1. Think of Post Office, Factotum,
and Women, with a trace of Pulp, since it's a PI, or underground writer
procedural novel, and you have a rough feel for BUKOWSKI NEVER DID THIS: A YEAR
IN THE LIFE OF AN UNDERGROUND WRITER AND HIS FAMILY.
PI for post-inaccrochable,
or public intellectual. Think of Stanley Crouch telling us about Jack Johnson
in the boxing ring. Close-up of Stanley Crouch.
In the year covered in this
book Art Brew wrote 18 books. How did he do that and work at a full-time job?
He didn't. He got fired from one job for blogging.
But he's hanging on to
the second job at this report.
2. Hemingway said he went ten rounds with Mr. Turgenev. Bukowski
went ten rounds with Hemingway. In BUKOWSKI NEVER DID THIS Art Brew goes ten rounds
with the Buk. There are two rules. (1) You have to take the whole package. (2)
There isn't any package without a lot of shit in it.
3. BUKOWSKI NEVER DID THIS is a play on Shakespeare Never Did This.
Bukowski toured Europe. With a paparazzo. The years from 50 to 60 were good years
for Bukowski. The years between 60 and 70 were very good years. Brew is 65, trapped,
no light at the end of the tunnel, when he sits down and writes his way out, with
BUKOWSKI NEVER DID THIS, the first book, after 250 duds, misfires, and rimshots,
for which he is to be paid. Although John Bennett sank a year of his own writing
time into Screed and Crowbar put up his own money to publish Forty and
Jeff Potter is a tireless advocate.
4. What happens to a book after it is written is part of the implicit
drama of the book. If you're holding it in your hands, reading it, a small miracle
has occurred. William Saroyan said the miracle doesn't happen when you become self-supporting
as a writer, but when you become a writer at all. Art Brew says the miracle doesn't
happen when a book is a runaway bestseller, but when a book is published at all.
5. A book is not an isolated artifact. It is written in context. A cultural milieu. A sort of a sociology-of-work context, only creative writing, art, for which the writer might not ever be paid. A labor of love. How do you put a price on a labor of love? How do you put a price on your spouse, or significant other's labor of love? There is also a book before it and a book after it in the catalog. The one after it is about what happened to it in the world, after it was written. It's not a sequel but a continuation. A series. BUKOWSKI NEVER DID THIS is like a mid-stream sample, when you give a specimen, for your UA test. In his day job Brew witnesses court-ordered drug-offenders pee in a bottle.
6. If a book is about how to balance writing, work, and family, it
ought to be about all three, in equal measure. How does a man do the best work he
is capable of doing in a world that's hostile or indifferent to his best. And still
be true to his responsibilities to his wife and family. Brew calls this theme "vocation
and career in conflict."
7. Richard Brautigan crossed over from the underground to the mainstream.
Bukowski did it. Art Brew thought he'd do it, by bearing down, disappearing up
his own asshole. The danger is of disappearing.
8. Paul Auster called a book Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early
Failure. Everybody fails early. Brew called a series of books For All Mankind:
A Tale of Chronic Failure. Can you succeed by staying true to your failure?
Have you disavowed your early failure by succeeding? All you can do is bear down,
and let what happens happen. And don't compare yourself to anyone else.
There are two metrics. What did you accomplish, and what conditions did you do it
under. You can't compare something along two axes at once. Heisenberg's Uncertainty
Principle says so. You can say someone did more with the same amount, or did the
same amount with less, but you can't say someone did more with less.
Brew
did more with less.
9. Bukowski wrote poems, fiction, nonfiction. Then he collected the
pieces, by category. Brew put them all in the same book, in order of composition,
showing how they influence each other, like Rashomon, only with genres, instead
of points of view. A discontinuous narrative held together by the author's voice,
and book covers. Once Brew has done it, there's no going back.
10. If BUKOWSKI NEVER DID THIS reads like it was posted daily on the
worldwide web, as it was written, it was, but it was written by a writer with 250
books under his belt, who could dash a novel off like a columnist writing a 750-word
column, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, with his eyes closed, he has done
it so often. The wonder isn't that he could do it, but that he could keep it fresh.
He surprises himself, by switching from a column to a poem to a prose vignette to
an essay to a book review.
