The senseless, tragic rape of Charles Bukowski’s ghost by John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press
- Thread starter mjp
- Start date
mjp
Founding member
I think it's all letters.
So you see, ladies and gentlemen, that's how you reel them in. With your sexual magnetism.
OK, if there are six good letters...I can do this all day long...
number6horse
okyoutwopixiesoutyougo
Great presentation but I'm weirded out by the fact that you sound so much like my friend Chris. Get out of my earbuds, mjChris !!!
Good lord I didn't have a clue such crime was being commited. I can totally relate to you... if that was in music, that editor would be releasing "covers" of the original work, but as if it was the real thing!!!
I´ve read the manuscript and the edited poem you´ve provided...
That's revolting. I don't know if we get waves of conservatism and it's an example of that. But here in Brazil we got 20 years of a dictatorship whose main target was culture/costumes(? I mean, tradition).
Poetry and music made (sorry, published!) on that time (1964-1985) sounds just like that. For dummies.
What surprises me nowadays is that this kind of behaviour is perpetrated by civilians... no need to dwell on John Martin, I´m talking about those who censored you on the use of the "rape" word.
And I must say I agree with the term. Bukowski's legacy was raped indeed!!!
I´ve read the manuscript and the edited poem you´ve provided...
That's revolting. I don't know if we get waves of conservatism and it's an example of that. But here in Brazil we got 20 years of a dictatorship whose main target was culture/costumes(? I mean, tradition).
Poetry and music made (sorry, published!) on that time (1964-1985) sounds just like that. For dummies.
What surprises me nowadays is that this kind of behaviour is perpetrated by civilians... no need to dwell on John Martin, I´m talking about those who censored you on the use of the "rape" word.
And I must say I agree with the term. Bukowski's legacy was raped indeed!!!
mjp
Founding member
I don't know that Martin hacked apart Bukowski's work as a result of a wave of conservatism, Martin is conservative. He's a Christian Scientist. Which makes his interest in Bukowski in the first place a little...unexpected, but art is art. You can't help what moves you.
No one but Martin will ever know what possessed him to alter the work once Bukowski was dead and he was free to do so. As I've said one or two or fifty times, the reason doesn't matter. What we're left with is the result.
One thing I will say (and I don't know if I've said this fifty times yet, but I'm sure I've said it before): what Martin did after Bukowski died demonstrates quite clearly that he never really understood Bukowski's work. He liked it, yes, obviously, but he didn't understand it. No one who understood it could have done what he did.
No one but Martin will ever know what possessed him to alter the work once Bukowski was dead and he was free to do so. As I've said one or two or fifty times, the reason doesn't matter. What we're left with is the result.
One thing I will say (and I don't know if I've said this fifty times yet, but I'm sure I've said it before): what Martin did after Bukowski died demonstrates quite clearly that he never really understood Bukowski's work. He liked it, yes, obviously, but he didn't understand it. No one who understood it could have done what he did.
the bored BSP-typist runs out of business now as there's a new Martinization-app that automatically does the work.
It's called 'clean reader'.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoo...reader-the-new-do-it-yourself-censorship-app/
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-s...clean-up-bad-language-in-ebooks-10131321.html
It's called 'clean reader'.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoo...reader-the-new-do-it-yourself-censorship-app/
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-s...clean-up-bad-language-in-ebooks-10131321.html
PhillyDave
“The essential doesn't change.” Beckett
i saw the 'clean reader' thing. Fucking insanely stupid. if your reading needs to be cleaned you shouldn't be reading it.
In "squeaky clean" mode, "breast" becomes "chest." Maybe they can install way back mode, so blacks and women can't vote, and Liberace just hasn't met the right gal. Same mentality.
Bukfan
"The law is wrong; I am right"
Now they don't have to burn or ban books anymore, at least not e-books. Soon we´ll have a Clean Reader version 2 that will delete any hints of sex, words like "gay" and "liberal", etc., and that's just the beginning. "Offensive" e-books will soon contain mostly blank pages after the Clean Reader have deleted all of the offensive writings. Maybe we better stick to our Bukowski paper books, just as a precaution. :p
it's idiotic and kinda scary. what are the chances the "inventors" from idaho are good god-fearing christians...
from one of the articles -
Joanne Harris, the writer of Chocolat, wrote a blog entitled “Saying ‘Fuck You’ to Clean Reader”, arguing: “The fact is that these ‘acceptable alternatives’ are all taken from modern American slang, and not only do some of them make no sense in the context of English literature, they are likely to be far more intrusive (and potentially, more offensive) than the word they are meant to replace.”
Her main worry about the app, she added, was “One of censorship.”
“To tamper with what is written – however much we may dislike certain words and phrases – is to embrace censorship. It starts with blanking out a few words. It goes on to drape table legs and stick fig leaves onto statues. It progresses to denouncing gay or Jewish artists as “degenerate”. It ends with burning libraries and erasing whole civilizations from history.”
from one of the articles -
Joanne Harris, the writer of Chocolat, wrote a blog entitled “Saying ‘Fuck You’ to Clean Reader”, arguing: “The fact is that these ‘acceptable alternatives’ are all taken from modern American slang, and not only do some of them make no sense in the context of English literature, they are likely to be far more intrusive (and potentially, more offensive) than the word they are meant to replace.”
