The text traveled 10,000 kilometers there, then 10,000 kilometers here, and returned to travel around over there. ...you read it in a language that is not yours twelve or thirteen years after it was ...written. ...I use them to provide a guide to the story that I am telling. ...there is the first difference in consistency and perseverance. Because from the beginning I did not care about my job, my jobs do not matter to me, whereas my trade does. ...I write them and send them to be edited without looking them over again.
Be it in prose or be it in poetry, Charles Bukowski proposes anarchic protagonists, critical of the Establishment and absorbed in writing. Muses are plenty, but the real fuel for inspiration is ...alcohol, especially beer. Epic in poetry, abrupt in prose, Bukowski is unflinchingly honest and self-demythologizing. His hedonism and drunkenness are masks put on his revolt against the world and his own flaws. Undoubtedly, Bukowski is obsessed with writing his version about the macro- and micro-universe, but it is booze that flares his sincerity and resistance to compromise. Apart from his characters’ anti-hypocritical attitude, alcohol also sentimentalizes them or boosts their frustrations. On a mythical level, drinking in Bukowski’s works functions both as a medieval magic filter and as a cartoon-like exhilarating potion. At the surprising intersection of a more geometrico world with the postmodern realm, the subconscious blends with the superego’s projections into a drink-irrigated and peripheral cityscape inferno.
In her illustrations figures dance, houses float, and fish fly. In 2006, she received the German Children's Literature Special Award for her complete work, and in 2009, she was awarded the ...Schwabinger Kunstpreis for her complete work.
This thesis explores two main questions: First, why is allusion to the filmic trope of the Outsider so prevalent throughout the literature of Charles Bukowski and the Beat Generation writers? Second, ...how does this filmic allusion affect the writing? My hypothesis is that the masculine figure of the Outsider in Beat literature is heavily informed by that of the Outsider appearing in twentieth-century American cinema, portrayed by actors like Charles Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, George Raft and Burt Lancaster. I argue that these hyper-masculine cinematic portrayals significantly impacted Bukowski and the Beats, affecting the written expression of their autobiographical identities plus their fictional characters. I examine how film created a generation-wide and oft-overlooked cinephilia - a collective love of film that inspired these writers in their literary experimentations, manifesting itself in their works in the figure of a transposed filmic Outsider-poet hybrid. My critical approach is principally socio-historical; I juxtapose selected literature with contemporarily evolving film genres (e.g. gangster movies and film noir), employing the lenses of cultural discourses and theories emergent around the Beat coming-of-age (e.g. existentialism and the Self). Primary sources by Bukowski include what I argue are film-inspired poems like "upon this most delicate profession" and "the bluebird". Other foci include: Jack Kerouac's "The Origins of the Beat Generation"; Frank O'Hara's "To the Film Industry in Crisis"; Gregory Corso's "The Last Gangster". Critiques employed to contextualize Bukowski with the Beats include those by Paul Clements, Russell Harrison, Julian Smith and Jean-François Duval. Studies selected to explore the cinema-literature relationship include those by Laurence Goldstein, David Trotter and David Sterritt. Treatise cited to analyze the Outsider, the Other and the Liminal include those by Jean-Paul Sartre, Colin Wilson, Albert Camus, Victor Turner and R. D. Laing. My contribution reveals two new literary techniques, namely: (1) Perflection - the act of 'performance-based reflection' employed by an author or character in imitation of what the author has seen in cinema. I show that Bukowski's on-page machismo (his construction of Self as Other) is a perflection of the onscreen disaffected manner that he observed in Outsider performances by macho character actors like Bogart and Cagney; correspondingly, I suggest that Kerouac's method for writing On the Road on an elongated paper scroll is a perflection of filmmaking technique which similarly employs a film reel. (2) Perjection - the act of 'performance-based projection' used by an author or character to project (mentally) an image through a real or imagined glass lens (e.g. window or car windscreen) onto a character beyond in voyeuristic imitation of that seen in cinema. Perjection is a mode of seeing from the Outsider position, involving a psycho-mechanical self-metamorphosis that transforms the author's or character's eye into (essentially) a projector. My cultural-theoretical contextualizing throughout the thesis helps to highlight the location and role of the filmic Outsider in Beat thought, while perflection and perjection elucidate how Bukowski et al employ the filmic Outsider to dynamize their writing.
Philosophers and critics of social media warn us of a lurker's complex: the unsettling belief that "real" communication is happening on someone else's blog or Facebook page. But this complex is ...hardly new. In popular works of fiction, the bored postal clerk has been a recurring symbol of the alienated, modern gossip hound stuck on the fringes of someone else's discourse. Rereading these post office novelists can help us clarify and critique our own online behaviors.
Sylvia enters the marriage with false expectations and when Phillip is against her returning "to business" (BG 554) after the baby is bom she retorts by not "keeping the house anymore" (BG 554) and ...refusing to have "any more children" (BG 554), two decisions that severely damage her husband's masculine pride. According to Phillip, his sexual problems started when he could sense Sylvia's resentment and "everything ... just dried up" (BG 554). Just before she starts screaming with a "weird, blind, violent persistence" that the events in Europe are nothing less than "an emergency" (BG 551) the doctor is "horrified...his spine tingling with her fear" (BG 550) as she gets more and more upset until their session ends with her losing consciousness. A comical touch is added when he is delighted and relieved to have discovered the existence of "Chinese Jews, for God's sake" (BG 568), and he returns to the realm of likeable human beings when "his little grin" (BG 561) acknowledges that Dr. Hyman is no longer his enemy for liking Sylvia and his "little wave" (BG 566) gently thanks Margaret Hyman for her help.
A Pilgrimage of Wolves is a narrative told in two parts. The first part is set in the present and follows the five members of the Lobos family through a moment of crisis, their decisions in ...adversity, and the fallout of their actions. Their story is told in vignettes that culminate with the eldest son, Valentino, experiencing a panic attack while driving, which results in an accident that puts him in a coma. The second part of A Pilgrimage of Wolves, titled “The First Valentino,” takes place in 1950’s Los Angeles, and details the origins of the Lobos family, then known as Villalobos. It is an immigrant story chronicling the arrival of siblings Valentino and Libertad Villalobos in California, and their search for a cousin who is supposed to shelter them. They end up being separated when Valentino becomes involved with a local street gang to earn money, but they remain in contact while Valentino tries to secure a place for them to live.
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