Word: bukowski
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Written by Charles Bukowski...
...problem with Barfly is that it has a mission. This is to glorify the life of the Los Angeles beat poet Charles Bukowski, who wrote the semi-autobiographical script. Now Bukowski has a terrific literati-on-the-skids persona; more downwardly mobile than Kerouac or Burroughs, more degenerate than Ginsberg. He came of age as a writer in the same kind of desolate, marginal, flophouse and seedy bar milieu that Schroeder evokes so effectively in the film. And he's a fine writer--the problem is that you'd never know it from the script, which struck...
...self-image that Bukowski apparently wanted to project is that of a proudly independent tramp/sage, an innocently virtuous Candide figure whose crowning virtue is having "refused to join the rat race." It's cool to be a bum, Bukowski tells us. In fact, it's the only artistically valid way to live. We are meant to appreciate this when Bukowski's alter ego Henry abruptly leaves the bed of the wealthy and beautiful young editor Tully Sorenson (Alice Krige). He tells her that she "lives in a cage with golden bars," and shambles back down the hill to the sordid...
...books, exclaimed one French critic, "possess all the passionate excess of Rabelais' Gargantua, the verbal virtuosity of a Joyce, the demonic cruelty of Celine's best work." Mon dieu, who is this born-again Shakespeare? Charles Bukowski. You know, the 64-year-old Los Angeles-based laureate of American lowlife whose Henry Miller-ish paeans to booze and broads (Love Is a Dog for Hell, Notes of a Dirty Old Man) typically sell only around 5,000 copies in the U.S. In France, more than 100,000 copies of the Boho's short and tall stories have left the shelves...
...Bukowski is typical of the outsider author Martin tends to favor. John Fante, a neglected proletarian novelist and screenwriter, was rescued from obscurity by Black Sparrow in the last years of his life. His reissued novels, Ask the Dust and Dreams from Bunker Hill, sold more than 10,000 copies each. Martin's current favorite is the late Wyndham Lewis, a novelist and critic whose work, & said T.S. Eliot, combined "the thought of the modern and the energy of the cave man." Lewis also dabbled in art. To Poet Edith Sitwell, his pictures seemed "to have been painted...