Her main worry about the app, she added, was “One of censorship.”
“To tamper with what is written – however much we may dislike certain words and phrases – is to embrace censorship. It starts with blanking out a few words. It goes on to drape table legs and stick fig leaves onto statues. It progresses to denouncing gay or Jewish artists as “degenerate”. It ends with burning libraries and erasing whole civilizations from history.”
MJP, kind of curious about this: has anyone looked at the posthumous collection of John Fante's stories published by BSP, published and MS versions? I mean, Martin might have had less reason to take pruning shears to Fante's language than to Buk's - but maybe he sprinkled a few adverbs. The crucial point is that all of the Fante texts were previously unpublished, posthumously collected, so ripe for Martinizing. Any thoughts?
I'm curious to know what you all have done with your posthumous Buk poetry books. Have you thrown them away, purged them from your collections? I have taken my off my Buk shelf and put them in a box in a closet... but I have a hard time chucking them, for unknown reasons - maybe just a gut feeling, somehow that I shouldn't or that I might miss them later. I wish the full manuscripts were out, it would make the decision easier.
Pogue Mahone
Officials say drugs may have played a part
I wish I had kept them all just to compare them to the originals. Maybe I'll buy them back from the secondary market. Finding the unedited stuff in the magazines has become an obsession. It feels good to expose the failed English teacher for who he is. His contributions are senseless, no matter what his intentions. Looking forward to reading the new City Lights book.
zobraks
Moderator
They're (all) still on my shelf.
When there's no rain, hail is just fine :fog: - as they say in these parts.
They were never on my shelf. When I started to dig into Bukowski's poetry, guys like MJP and Roni had already begun to record the butchering of the posthumous collections. So I decided to go without those ones.
Sometimes it's an advantage to be a newbie. You can take a pass on stuff that is known to be covered with slime.
True. I like to do that too, every now and then. That'd be the only reason to keep them. In fact, I did this last night. Read a poem called The Hollywood Hustle. And the slimed version has a particularly absurd change at the end. You want to laugh (or cry), check this out.
The authentic version:
http://bukowski.net/manuscripts/dis...75-01-07-the_hollywood_hustle.jpg&workid=3199
The slimed version:
https://books.google.com/books?id=d...v=onepage&q=hollywood hustle bukowski&f=false
I mean, WTF? The changes kill it.
The authentic version:
http://bukowski.net/manuscripts/dis...75-01-07-the_hollywood_hustle.jpg&workid=3199
The slimed version:
https://books.google.com/books?id=d...v=onepage&q=hollywood hustle bukowski&f=false
I mean, WTF? The changes kill it.
The genesis of clean reader...
[This video is unavailable.]
Seriously though, things like clean reader is a slippery slope towards a frightening fascistic culture of censorship that if allowed to take hold and become the norm would have grave ramifications for freedom of expression. It would be a destroyer of art, and a rampant breeder of mediocrity.
Let art be. We don't want artless holier than thou mediocre meddlers ruining all the good stuff, all the cool stuff. Fuck that. A censored society scares the shit out of me.
[This video is unavailable.]
Seriously though, things like clean reader is a slippery slope towards a frightening fascistic culture of censorship that if allowed to take hold and become the norm would have grave ramifications for freedom of expression. It would be a destroyer of art, and a rampant breeder of mediocrity.
Let art be. We don't want artless holier than thou mediocre meddlers ruining all the good stuff, all the cool stuff. Fuck that. A censored society scares the shit out of me.
PhillyDave
“The essential doesn't change.” Beckett
Fuckin' A Faramir!
mjp
Founding member
Slow down, hombre.
Some voluntary app that changes curse words to things that everyone knows are just replacements for curse words (what's the difference?) is not censorship, and it isn't a step down a road toward censorship. It's just simpletons doing what simpletons have always done. I have a copy of It Catches My Heart In Its Hands where every instance of the word fuck is crossed out with a pen. That book is more than 50 years old.
If you want to get wound up about something, get wound up over the moronifying of textbooks, which are quite a non-voluntary thing.
I hope you're right about that. The scary thing is that there seems to be a market for that app, who are those people, and more importantly what's wrong with them?.
It's funny that the fuck hunter gave enough of a fuck that he/she had to cross out the word from an entire book. I wonder if he/she got anything out of the book, maybe they just skim read scanning for the awful F word. Maybe they had some kind of mission from god to strike the word from every book they found. It's very odd behaviour.
The textbook thing sounds like the dumbing down of education that's been going on for a while. I've read that American kids from the 1900's we're smarter than the kids of today.
Anyway, John Martin, I like my art warts and all, exactly as the artist intended, unmolested by a third party. Where does he get the balls? The very idea is sickening.