Anyone fancy Charles Bukowski? Been revisiting him since I went to this rock n roll bar in Rio that bears his name.
Good to read “Women” again.
Anyone fancy Charles Bukowski? Been revisiting him since I went to this rock n roll bar in Rio that bears his name.
Good to read “Women” again.
Years ago, a buddy photocopied a bunch of Bukowski poems for me. I just read a bunch of them--the rest are on my coffee table. Right now I'm reading Peter Carey, an Aussie. Before that I read two books by Thomas Keneally, another Aussie. Anyway, I plan on reading more of the Bukowski when I finish Carey.
If we'd known we were going to be the Beatles, we'd have tried harder.--George Harrison
I have been into buying Beat Generation books, I lost my Kerouac stuff years ago.
Went to this pretty good bookstore in Rio de Janeiro and saw a great pictorial history book about Beat writers and that made me want to read more of their works. Didn’t buy this one, it had great photos but was written in French, I hate reading that language and I’m not too good at it.
Have you read Ginsburg? His best known is "Howl" but he wrote a lot of great poetry and some really shitty stuff as well.
If we'd known we were going to be the Beatles, we'd have tried harder.--George Harrison
Not yet. Ginsberg is still on my list, though.
Btw after I wrote my last post I took a break from the office and went to this used book store here in town.
Found two books I had been looking for, by Faulkner and Steinbeck. I'm not sure John Steinbeck is considered a "beat generation" author, but if not, he's close enough.
Having read Steinback's wayward bus, I just started Joseph Conrad's Youth. Seems to be a good read! Too bad the only copy I could get was a Brazilian edition in Portuguese.
I've read a lot of Conrad. My favorite by him is The Secret Agent. Great book. Except for historical reasons, I'm not that into Heart of Darkness. Last summer, I read his N*gger of the Narcissus. It was one of the most turgid and racist books I've ever read. Really took the shine off Conrad for me.
If we'd known we were going to be the Beatles, we'd have tried harder.--George Harrison
Of the three originally noted I like London the best. He was very "Melvillian" in his ability to place the reader into the setting. His works are historical in nature and transport the reader to another time and place. What amazes me the most about Jack London is how his works still stand up over time so well. Man v. Nature is as awesome in Call of the Wild as it is in Gozilla, King of the Monsters or Ghostbusters.
"No harmonic knowledge, no sense of time, a ghastly tone, unskilled vibrato, and so on. Chuck is one of the worst guitar players I know" -Gravity Jim
There are well over 900 books here. 95% are reference, tech manuals, or history. Perhaps 50 are fiction or novels. Must be a dozen alone on WWII German armour. Perhaps 20 on German U Boats. And twice as many on the War Between the States. Not much fiction I'm afraid. But I'll bet ya I could climb into a Tiger tank and drive it!
I forgot what I was going to say...
I must admit a certain amount of attraction to C. S. Forester and the Hornblower series. I believe that there is a complete collection here. And of course Homer's Illiad and the Oddsey. [Probably spelled em wrong ...] And my first printing of T. E. Lawrence : Revolt in the Desert. Excellent book.
I forgot what I was going to say...
Willie (and everyone else), have you ever read Blaise Cendrar's "Moravagine"?
I don’t know it. Tell us about it.
If we'd known we were going to be the Beatles, we'd have tried harder.--George Harrison
Taking a look at Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. Interesting, really.
After reading Vonnegut's Breakfast, I switched back to Beat Generation books.
Right now I'm digging into Kerouac's Dharma Bums, and having a good time identifying clear Hemingway influences in it. Great book, and great author. I can't help but recalling Papa's "Big two-hearted river" whenever I revisit the 'dinner by the Californian beach' in the first chapter of Dharma Bums. It's like seeing Nick Adams in Kerouac's boots.
Last edited by S. Cane; 06-03-2020 at 04:18 PM.
I hated On the Road. It was a chore to get through it for some reason, not a hard book, but it annoyed me for some reason. Two days after I finished it, I was still mulling it over, and suddenly, I realized what Kerouac was doing, and I realized what a great book it was. I need to reread that one. It's been 38 years.
If we'd known we were going to be the Beatles, we'd have tried harder.--George Harrison
It's been a long time since High school English lit class. I read a couple Hemingway and I may have read OTR. It probably didn't help that I was having a miserable time in school in spite of doing well academically. I just know that reading Orwell scarred me for life.
"Live and learn and flip the burns"
I don't know if they're faves or the best, but first, you've got to get the granddaddy of the Beats and read Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.
I haven't read a lot of the Beats.
I like Ferlinghetti's stuff. His book Coney Island of the Mind is an obligatory read.
And Allen Ginsberg's Collected Poems is a gem. His book Howl, though is a must read, and you should read it soon OR AGAIN: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...
I've read a few other things that escape me, but I've never gotten fully into them.
