A little bit less gay bar action would have been nice for me personally but I don’t think anyone delicate or easily offended would read Bukowski past his introduction. i understand its a collection of essays he wrote for an underground California magazine in the 1970s (i think). He displays many of the outcomes that most people with alcoholism show as well: self-control problems, difficulty in identifying feelings, apathy toward external reality, difficulty in emotional processing, and more depressed and/or anxious, and a face deformed by its abuses. It is life uncluttered by the niceties and civilities of the numbed life most of us, under the confines of comfy blankets, PC's, cell phones, the latest fashions, million channel TV, etc. Bukowski is so unflinchingly honest about everything, so don't read this if you can't handle the truth.

And not even because it was nasty or creepy (because let's face it, despite panic attacks and crap, I made it through Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho and if I can get through that, I think I can get through any book). Which makes for a hilarious companion, where we tend to stick around near him and cannot wait to see what he will say or do next, but never want him to be anywhere near our children. Whether he is drinking while writing his stories and poetry, or showing up to work and meetings already drunk, every story incorporates his vigorous drinking habits. He crashed on earth a few hours ago and now wanders around in a city whose name is irrelevant, while trying to get used to the possibility of having to spend the rest of his life among humans.I read for the prose when it comes to this author, so I was very disappointed to find a lack so enormous that I could hardly get through the book. Like he was always aware of what he should’ve been and how he wasn’t measuring up to those expectations. I don't know what difficult thing Bukowski was trying to say but I can't argue that it was told in a very simple way. according to my figures I’ve only had 2500 pieces of ass but I’ve watched 12,500 horse races, and if I have any advice to anybody it’s this: take up watercolor painting.

However, you did provoke a smile here and there, mostly when you were sober, and I will grant you 3 small stars for you many wordplays.Almost all of the "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" columns have been collected by City Lights Books: Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969), Erections, Ejaculations and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (1972), Tales of Ordinary Madness (1983), The Most Beautiful Woman in Town and Other Stories (1983), Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook (2008), Absence of the Hero (2010), More Notes of a Dirty Old Man (2011), The Bell Tolls for No One (2015), and The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way (2018). During his lifetime he published more than forty-five books of poetry and prose including the novels Post Office (1971), Factotum (1975), Women (1979) and Pulp (1994) all available from Virgin Books. By turns hilarious, disgusting, prosaic and profound, these vignettes of distilled humanity are somehow rendered all the more powerful for the squalor and the cheap sex and the shameless alcoholism. The inclusion of this story may sound pretentious, and that is probably because it is, but it is a good encapsulation of the Bukowski appeal. Yıllarca insanlardan kaçmamın nedeni bu, ve onlarla görüşmeye başladığımdan beri inime dönme zamanının geldiğini hissediyorum.

Others were sad to me, such as a vivid recounting of how years of beatings and other abuse turns someone into a living but kind of mostly dead person. I’ve seen too many intellectuals lately, I get very tired of the precious intellects who must speak diamonds every time they open their mouths. Packed with violence, women, gambling and booze, Bukowski’s semi-autobiographical stories veer between hilarity and despair, as he extols the inherent beauty and futility of life.Oyy ok let’s get this wrapping up, I’m rambling which means I had a lot of thoughts and didn’t know how to frame them. I’m spoiled and used to sections and titles in short story collections now so we know how it’s organized, but this seems like total hodgepodge or possibly chronological by publication date. Of course, that doesn't make any of his literal and figurative woman-bashing acceptable, but it's part of the entrance fee for reading this shit. This is the first of his books that I've read and I catch myself thinking that I really don't hope the rest of his book are the same. It begins during his early childhood by explaining the difficult relationship that he had with his father.