       The Impotence of Being Ernest: Review of Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream

       An Introduction to These Poems: Al Masarik, Invitation to a Dying

       Foreword: Steve Richmond, Earth Rose

       A Note on These Poems: Appreciation to Al Purdy’s At Marsport Drugstore

       About “Aftermath”

       Preface: The Bukowski/Purdy Letters 1964–1974

       Introduction to Horsemeat

       Foreword: Douglas Goodwin, Half Memory of a Distant Life

       Foreword: Macdonald Carey, Beyond That Further Hill

       Further Musings

       INTERVIEWS

       Stonecloud Interview

       Confessions of a Badass Poet

       Craft Interview for New York Quarterly

       Gin-Soaked Boy

       Lizard’s Eyelid Interview

       INTRODUCTION

       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”)!