This is a collection of short stories of an underground writer who used his writings to depict the depravity of this so-called society. A cult hero: Charles Bukowski. Subject changes from horse racing to how he survived as a broke writer to his sexual life. Hank’s writings are from pure experience, emotions that leads to direct and violent but truest language. Stories you are going to read in this book, just like his other works, are strongly narrative.
If you are someone who has a thin-skinned personality and can get easily offended by brutal honesty I wouldn’t advise you to read this but if you love what I love which raw scenarios that doesn’t glamorize life. I can easily relate to how much he loves his solitude and this makes him hard to be around people but not sure about his misanthropy.
Whenever I read a book I always underline it and take notes. Here are some of the underlined pieces from the book that will help you to understand what this book is exactly.
1. There are not enough lives in one man to conquer Art, let alone enough men in one world to criticize it.
2. Nothing is to be understood or “regained”. It is simply to be written. By someone. Sometime. Not too often.
3. …the police ask, where do you live? not, why do you live? but where? and they take me to their jail, a thing of wood and steel. what is your name? they ask. they ask all the easy questions and I suppose that is why they are so fat and fearless and clean.
4. death, at last, is a bore – no more than pulling a shade. we do not die all at once, generally, but piece by piece, little by little. the young die hardest and live hardest and understand nothing. but they are the most generous and the truest and better fit to lead than the cautious wise. …the young have yet to surrender to fact. and fact is nothing but the grime of centuries.
5. …because the lead the dead mass our so-called leaders have had to speak dead words and preach dead ways (and war is one of their ways) in order to be heard by dead minds. History, because it is built in this beehive fashion, has left us nothing but blood and torture and waste.
6. I don’t know if the world can ever be saved; it would take a tremendous and almost impossible turnabout. But if we cannot save the world, then at least let us know what it is, where we are.
7. Yet society says that a man without a university education because he refuses to carry the game forward, must act as a lower or end-agent of the game. …So you think it over and spit it out. Given 2 choices, being a professor of English or a dishwasher, you take the dishwasher. Perhaps not to save the world but to harm it less.
8. If you destroy the Left you tend to become the Left; if you destroy the Right you tend to become the Right. It’s all quicksilver, a teeter-totter, and great men have been trapped and fooled by the switching of the balance. Politics, wars, causes – for thousands of years we have ended up with a sack of shit. It’s time we learned to think.
9. Everything you own must be able to fit inside one suitcase; then your mind might be free.
10. I introduced Cornelia and Vanna. They looked at each other the way women do, immediately knowing everything I had done to either of them or wanted to do or would do.
11. I am all I can possibly be at this moment.
12. The writing arrives when it wants to. There is nothing you can do about it. You can’t squeeze more writing out of the living than is there. Any attempt to do so creates a panic in the soul, diffuses and jars the line.
13. If there is anything I can’t stand it’s the happiness of an idiot, an unfounded happiness.
