Wherein I lay the sad tale of the senseless, tragic rape of Charles Bukowski’s ghost by John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press at your feet. Do with it what you will.
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Good stuff, man. Someday someone will right this wrong.
That seems to be what a lot of people think (hope?), but I’m not as optimistic about the wrong being righted.
Well written! I enjoyed your piece written in 2013 as well. I’m very much, a Charles Bulowski fan, he has and will always be my top 3 favorite poets/ writers. I am a writer, but not professional by any meaning of the definition. I am a poet but not a “good” one….15+ years of stacks upon stacks of my proof of insanity collect dust in boxes marked Toxic. Hah hah.. At least I can have a good laugh at my ink scribblings. It passes the time. I don’t write crowd pleasing poetry… I am making an assumption as I’ve never shared more than a few pages of my toxic nonsense, however if I were to ever discover that my crazy was edited and hacked to pieces like the posthumous published books of Buk, Id feel violated in an unflattering way. I appreciate the list of hacked posthumous titles.. I was relieved none of which I own were on that list. Probably why I love all of his books, those of which were on the genuine list. Well, job well done in shedding light on the matter for those of us Bukowski fans
what’s your source for your claim that bukowski was making $4,000 per month at the post office circa 1969/70? i don’t think that’s even close to accurate. $48,000 in ’69 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $420,444.69 today.
You’re applying inflation to a number I already applied inflation to (when I recorded that a decade ago). As a clerk with 10 years on the job in 1969, Bukowski would have been making about $625 a month at the post office. Which the inflation calculator says is $5,347.50 (as of last month). The apocryphal $100 a month he supposedly lived on after leaving the post office would be about $855.60 today. He spent that much on child support and his phone bill. While $100 a month was likely a welcome gesture, it was not the critical financial support it is made out to be in the Bukowski myth.