Read Online Screams From the Balcony by Charles Bukowski - Free Book Online
Authors: Charles Bukowski
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the local hicks glaring at me. The gal had money. I didn’t know she had money. Or her folks had money. We went back to L.A. and I went back to work, somewhere.
The marriage didn’t work. It took 3 years for her to find out that I was not what she had thought I was supposed to be. I was anti-social, coarse, a drunkard, didn’t go to church, played horses, cursed when intoxicated, didn’t like to go anywhere, shaved carelessly, didn’t care for her paintings or her relatives, sometimes stayed in bed 2 or 3 days running etc. etc.
Very little more. I went back to my whore who had once been such a cruel and beautiful woman, and who was no longer beautiful (as such) but who had, magically, become a warm and real person, but she could not stop drinking, she drank more than I, and she died.
There is not much left now. I drink mostly alone and discourage company. People seem to be talking about things that don’t count. They are too eager or too vicious or too obvious.
I hope this clears up some things and that I have not Ferlinghettied you. I can tell you things that happened like this and it takes nothing away because it is only a LISTING in a sense, and what happened, the living of it, it is still there. I have played some bad lutestrings and taken some knocks in the head, but it was the only way, there was only one path.
As to the other, I like the EARLY Hemingway, and like the rest of us, was affected somewhat by T.S. and Auden, but not so much in a sense of content , but in a clean and easy way of saying. I like Wagner and Beethoven, Klee and Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff and rabbits. This is all pretty common, I realize. So is breathing. Then too, there’s Darius Milhaud, Verdi, Mussorgsky, Smetana, Shostakovich, Schumann, Bach, Massenet, Ernst von Dohnanyi, Menotti, Gluck, Mahler, Bruckner, Franck, Gounod, Handel and Zoltan Kodaly. Brahms and Tchaikovsky somehow become less and less to me. In Jeffers, I like the longer works, where the style is almost prose, but where everything is hard brick and breaking, where everything is up against the knife and very real. Jeffers almost admires his nonthinking man-brutes as opposed to etc…. that gives his work the touch of truth. He writes believably and the pages are in your hands like warm things, difficult to believe that type and machine also put them together. As to contemporaries, they do not do much for me. I do not mean the poets still living who have stopped writing, I mean those living now and writing now. I cannot see much. A great alikeness. A carefulness. What a stinking age! What a set of ass-lickers.
Enough of that. [* * *]
Got a letter from Germany today from some Heinie telling me that he has translated “Candidate Middle” and “The Life of Borodin” and that they will be used in a radio feature. This calls for cold chills all around. I, who can no longer speak or understand the language of my birthplace, will be going back into my own tongue from the place I left. This is some kind of magic, like black horses turned loose and running on a hill. [* * *]
Weekend shot. Sherman haggling with Norman Mosher who studies under T. Roethke. Real bitter stuff. I have long ago said that I do not care for the poets. I would like to see one once in a while with a little self-doubt instead of this cockiness and the unsheathing of the nails. I am just about now getting over it. People climb into my mind, kick around, piss around, and it takes some time for them to leave.
…a part of the ankle will not go down. I will be the club-ankle poet. Lord Byron, make way!
I told Jon to let you have your head in the intro. If you want to go long, go long; if you want to go short, go short. It is a tough job at best. But you must know that I am honored to have you for my barker: “And now, ladies and gentlemen, we give you—,” and Bukowski steps out from behind the tent flap with 3 red hairs on his chest, and can of beer in one hand and a German shepherd pup in the
The marriage didn’t work. It took 3 years for her to find out that I was not what she had thought I was supposed to be. I was anti-social, coarse, a drunkard, didn’t go to church, played horses, cursed when intoxicated, didn’t like to go anywhere, shaved carelessly, didn’t care for her paintings or her relatives, sometimes stayed in bed 2 or 3 days running etc. etc.
Very little more. I went back to my whore who had once been such a cruel and beautiful woman, and who was no longer beautiful (as such) but who had, magically, become a warm and real person, but she could not stop drinking, she drank more than I, and she died.
There is not much left now. I drink mostly alone and discourage company. People seem to be talking about things that don’t count. They are too eager or too vicious or too obvious.
I hope this clears up some things and that I have not Ferlinghettied you. I can tell you things that happened like this and it takes nothing away because it is only a LISTING in a sense, and what happened, the living of it, it is still there. I have played some bad lutestrings and taken some knocks in the head, but it was the only way, there was only one path.
As to the other, I like the EARLY Hemingway, and like the rest of us, was affected somewhat by T.S. and Auden, but not so much in a sense of content , but in a clean and easy way of saying. I like Wagner and Beethoven, Klee and Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff and rabbits. This is all pretty common, I realize. So is breathing. Then too, there’s Darius Milhaud, Verdi, Mussorgsky, Smetana, Shostakovich, Schumann, Bach, Massenet, Ernst von Dohnanyi, Menotti, Gluck, Mahler, Bruckner, Franck, Gounod, Handel and Zoltan Kodaly. Brahms and Tchaikovsky somehow become less and less to me. In Jeffers, I like the longer works, where the style is almost prose, but where everything is hard brick and breaking, where everything is up against the knife and very real. Jeffers almost admires his nonthinking man-brutes as opposed to etc…. that gives his work the touch of truth. He writes believably and the pages are in your hands like warm things, difficult to believe that type and machine also put them together. As to contemporaries, they do not do much for me. I do not mean the poets still living who have stopped writing, I mean those living now and writing now. I cannot see much. A great alikeness. A carefulness. What a stinking age! What a set of ass-lickers.
Enough of that. [* * *]
Got a letter from Germany today from some Heinie telling me that he has translated “Candidate Middle” and “The Life of Borodin” and that they will be used in a radio feature. This calls for cold chills all around. I, who can no longer speak or understand the language of my birthplace, will be going back into my own tongue from the place I left. This is some kind of magic, like black horses turned loose and running on a hill. [* * *]
Weekend shot. Sherman haggling with Norman Mosher who studies under T. Roethke. Real bitter stuff. I have long ago said that I do not care for the poets. I would like to see one once in a while with a little self-doubt instead of this cockiness and the unsheathing of the nails. I am just about now getting over it. People climb into my mind, kick around, piss around, and it takes some time for them to leave.
…a part of the ankle will not go down. I will be the club-ankle poet. Lord Byron, make way!
I told Jon to let you have your head in the intro. If you want to go long, go long; if you want to go short, go short. It is a tough job at best. But you must know that I am honored to have you for my barker: “And now, ladies and gentlemen, we give you—,” and Bukowski steps out from behind the tent flap with 3 red hairs on his chest, and can of beer in one hand and a German shepherd pup in the
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