Rückblende in die Stadtbücherei Andernach ins Frühjahr 1988: Als Praktikant hörte ich erstmalig vom großen Andernacher Sohn, dem allerdings ein kleiner Makel zuteilwurde, weil sich seine Bücher in ...einem Giftschrank in der hintersten Ecke der Bibliothek befanden. Erst einmal neugierig geworden, wollte ich mehr über diesen Charles Bukowski wissen und erhielt die Erlaubnis, mir die Schätze im Tresor näher anzuschauen.
Los Angeles Hernandez, Laura
World literature today,
03/2015, Letnik:
89, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
There's always something literary going on around the city and something to please fans of any genre, such as Hollywood's longest-running weekly poetry venue hosted by Da Poetry Lounge or the ...Griffith Park Storytelling series, which presents outdoor events in different locations around the park.
Charles Bukowski is well-known for his gritty portrayals of life as a barfly. Another common subject in his writings that deserves equal consideration is his love of gambling. The risk that gambling ...entails is a motif in his works, especially in the novels Ham on Rye, Factotum, Post Office, Women, and Hollywood. Henry Chinaski, the protagonist in these novels who functions as Bukowski's alter-ego, finds risk essential to surviving in a world ruled by chance. In the novels, Chinaski's risks include living on skid-row, quitting numerous jobs, participating in drunken brawls, and roaming the country. The self-destructive risks teach him the importance of caution, and his disciplined horse betting in Hollywood reflects his belief in financial stability and self-preservation. This concept of cautious risk proves that Bukowski did not glorify a reckless lifestyle. Risk is vital to gaining experience, but in the same way a gambler should avoid the chance of a crippling debt, one must avoid the danger of an irrecoverable loss.
The poems included in this manuscript construct, explore, and interrogate hyper reality and how it affects the twenty-first century. Simultaneously creating and destroying representations of a world ...made in the image of electronic entertainment, Versus Los Angeles inhabits various pop-culture personas in order to illustrate loss of identity, fame as commodity, the erosion of language, and the politics these various icons or platforms promote.
Among the new EU and NATO members Slovenia is known for its "friendly pragmatism" in its relations with Russia. This can be explained as a manifestation of a recurring pattern in identity politics, ...typical of smaller Slavic nations of Central and South-Eastern Europe. In this sense, the case of Slovenia demonstrates the utility of social constructivism in international relations theory and corroborates the importance of social identities in the formation of intra-state policies and security communities. It also has clear implications for the process of Euro-Atlantic integration in the future, especially as it relates to Slavic candidate countries - unwarranted delays on this path can have unintended consequences.
In one of the last interviews with late Los Angeles poet Wanda Coleman, conducted between 16 October 16 2012, and 9 May 9 2013. Coleman discusses the motivations behind and sources of her ...one-hundred-poem American Sonnets sequence, which was published as part of three discrete volumes of poetry (American Sonnets 1994, Bathwater Wine 1998, and Mercurochrome 2001). She focuses in particular on the social and professional discrimination she endured as a black woman writer from southern Los Angeles, her inability to secure consistent recognition for her work, her older son's death, and her ties to Western literary traditions. The interview offers insight into the sonnets' experiments with form, as Coleman notes her investment in blues techniques, her complex relationship to the Black Arts Movement, and her many responses to other poets' characteristic styles and themes. She ties the sonnets' recurring critiques of social injustice to her unique position as a Western writer whose work is centered in urban spaces, rather than the open expanses of the desert highways, and to her experiences with the prejudice directed at US ethnic minorities. She also identifies a more general interest in formal experiment, a popularly overlooked element of modern black poetry, through discussions of the Harlem Renaissance and Beat poets, a consideration of contemporary Language-influenced work, and observations about several present-day LA writers. The interview is also distinguished by Coleman's explanations of the poetry's formal inspirations and the audience she envisions for her work.
