Mathematics of the Breath and the Way , livre ebook

Canongate Books - Bukowski Charles

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

158 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

In The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way, Charles Bukowski considers the art of writing, and the art of living as writer. Bringing together a variety of previously uncollected stories, columns, reviews, introductions, and interviews, this book finds him approaching the dynamics of his chosen profession with cynical aplomb, deflating pretensions and tearing down idols armed with only a typewriter and a bottle of beer. Beginning with the title piece - a serious manifesto disguised as off-handed remarks en route to the racetrack - The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way runs through numerous tales following the author's adventures at poetry readings, parties, film sets, and bars, and features an unprecedented gathering of Bukowski's singular literary criticism. The book closes with a handful of interviews in which he discusses his writing practices and his influences, making this a perfect guide to the man behind the myth and the disciplined artist behind the boozing brawler.

Informations

Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	06 septembre 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781786894441
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0400€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Charles Bukowski is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. At the forefront of American counter-culture, his Beat Generation writing is widely celebrated. He was born in Germany in 1920 to an American soldier father and a German mother and was brought to the United States at the age of three. He grew up in Los Angeles and lived there for the majority of his life.
During his lifetime he published more than forty-five books, including novels such as Factotum , Post Office and Ham on Rye . He died in 1994 shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp .
BY CHARLES BUKOWSKI
The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (1969)
Post Office (1971)
Mockingbird Wish Me Luck (1972)
South of No North (1973)
Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems 1955–1973 (1974)
Factotum (1975)
Love is a Dog from Hell: Poems 1974–1977 (1977)
Women (1978)
Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit (1979)
Shakespeare Never Did This (1979)
Dangling in the Tournefortia (1981)
Ham on Rye (1982)
Bring Me Your Love (1983)
Hot Water Music (1983)
There’s No Business (1984)
War All the Time: Poems 1981–1984 (1984)
You Get So Alone at Times that It Just Makes Sense (1986)
The Movie: ‘Barfly’ (1987)
The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems 1946–1966 (1988)
Hollywood (1989)
Septuagenarian Stew: Stories & Poems (1990)
The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992)
Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960–1970 (1993)
Pulp (1994)
Living on Luck: Selected Letters 1960s–1970s, Volume 2 (1995) Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories (1996)
Bone Palace Ballet: New Poems (1997)
The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship (1998)
Reach for the Sun: Selected Letters 1978–1994 (1999)
What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire: New Poems (1999)
Open All Night: New Poems (2000)
The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps: New Poems (2001)
Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli, 1960–1967 (2001)
Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way: New Poems (2003)
The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain: New Poems (2004)
Slouching Toward Nirvana (2005)
Come On In! (2006)
The People Look Like Flowers at Last (2007)
The Pleasures of the Damned (2007)
The Continual Condition (2009)
On Writing (2015)
On Cats (2015)
On Love (2016)

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
Published in the USA in 2018 by City Lights Books, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133, USA
This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books
Copyright © 2018 by The Estate of Charles Bukowski Introduction copyright © 2018 by David Calonne
Design by Linda Ronan
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 443 4 eISBN 978 1 78689 444 1
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Charles Bukowski on Writers and Writing
MANIFESTO
Upon the Mathematics of the Breath and the Way
TALES
A Dollar for Carl Larsen
Hell Yes, the Hydrogen Bomb
Dialogue: Dead Man on the Fence
Autographical Statement
Bukowski Meets a Merry Drunk
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“Can’t you keep those motherfuckers quiet?”)
Bukowski’s Gossip Column
More Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“You may not believe it”)
More Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“I was put in touch with them”)
More Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“I swung three deep out of Vacantsville”)
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“Tony Kinnard was a great poet of the ’50s”)
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“They’d been married 32 years”)
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“We walked in”)
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“I’m not in the mood for an immortal column today”)
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“I had given up on women”)
Guggenheim Application: 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 o