And Lo,
for the Earth was empty of Form,
and void.
And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep.
And We said: 'Look at that fucker Dance.'
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite JestBack to Index
Early Bukowski is so weird and pretentious and sad.
Far from the image of Bukowski recognized in certain b-tier art consumer circles today: the tired but ultimately complacent and entertainingly vulgar, foul-mouthed, grotesuqe, post-sexual old fuck.
It is a frustrated and resentful young Buk, aggresively naive, lobbing trite and tired old observations about consumerism and superficiality at a society he sees himself as somehow, not belonging, if not so much as superior to. Criticizing, unsubtly justifying himself and his obvious misery instead of trying to merely 'convey' and 'express'
We see a man utterly, yet understandably, incapable of conceiving of a reader who is genuinely curious to read about who he is, what he sees and says and does, to get to know him as opposed to his thoughts and opinions and, strangely, words.
A sort of like, archetypal adolescent lamentation, representative of types that he would, himself, eventually come to describe as: 'writing about life as if they had a real angle on it.'
He, to put it rather mildly, bores. If his trick is being such a disastrous mess that you can not, for the life of you, look away, then clearly he isn't there yet, as he writes.
The aspiration to come out on top is still there, and it's so familiarly tedious and dull, another ambitious striver making ostensibly pointed remarks on the sourness of the proverbial grapes. He loathes and resents us for having and enjoying and taking for grant all these things which he will, eventually, come to confess a profound pain of deprivation and unmet need for. The deadthly-tired old toad now brooding, ruminating, reflecting on all those things he never had, will never have. The deep and festering wounds of rejection, isolation and pain ever wide open, never healed, nor closed or scarred. A Bukowski who, in due time, wearing his collosal gash on the proverbial sleeve, would gather small and rowdy crowds in small rooms translucent with smoke and loud with jeering and swear words, crowds that never missed a good laugh at a bodily-function type joke but would often seem to fail to perceive the endings of his rather more serious pieces and, like, forget to applaud, or respond, the way that failing to add the appropriate inflection at the end of a sentence can leave your interlocutor like, hanging, waiting for you to go on
Because, still, at that point, we see a man, who, like so many of us, still hopes and strives, kicks back and wants, grasps for it, frustrated and sad.