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Things are going to get worse, and people will get an agenda rather than just protest against what they don't like, and then things will change. That's as optimistic as I get.

I'll see if I can figure out how to PM you. I'm new and can hazard a pretty safe guess that nobody else will be bored enough for this.

This kind of man laughing in his bedroom must make the loneliest sound in the world. So that must be what a troll is. I suppose they can give you a chance to see how you feel about things. He had too many holes in his statements, though. (I imagine a broken man saying, "that was the point!" and...

If Bukowski is a sort of rite of passage writer to you though Robbie, an initiation type, why don't you leave him behind? I feel that way about certain writers. Some I've left behind completely and others I still have an affection for so I still have their work and I might revisit them, but I...

People were being a little too defensive, Robbie, but that's understandable. What you've just said is far too defensive, though. Imagine we were all in front of each other. People would disagree, but 77.2% chance we'd do it in a more friendly way. Bukowski was more layered than you give him...

Oh right yeah! Yeah, I suppose it's the way everybody knows it to be really: there is no consensus. As liberating as it is depressing. I've just decided to try to give up thinking in terms of "this doesn't work as a poem" or "this doesn't work as a short story". It's just whether I like it or...

I think the last CD I bought was a Cobra records compilation (Cobra was like Chess but better and involved some of the same people), but that was months ago. The last music I downloaded was Moon Duo's Horror Tour EP. If you like repetitive guitar music, you'll like Moon Duo (and related band...

Ha! OK, thanks.

I have holes in my memory - it's just that kind of memory, plus a little naughty living didn't help - but I think I first read Bukowski in about my mid-20s (late 1990s). I was aware of him before I got round to reading him, anyway, but I had some vague idea he'd be somehow "too real" for me...

OK, it took me at least 21 minutes to write my last post. I know this because in the meantime another one popped up. OK, I'm slow. It was meant as a reply to mjp.

I know you countered it with love, but "spiral of nothingness" is a bit tough. It might all be obvious and/or by-the-by to most, but it's helped me, particularly David's stuff. Those posts must at least be of interest to some others too. I apologise if I've barged in in the wrong way. I read...

This argument is hotting up. I like David's Harold Bloom argument. O'Malley's open wound bit points to a good reason why he doesn't tend to turn up on university literature courses. I put bukowski into Google to get here and found this call for a reappraisal of him as poet...

See, I'm not sure about this argument that Bukowski is primarily a poet. That's where much of his best writing is but the novels are underrated, especially Factotum. Its form is amazing. It isn't quite a novel, actually, isn't quite a story cycle. It's a mishmash of short stories that works...

Yeah the poetry is more difficult to defend, as poetry, but it's often great in its own right whatever you want to call it. I think all but the kindest would admit to quite a quality control issue, anyway. (A defence would be that too much Poetry capital P fails because it adheres to notions of...

I don't think those traits explain why his literary standing is unequal to other writers of the twentieth century. Henry Miller, Christopher Isherwood and others I mention wrote first-person autobiographical stuff. I'd say plot and characterisation tend to be elements found in novels of any...

Where does Bukowski stand among writers of the previous century? Bukowski fares badly in terms of sales, a long way behind Chairman Mao, J. R. R. Tolkien and late-to-the-party J. K. Rowling. He's omitted from most lists where critics try to compile the century's greatest writers, too. I often...