New Bukowski blog

[mjp]

You don't understand it because you're a woman. Maybe he can couch it in terms you would understand...something like, "Good counter tactic - scrub the pots and pans until they're clean and then claim they were never dirty." Something like that. Would that help?

 

[Dora]

good counter tactic - back up until you claim nothing at all.

Not sure if it's "backing up" in that case. It can be very difficult to sum up the content of a whole thesis in a few sentences on a forum, so every flaw we might find in her arguments might be actually explained in her thesis, which obviously can't be exposed in its entirety on the forum.

I'm saying that even though I consider the whole "masculinity-gender-feminism" approach not that relevant to understand Bukoswki's work, but I still find it interesting to know what people would think of it.

That said, Jordan I find your 'debate' quite interesting. And you haven't answered my question about the cupcakes reading ;)

My claim is that Bukowski's fictional characters are hypermasculine in the texts I'm discussing. His real life poetic performance abjects literary celebrity in quite a different way.

I think Jordan had a point here- even though Bukowski's readings were real life, you still call them performance. On the other hand, you talk about the hypermasculinity of his fictional characters.
The question could be: to which extend was Bukowski embodying a fictional character while performing on stage?

I have no answer to this question. It's just that if one starts getting outside of the TEXTS to examine the Bukowski persona in "real life"- esp. in the context of public readings-, then one has to deal with tricky concepts such as that of autofiction, performativity etc. at least so as to avoid the confusion between the characters and the author, as well as taking into account the way they are so connected that readers often confuse them.

Maybe you're doing it, Erica, but I just wanted to give my two cents.

Seems that I start sounding like an old bore.:nw: Whatever...

 

[Digney in Burnaby]

This poem?

 

[Dora]

Thanks for sharing, Digney, it's a touching video -not to mention a beautiful poem.

 

[Erica C.]

Dora, you are right. There are some seriously muddy waters when one starts to look at a writer's art off the page, as well as on it. Where do we draw the line between artist as performer and artist as person. Like I've set out, I'm not interested in doing an MRP on Bukowski's life. There is enough work out there on Bukowski "the person" that, I think, hijacks attention away from his art. My MRP is about his work and his work encompasses the poetry/prose written on the page and in performance. Obviously, I will have to define, if somewhat artificially, where the boundry between artist and person lies for me in terms of his poetic performances. I'm only interested in studying his work. While his life is fascinating and much great work has and can continue to be done on it, it is not feasible to do a focused study of his work and life in 40 pages in any meaningful way.