Hank Chinaski Lives
In the next quarter century, the surplus grew, thanks to Bukowski’s nearly graphomaniacal fecundity. “I usually write ten or fifteen [poems] at once,” he said, and he imagined the act of writing as a kind of entranced combat with the typewriter, as in his poem “cool black air”: “now I sit down to it and I bang it, I don’t use the light / touch, I bang it.”
As could have been predicted, it started with a post at Dangerous Minds. The feature was about the late Charles Bukowski, who was called Hank by those who knew him. The writer/drunk had always been a bit of a fascination to PG. Out of the millions of useless drunks feeding the urinals of planet earth, at least one will turn out to have had literary merit.
A trip to Google city is made, and quotes from the bard are found, along with the wikipedia page. All of this leads to a New Yorker piece about the gentleman. After nine paragraphs, and two poems, there is the phrase that set off PG…graphomaniacal fecundity.(spell check suggestion:nymphomaniac)
As best as we can figure, g.f. means that Hank wrote a lot of stuff. This is a good thing. PG operates on the notion that if you keep your quantity up, the quality will take care of itself. Hank seems to agree, spitting out product “like hot turds the morning after a good beer drunk.” He seemed to take pride in doing what Truman Capote said about Jack Kerouac…he doesn’t write, he types.
If you google the phrase graphomaniacal fecundity, you can choose from 71 results. The top six apparently quote the article in New Yorker. A blogspot facility called poemanias quotes the paragraph from the New Yorker, with the title “On Bukowski’s afterlife”, while Fourhourhardon reprints the entire thing. Neither provide a link back to the original.
Goliath and Petey Luvs Blog take the same copy-paste approach. The first tries to get you to pay for more reading material. This forum also does the control A-C-V approach, but yields this comment : “He was a contemporary of the Beats, but not quite one of them because he was darker and not as willing to smoke a joint and sing Phil Ochs songs on the lower east side.” The truth is, Hank hated marijuana, and had the classic alcoholic attitude about it. So it goes. Keep and share copies the complete New Yorker feature, but has some other thumbsuckers about Mr. Bukowski.
It is a truism that new media borrows content from old media. Stories, told orally from genration to generation, are compiled into books, which are then made into movies. Plastic panels try to look like wood. The newest new media that old fogey PG knows about is twitter. People tell little stories in 140 characters or less, which go around the world in seconds. With this abundance of media, there are not always enough messages to feed the beast.
On twitter, there are people producing twitter feeds from dead authors. Maybe these wordmongers went to a place with internet access. Kurt Vonnegut (three hours ago) “Busy, busy, busy”. Mark Twain (three hours ago) “Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint”. Brautigan’s Ghost (twenty two hours ago) “I cannot say to the one I love, “Hi, flower-wonderful bird-love sweet.”
The deceased content maker best suited to twitter might be Conway Twitty. One slow day two years ago, Yahoo asked peeps Do you think Conway Twitty would have used Twitter? ~ He gave them the idea ~ I think Twitty would tweet, Twitter would be Conway’s, way of of communicating to the world, Twitty would be tweeting his little Twitty head off, ~ I better send out a Twitty Tweet ~ Cute, but a serious answer, probably. A media hound, he’d want to get his name plastered everywhere. ~ If he did that would have made him a ‘Twitty Twitter” ~ Who cares, he’s a twit anyway”.
There are four Twitty Twitter feeds. @ConwayTwitty (Oct. 21,2009) “The Conway Twitty Musical is getting great reviews in Branson!!! . @TwittyTweats (January 12, 2012) “In Twitty City, it never snows. All the men wear gold medallions and blazers. And the women never cry. Unless you hold them.” @Conway_Twitty (February 20, 2012) “My cock is an amphibious assault vehicle” @conwaytwittier (April 28, 2012). “@JasonIsbell How’s the English weather treating your hair? I had the hardest time keeping my pompadour in tiptop shape there.” @twittybirdmoda is written in Japanese.
The original concept for this post was to spotlight twitter feeds borrowing material from Charles Bukowski. Hank is the beer bard of Los Angeles. He is a hero to many. Out of the millions of worthless drunks populating bars, at least one could write poems. It gives you hope for mankind.
The front page of a google search for “charles bukowski on twitter” yields eight feeds. The original plan was to ignore any that were not updated in 2012. An exception will be for @hank_bukowski (Yeah it’s good to be back). (January 25, 2009) “Yesterday I met Adolf H. in hell. He is fuckin stupid.” “too lazzy these days, too drunk to twitter”.
With the 2012-only rule in effect, we are left with three Bukowski thieves. @BukowskiDiz (May 1) “Curiosidades sobre Charles Bukowski http://migre.me/8UhRf“. @bukquotes (May 8) “all the mules and drunken ladies gone the bad novels march…”. ~ “I always read when I shit and the worse the book the better the bowel movement.” @bukowski_lives (one hour ago) “Basically, that’s why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.”
Pictures are from The Library of Congress. This is a double repost.
The Poetry He Invented
In the past year, PG has learned that two poems he enjoyed were “borrowed.” One was in Mad Magazine. It was a poem about baseball. “Tigers Tigers, burning bright, in the ballparks, of the night, your pitching’s fair, your fields adroit, so why no pennant for Detroit.” Not only was this a memorable rhyme, but it has the word adroit. While this is a wonderful addition to a vocabulary, in forty eight years PG has never used it. Maybe the only thing it is good for is rhyming with Detroit.
PG is not terribly well educated when it comes to poetry. A lot of things slip by him. He did develop an admiration for Allen Ginsberg, which led to William Blake. One night, with the World Series in the background, PG found a poem by Mr. Blake, The Tyger.
“Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” Could it be that Mad was more fun to read? A more adroit turn of phrase? Or less prophetic… The Tigers won the World Series before the sixties were over.
In a few years, PG moved byond Mad Magazine. He read about these albums being sold by Warner Brothers. They were collections of songs from different artists, designed to make you want to buy more. “The Big Ball” cost two dollars by mail order. Side four was devoted to weird stuff. Captain Beefheart, The Mothers of Invention, The GTO’s, and Pearls Before Swine. The last band had a song, “Footnote,” which is embedded with this post.
“Footnote” is a quiet song, with easy to remember words. PG listened many, many times, and thought he had it figured out. It was about an arms dealer. Of course, most think the Pearls Before Swine is something in the Bible. Another version is when Clare Boothe Luce went into a room ahead of Dorothy Parker. “Age before beauty” “Pearls before swine”.
So anyway, there was an article about something, somewhere. It was quoting Wyston Hugh Auden, known mercifully by his initials W.H. This is another famous person that PG knew little about, other than his friendship with Christopher Isherwood. The quote was familiar. Then it hit… this was that song by Pearls Before Swine. It seems like the performer borrowed the lyrics from a copyrighted poem, Epitaph on a Tyrant.
Pictures for this entertainment are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”. The second embedded video is from side four of “The Big Ball.” PG does not know if a famous poet was copied, or if this piece is original.
Chamblee54 
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