href="#ulink_9a413477-0d12-54f0-ba27-2044e2b367ed">Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“Can’t you keep those motherfuckers quiet?”)
More Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“You may not believe it”)
More Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“I was put in touch with them”)
More Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“I swung three deep out of Vacantsville”)
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“Tony Kinnard was a great poet of the ’50s”)
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“They’d been married 32 years”)
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“We walked in”)
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“I’m not in the mood for an immortal column today”)
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“I had given up on women”)
Guggenheim Application: Narrative Account of Career
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“‘Harry,’ said Doug”)
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“I was too early at the airport”)
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“They were drunk and driving along the coast”)
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“The Great Poet had finished his reading”)
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“Hello Mom”)
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“Lydia got out of bed”)
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (“I left L.A. International with a tremendous hangover”)
Politics and Love
Dildo Man
Little Magazines in America: Conclusion of Symposium
Introduction to John William Corrington, Mr. Clean and Other Poems
The Corybant of Wit: Review of Irving Layton, The Laughing Rooster
Introduction to Jory Sherman, My Face in Wax
Lightning in a Dry Summer: Review of John William Corrington, The Anatomy of Love and Other Poems
Another Burial of a Once Talent: Review of John William Corrington’s Lines to the South and Other Poems
Foreword to Steve Richmond, Hitler Painted Roses
Essay on Nothing for Your Mother-Nothingness
Who’s Big in the “Littles”
The Deliberate Mashing of the Sun (d.a. levy)
Charles Bukowski on Willie: Introduction to The Cockroach Hotel by Willie [William Hageman]
Introduction to Doug Blazek’s Skull Juices
The Impotence of Being Ernest: Review of Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream
An Introduction to These Poems: Al Masarik, Invitation to a Dying
Foreword: Steve Richmond, Earth Rose
A Note on These Poems: Appreciation to Al Purdy’s At Marsport Drugstore
About “Aftermath”
Preface: The Bukowski/Purdy Letters 1964–1974
Introduction to Horsemeat
Foreword: Douglas Goodwin, Half Memory of a Distant Life
Foreword: Macdonald Carey, Beyond That Further Hill
Further Musings
Confessions of a Badass Poet
Craft Interview for New York Quarterly
Gin-Soaked Boy
Lizard’s Eyelid Interview
INTRODUCTION
Charles Bukowski on Writers and Writing
David Stephen Calonne
Although many modern authors have made writing itself a central theme in their works—“metafiction” is a ubiquitous example—Charles Bukowski was particularly obsessive in defining himself constantly as a writer in his texts while simultaneously questioning what this might signify: he exists in a purely literary universe that spins out of and around the idea of writing. Experience exists in order to be turned into poetry and prose, but he also is constantly mocking himself and the pretensions of the “artist.” In The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship, he tells us: “Old Writer puts on sweater, sits down, leers into computer screen and writes about life. How holy can we get?”—a scene masterfully portrayed by R. Crumb.1 The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way: On Writers and Writing presents a variety of Bukowski’s introductions and essays on authors, explorations of his poetics, and other samples of the ways he continually incorporates writerly themes in his fiction.
The earliest work included here—Bukowski’s 1957 story “A Dollar for Carl Larsen”—is an example of his experimentation with combining fiction and illustration: he submitted several “graphic fictions” to Whit Burnett’s celebrated Story magazine. While it ostensibly treats an encounter with a “big blonde” at the racetrack, the tale begins and ends with mysterious literary, extra-textual allusions. The epigraph reads: “dedicated to Carl Larsen, owed
