Upon the Mathematics of the Breath and the Way

      I was going to begin this with a little rundown on the female but since the smoke on the local battlefront has cleared a bit I will relent, but there are 50,000 men in this nation who must sleep on their bellies for fear of losing their parts to women with wild-glazed eyes and knives. Brothers and sisters, I am 52 and there is a trail of females behind me, enough for five men’s lives. Some of the ladies have claimed that I have betrayed them for drink; well, I’d like to see any man stick his pecker into a fifth of whiskey. Of course, you can get your tongue in there but the bottle doesn’t respond. Well, haha among the trumpets, let’s get back to the word.

      The word. I’m on my way to the track, opening day at Hollywood Park, but I’ll tell you about the word. To get the word down proper, that takes courage, seeing the form, living the life, and getting it into the line. Hemingway takes his critical blows now from people who can’t write. There are hundreds of thousands of people who think they can write. They are the critics, the bellyachers and the mockers. To point to a good writer and call him a hunk of shit helps satisfy their loss as creators, and the better a man gets the more he is envied and, in turn, hated. You ought to hear them razz and demean Pincay and Shoemaker, two of the greatest jocks ever to steer a horse. There’s a little man outside our local tracks who sells newspapers and he says, “Get your paper, get your info on Shoemaker the Faker.” Here he is calling a man who has ridden more winners than any other jock alive (and he’s still riding and riding well) and here’s this newspaper guy selling papers for a dime and calling the Shoe a fraud. The Shoe is a millionaire, not that that’s important, but he did get it with his talent and he could buy this guy’s newspapers, all of them, for the rest of this guy’s life and into a half-dozen eternities. Hemingway, too, gets the sneers from the newspaper boys and girls of writing. They didn’t like his exit. I thought his exit was quite fine. He created his own mercy killing. And he created some writing. Some of it depended too much on style but it was a style he broke through with; a style that ruined thousands of writers who attempted to use any portion of it. Once a style is evolved it is thought of as a simple thing, but style not only evolves through a method, it evolves through feeling, it is like laying a brush to canvas in a certain way and if you’re not living along the path of power and flow, style vanishes. Hemingway’s style did tend to vanish toward the end, progressively, but that’s because he let down his guard and let people do things to him. But he gave us more than plenty. There is a minor poet I know who came over the other night. He is a learned man, and clever, he lets the ladies support him so you know he’s good at something. He is a very powerful figure of a man growing soft around the edges, looks quite literary and carries these black notebooks around with him and he reads to you from them. This boy told me the other night, “Bukowski, I can write like you but you can’t write like me.” I didn’t answer him because he needs his self-glory, but really, he only thinks he can write like me. Genius could be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way, or even to say a simple thing in a simpler way. Oh, by the way, if you want to get one angle on a minor writer, it is one who throws a party or gets one thrown for him when his book comes out.

      Hemingway studied the bullfights for form and meaning and courage and failure and the way. I go to boxing matches and attend horse races for the same reason. There is a feeling at the wrists and the shoulders and the temples. There is a manner of watching and recording that grows into the line and the form and the act and the fact and the flower, and the dog walking and the dirty panties under the bed, and the sound of the typewriter as you’re sitting there, that’s the big sound, the biggest sound in the world, when you’re getting it down in your way, the right way, and no beautiful woman counts before it and nothing that you could paint or sculpt counts before it; it is the final art, this writing down of the word, and the reason for valor is all there; it is the finest gamble ever arranged and not many win.

      Somebody asked me, “Bukowski, if you taught a course in writing what would you ask them to do?” I answered, “I’d send them all to the racetrack and force them to bet $5 on each race.” This ass thought I was joking. The human race is very good at treachery and cheating and modifying a position. What people who want to be writers need is to be put in an area that they cannot maneuver out of by weak and dirty play. This is why groups of people at parties are so disgusting: all their envy and smallness and trickery surfaces. If you want to find out who your friends are you can do two things: invite them to a party or go to jail. You will soon find that you don’t have any friends.

      If you think I am wandering here, hold your tits or your balls or hold somebody else’s. Everything fits here.

      And since I must presume (I haven’t seen any of it) that I am being honored and criticized in this issue I should say something about the little magazines, although I might have said some of it elsewhere?—at least over a row of beer bottles. Little magazines are useless perpetuators of useless talent. Back in the ’20s and ’30s there was not an abundance of littles. A little magazine was an event, not a calamity. One could trace the names from the littles and up through literary history; I mean, they began there and they went up, they became. They became books, novels, things. Now most little magazine people begin little and remain little. There are always exceptions. For instance, I remember first reading Truman Capote in a little named Decade, and I thought here is a man with some briskness, style and fairly original energy. But basically, like it or not, the large slick magazines print a much higher level of work than the littles—and most especially in prose. Every jackass in America pumps out countless and ineffectual poems. And a large number of them are published in the littles. Tra la la, another edition. Give us a grant, see what we are doing! I receive countless little magazines through the mail, unsolicited, un-asked-for. I flip through them. Arid vast nothingness. I think that the miracle of our times is that so many people can write down so many words that mean absolutely nothing, but they can do it, and they do it continually and relentlessly. I put out 3 issues of a little, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns. The material received was so totally inept that the other editor and myself were forced to write most of the poems. He’d write the first half of one poem, then I’d finish it. Then I’d go the first half of another and he’d finish it. Then we’d sit around and get to the names: “Let’s see, whatta we gonna call this cocksucker?”