11. The last book Brew published, not counting chapbooks commissioned
by Roger Jackson, pamphlets he published himself, or the titles he posted on the
worldwide web, was Forty, his 40th book, in 1988, 17 years ago. It's been
a long, dry spell. Well, a long dry spell publishing. Writing, he's written 214
books since then, 215 in progress.
12. Jack Saunders, bitter literary also-ran, has a new book out, trying
to ride the coattails of every small press writer's hero, Charles Bukowski, and,
I suppose, the gang of rabble-rousers and professional outsiders who featured him
as a headliner at their Legends of the Underground reading, the Underground Literary
Alliance (ULA), will act as cheerleaders, as they did at the press conference, where
George Plimpton shouted out at them, "Balderdash!" and the Paris Review
contingent shouted, "Hear, hear!"
Me and you are pals-huh, Spike?
13. Jack Kerouac went seven years between the publication of The
Town and the City and On the Road, and then he had to make the changes
Viking Press insisted on before they'd publish it.
I went 17 years between
Forty, my 40th book, and Bukowski Never Did This: A Year in the Life of
an Underground Writer and His Family, my 251st, 252nd, and 253rd books, perhaps
because I wasn't interested in bowdlerizing myself to get published by New York,
I was interested in getting the word right on the page and the pages out to readers
through The Daily Bulletin, where Bukowski Never Did This was serialized,
daily, as it was written.
14. Seymour Krim said, "When's the last time you kicked off a
revolution?" Perhaps he said "invented a generation." The Rucksack
Revolution and the Beat Generation were related. Kerouac walked the earth, having
adventures, then told stories about them, like Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction.
If I adapted Bukowski Never Did This it would be in two volumes, like Kill
Bill I and Kill Bill II, the tech writing job I got sacked for blogging
from and the grant writing job I presently hold. I would interlard the third part,
"Orts," into the first two parts, "Bukowski Never Did This" and
"A Poor Man's Like a Gopher in a Tub." In fact, I might do that next.
Adapt Bukowski Never Did This for the screen.
15. When James King hosted a bluegrass festival at Hoofer's Gospel
Barn, in LaGrange, Georgia, Owen was just back from the IBMA (International Bluegrass
Music Association) convention in Kentucky, where he got a souvenir tin that looked
like a film can with a picture of George Clooney modeling a Dapper Dan hair pomade
can on the cover, to promote a Coen Brothers movie in production, O Brother, Where
Art Thou? The movie, or the soundtrack CD, were not available yet, but already
the word-of-mouth buzz was building into a drum roll, among bluegrass music fans.
16. One time Brenda and I went to an art theater in Atlanta to see a documentary film and in the lobby was a poster for a concert movie, Down From the Mountain, cashing in on the success of O Brother, Where Art Thou? I looked it up on the Internet at home and was able to buy a video of the movie before it played at a theater near me. I got to see Ralph Stanley sing "Death, won't you spare me over for another year," with John Hartford, dying of cancer, behind him. That raised the hair on the back of my neck.
17. As soon as LitVision Press asked to publish Bukowski Never Did
This, I wrote "12 Short Reviews of Bukowski Never Did This," and sent
it to an editor of 3AM magazine, in London, who had interviewed Michael Jackman,
of the Underground Literary Alliance (ULA), identifying myself as a member of the
ULA. He said he no longer worked for the magazine, but gave me the email address
of an editor in Paris. I sent the story to him and he accepted it. The Wines
and Cheeses of England and France, with Notes on Irish Whiskey. Larry called
John Ehle "that cookbook author." So now I am international, like my book
tour for Screed was bi-coastal (Winter Park, Florida, and Ellensburg, Washington).
18. My publisher cautioned me about peaking too soon, on the publicity
for Bukowski Never Did This, but I can't contain my enthusiasm. When you
only publish a book every 17 years, you don't get inured to the excitement of the
process. It's fun. I want to shout it from the housetops.
19. I don't have a counter on my home page, so I don't know how many
visitors I have, or how many regular readers I have. I figure they are in the high-one-,
low-two-figures. I call my coterie of steadfast readers the Buzzard Cult, after
the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, a revitalization movement that swept the Lower
Mississippi Valley just before and after European contact. A cult writer and his
cult have a special bond. They were with him from the beginning, and stuck in there,
through thin and thin. I know there are some lurks, too, because when I mentioned
that I had sold Bukowski Never Did This I got congratulations from people
I did not know were readers.