Has reading Bukowski changed your personal life?

Lolita Twist

Lolita Twist

Rose-hustler
Has Buk changed my personal life since I started reading him?
For some reason upon reading this question, I flashback to my sophomore year in high school, reading Bukowski in the bathroom during my lunch period. Bukowski has given me better conversation with scholars and bums alike. A better understanding of poetry in everyday life, how to find it in the most allegedly-uncommon places. How to occupy my mind with laughter when nothing is funny, and everything is actually quite boring and mundane (in a bad way). Then again... he also influenced my life in a bad way for a period of time. I began to think it was ok and "normal" to be an alcoholic and a writer simultaneously. For me it's just not OK to be an active alcoholic. I thought to drink in excess would make me a better something (which he's always denouncing, eh?). I still think I wrote better when I was actively addicted, but that's neither here nor there (where is it? I don't know).
 
Mark73

Mark73

I've been reading this thread since you, Black Swan, started it but couldn't find the right words to express the impact Bukowski had on my personal life.

I can't seem to find them now, but wtf.

When I first picked up a book by him I was nine and he kind of prepared me for a world where sex and money, insanity and cruelty are dominant. I had sensed that before and he gave me a detailed look at how strange grown ups would behave. I read Fuck Machine at that time.

The obscure and bizarre always attracted me, so I went well through his mix of reality and fiction.

To see him suffer as a pus-covered outcast made me feel sympathy and maybe a sort of identification with him, not because of puberty's ugly spots, but because I felt myself alone in welcome darkness among the school kids at my age.

I couldn't (and still can't) relate to the reality whitewash that I noticed first and therefore most intense when I was a kid/teen and having read Bukowski, I knew there were a lot of dirty secrets behind the curtains.

Well, the drinking, I wouldn't say he influenced me there. At thirteen I was already quite a party tiger and ended all mentally fucked up at nineteen as a result of that. Thankfully I didn't become an alcoholic, but the tendency to excess in many ways is part of my nature and nothing I could make Hank responsible for.
 
Jane's Addiction

Jane's Addiction

Lolita Ginsoski said:
I thought to drink in excess would make me a better something
Click to expand...
That's a great way to put it. I had already realized that booze could grease the wheels, but after reading Bukowski, I thought I could opt out of just about everything but booze and the written word. I didn't go to school, I drank myself silly, I wrote jack shit. I told myself I was just too young to be good, anyway. That someday I'd write great poetry about how I used to write shitty poetry. I told myself that depression was a great experience. I did things I was ashamed of. I probably would have done the same without having read Bukowski, but without the added embarrassment of having to admit that I mis-used Buk's work to justify it all. I tried.

After a particular blackout wherein I thoroughly humiliated myself, I quit drinking. I began to write again after a couple of months, just for myself, just to get it out. Now I drank coffee when I wrote, without thoughts of immortality or audience or of myself as a writer. Now it was just a hobby, and I wasn't trying to be anything but a decent person--someone who could live life without being on the edge of a deep dark hole. I wrote more and more, I started reading at open mics, started to find my voice, quite different from Buk's. THEN I realized what his work was really about.

I started drinking again a year later, off and on but mostly on. But I never looked to anyone else's work or life to model my own after, I never romanticized booze or shitty behavior or paralyzing depression again. I learned that shame has a purpose besides hilighting incidents to one day write about. Ten years later I'm still learning these lessons.

So I guess the answer is yes, in the end Bukowski's work had an impact on my personal life, after I realized that his work was about himself, not me, and that if it 'meant' anything, it was that I needed to be true to myself, if I could just figure out how.
 
poptop

poptop

Thanks for being open about this. Got something out of every word. Incredible self-honesty in this amazing journey back to self. I liked everything.
 
Ponder

Ponder

"So fuck Doubleday Doran"
RIP
Lolita Ginsoski said:
Then again... he also influenced my life in a bad way for a period of time. I began to think it was ok and "normal" to be an alcoholic and a writer simultaneously. For me it's just not OK to be an active alcoholic. I thought to drink in excess would make me a better something
Click to expand...

I read this on another forum the other day:

I've admired his work for a long time but if you emulate Bukowski's lifestyle too much, you'll wake up and wonder why your name is on the liver transplant list.
 
Lolita Twist

Lolita Twist

Rose-hustler
HAHA! That's gorgeous, who wrote/said that?

And, Jane's, beautiful words that have me nodding my head all by myself here. I think I still romanticize it, though maybe that's just my way. At least I'm not blacking out and developing harmful lady-cysts anymore.

And let me just say... for me, seeing the world sober is much more depressing than seeing it with beer-goggle-laser-vision. But I'm funnier, drier. Which is more for me than it is for others, so, at last, I'm comfortable in being the chain-smoking, caffeine-pumped, sober cunt I am.
 
Jane's Addiction

Jane's Addiction

Thanks, Lolita. I guess you could say I still romanticize it some, but my vision is much wider now. the world makes me sad and frustrated, but drinking too much makes me clinically depressed. When I first started drinking, a senior in high school, Nothing's Shocking was just out and I'd demand my guitar-playing friend play Jane Says at every party. I can't sing a note, but I loved to holler "she can't hit!" at the top of my lungs.
 
Lolita Twist

Lolita Twist

Rose-hustler
This will sound overly fangirlish...

I DO THAT AT THE SONG TOO! TO THIS DAY!

/end enthusiasm.

That being said, Jane Says is still probably my favorite song. From Jane's, and probably of everyone else, too. I must have every version of it. Steel Drums, for the win.
 
Mark73

Mark73

No ouch. I was fit for Buk and benefited from reading him early. I freely choose to read Bukowski.

Stuff your question on Zoe.
 
Lolita Twist

Lolita Twist

Rose-hustler
I was also young when I started reading... maybe about 12 or 13?
I plan to have kids late, around the age of 37 (Mr. G wants them ha), if I even can. I'd have no quarrels bringing them up with Bukowski. In my liberal mind, it endorses free-thinking/choice.

janes said:
not to me!
Click to expand...

:)
 
Mark73

Mark73

We both can't see the damage it has done to us and have to bring on the suffering to our children :eek:!
 
rev.drian

rev.drian

everything you read from shitty novel's to your favorite novel's influences your personal life.

Buk made me understand that Ill never write anythin as good as he could
 
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