I've got to revisit Kerouac. A buddy of mine is semi-obsessed by the Beats and posts all kinds of stuff on FB.
But man, I've got about 10 Dickens that I've never read, and I'm going to read that and a couple of rock bios this summer. My reading list is longggggg. I go through phases, and I always do what my training has spurred on--if I like a book by an author, I read most of if not all they wrote.
If we'd known we were going to be the Beatles, we'd have tried harder.--George Harrison
I read Tropic of Cancer early on (late 60s, early 70s, I don't remember exactly). At the time, it had been the subject of censorship and book bans, and is often considered the leading example of "free speech." It was quite the landmark publication (and U. S. Supreme Court case).
We sometimes forget that writers like James Joyce and Henry Miller's books were not only banned, but in the case of Joyce, his American publishers were indicted on obscenity laws. And Joyce and Miller each faced possible imprisonment. While Miller is fairly explicit, Joyce is quite mild by today's standards.
If we'd known we were going to be the Beatles, we'd have tried harder.--George Harrison
Sorry, wrong thread
I just got this fine 1961 edition of Jack London's The Sea Wolf.
He was an autodidact, gave himself an incredible education by reading with great discipline and stamina. Big influence on Hemingway. I need to read London again.
If we'd known we were going to be the Beatles, we'd have tried harder.--George Harrison
I am having a wonderful time reading this book. Not only it's a Jack London book I hadn't read before, but also this edition was printed by Heritage Press, a particularly nice imprint. There are even collectors' groups dedicated to it though the books are quite inexpensive. A good score, indeed.
********************************
"Do you call sleeping with a guitar in your hands practicing?"
"It is if you don't drop it."
- Trent Lane, Daria, Episode 1-2.
My issue with Kerouac is that it doesn't age well. It captures the experimental nature of society when it was written. The stream of conscience style may have been hip to beatnicks and surely fun for the Pranksters and Kesey's folks to riff on but decades later, that framework of the reader isn't there anymore.
I also have an active dislike for On The Road because it was surely written for an audience. And again, that audience is gone. In short, it's not timeless. I know I'm supposed to like it because some professors I had told was supposed to.
Over the years I've tried to pick it up a few times and made an effort to start at curious but it's always the same problem: the story is OK but all the extraneous bullshit and rambling becomes annoying.
I can read a story in iambic pentameter and still hang with the story (except for Troilus and Cressida!). There's a point to the writing. It's communicating the writer's thoughts. Heck, I'm not the biggest Hemingway fan in the world but at least he can get his point across very effectively. (Guy was a good fisherman too so he gets points for that.) I can get through most modern poets too.
But Kerouac is too heavily stylized - to me, laboriously so. That pandering to the times in his writing makes it irrelevant today. If you're into a nostalgia trip fine, but if you want to read something that will move you or make you think look elsewhere.
"No harmonic knowledge, no sense of time, a ghastly tone, unskilled vibrato, and so on. Chuck is one of the worst guitar players I know" -Gravity Jim
Any book that specifically addresses things in current culture is always going to seem like a relic, more so when we leave that bit of culture for another one. I look at that book like I do any book. So the Beatnik stuff seems dated to us because it is, but no more than something like Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (one of my fave books)--prohibition, bull fights, Paris in the 20s? I can't relate to that, but I can relate to universals like heartache and disappointment. On the Road is still a relevant book if you don't quite believe in the American Dream
I understand, though. I hated the book while I was reading it. Bitched about it to my friends. Then a day or two after, it hit me that the book is genius, and I started to get what Kerouac was doing . It''s been 30 years since I read it. But I'll read it again before my boots point to the moon for good.
If we'd known we were going to be the Beatles, we'd have tried harder.--George Harrison
Btw this thread should be merged with the other one I was posting in.
https://www.thefenderforum.com/forum...ning-the-chat)
Mods, please?
Willie's in the middle of a Dickens novel, Little Dorrit. Been so busy I have been reading it slowly. I'm over half way through, and Dickens has just set up the major twist and is starting to bring it together like the master writer he was. Folks get a little put out that he takes so long for the setup, but the payoff is totally worth it. It's not just the crafting; man was a humanist who felt a sense of outrage over corruption and the abuse of the poor and uneducated. And more importantly to most, he's a great storyteller.
If we'd known we were going to be the Beatles, we'd have tried harder.--George Harrison
My Dad was dirt poor when he was a kid. They literally went hungry during the depression. His clothes were rags, and he had no education, could barely read. Over time, he taught himself, and he loved Westerns. Dreamed of being a cowboy. Grew up to own some incredible horses. He worked hard on his house and land when he retired. And he took breaks and read. I’m moving stuff out for new carpet. These are some of Dad books. L’Amour was his fave. I’ve got a couple of them in my to-be-read shelf.
If we'd known we were going to be the Beatles, we'd have tried harder.--George Harrison