inkbluesky

Interesting blog post on the poet/writer Charles Bukowski, Notes of a dirty old man’s author’s birthday yesterday. other then having watched the semi-autobiographical movie Barfly (1987) that Bukowski also wrote I’m not that familiar with his work.

I read him during the ’60s and ’70s when his hard, abusive, crude approach to women and other things were clearly not PC.  I also was that way about Norman Mailer who also rubbed many folks the wrong way.  Why did I find so much to like about his writing ?  I really still have to struggle to answer that.

Henry Miller the author of Tropic of Cancer among other classic of modern lit came to mind. First a few lines from some of Charles work, Post Office

I think it was my second day as a Christmas temp that this big woman came out and walked around with me as I delivered letters. What I mean by big was that her a** was big and her t*** were big and that she was big in all the right places. She seemed a bit crazy, but I kept looking at her body and I didn’t care.

From Henry’s Tropic,

Everything is endured–disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui–in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off. All the while some one is eating the bread of life and drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides away in the cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the street a phantom host touches the lips and the blood is pale as water. And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige even of relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open.

They were not nice. But they were honest about their thoughts. What realm of life do we have left to express those thoughts that do not fit the ideals of personal philosophy, religion or politics. There is only art. Bukowski and Miller not only said out loud, but in print what many people pay a psychiatrist a hundred dollars a hour to say freely and without judgment. It would be a mistake to brand them as nothing more the wordsmith versions of your crude and drunken old uncle that is no longer invited to holiday dinners. Miller and what I’ve quickly skimmed of Bukowski had a structure, a set of rules. In Miller’s case George Orwell once wrote that Miller was “accurate” in his attempt to capture the essence of life as he saw it. The way he saw things was raw, crude and frequently cruel, but it was honest as far as the extent of his vision, as admittedly subjective as that may have been. Neither writer is likely to enjoy any great resurgence in popularity because of that. The stand-up monologues on the Comedy Channel are about as culturally rebellious as the modern masses will tolerant. They still serve as reminders that censorship doesn’t just close down some faddish entertainment, but intrudes on our thoughts as well.

old boat – norway

Switching it up: How memory deals with a change in plans

Instead, they discovered that the prefrontal cortex became more active when participants had to switch rules, and a different part of the brain – the parietal cortex, which is near the back of the head – became more active when the participants were asked to switch numbers.

“This indicates that different parts of our brains store different kinds of memories and information,” Courtney said. That, she said, “provides clues about how the human brain accomplishes complex, goal-directed behaviors that require remembering and changing abstract rules, an ability that is disrupted in many mental illnesses.”

This is easy. You store the milk run in the parital cortex. No wait, you store the deadline at work in your parital cortex and the milk run in the prefrontal side door. Wait, first you tell your boss that the milk stored in your prefrontal cortex has to leave because if you don’t something in your pants might explode. This only works once and you’re unlikely to get a great year end salary review.

John McCain Attempts Spin to VFW Audience