Beautiful boozer

I love this about bookstores: when you frequent one, you discover new inhabitants on the shelves all the time. New names, new faces appear, like a condo housing new tenants. One week Paul Auster or Jonathan Lethem aren’t living there; the next week their back catalogues appear — authors with their respective broods in tow.

A bookstore is like a downtown village of thoughts, reflections, truths and lies, gossip and speculation. You get to listen in. You get to make the rounds. You get to pull out a few authors and take them out somewhere to sit down over coffee.

Then, inevitably, Dan Brown moves in with his storewide shelf space. And there goes the neighborhood.

Until fairly recently, National Book Store was not in the habit of stocking Charles Bukowski, I noticed. And then — surprise — I’d see his poetry books popping up alongside Neruda and Rilke.

Who rehabilitated Bukowski?

I’m reading one of his short story collections now, Tales of Ordinary Madness, and it reminds me of why we have books and bookstores. People need to read this stuff. It might disappear otherwise.

“Beautiful loser” would be an apt descriptor of Bukowski, if Bob Seger hadn’t long ago copped the title for his own song. A story like “The Stupid Christs” from Tales of Ordinary Madness isn’t a slam against the Catholic Church or Jesus; it’s a blurry manifesto from a guy who won’t let himself become a factory-working zombie, yet can’t stay sober long enough to even answer the door when opportunity knocks. And who else but narrator in a Bukowski story would find fault with the way pigeons’ necks move when they’re walking?

Bukowski has been immortalized by his words, but also by his portrayal in the ‘80s Barbet Schroeder movie Barfly, starring pugilistic Mickey O’Rourke back when he was working on his first or second comeback round. I’m not sure if O’Rourke got Bukowski right or not; I’ve only ever heard the man’s voice reciting his own poetry in YouTube videos, my favorite of which is “Something For The Touts, The Nuns, The Grocery Clerks, And You...”:

we have everything and we have nothing

and some men do it in churches

and some men do it by tearing butterflies

in half

and some men do it in Palm Springs

laying it into butterblondes

with Cadillac souls

Cadillacs and butterflies

nothing and everything,

the face melting down to the last puff

in a cellar in Corpus Christi.

It goes on like this for a thousand or so words, and the remarkable thing is that, what Bukowski could pull off in the occasional brilliant poem, he also pulls off in much of his prose. His novels, short stories (like the ones in Tales of Ordinary Madness) and poetry collections (start with Love is a Dog from Hell, perhaps) take up the thread of a life spent in flophouses, down at the racetrack, sometimes in prison, often sitting on barstools, writing at tables, just as often in bed — a life of mischievous glee. At first glance, he seems to come from the ‘50s Beatnik tradition, but Bukowski owed more perhaps to the manly posturing of Hemingway, not to mention his stripped-down, code-inflected pose. Still, he was an original who saw the world his way, wrote it down, often got it brilliantly right and blindingly beautiful:

and as the nurses come out of the building after

their shift, having had enough, eight nurses

with different names and different places to go --

walking across the lawn, some of them

want cocoa and a paper, some of them want a

hot bath, some of them want a man, some of them

are hardly thinking at all. enough and not enough.

arcs and pilgrims, oranges

gutters, ferns, antibodies, boxes of tissue paper…

National Bookstore has quite a selection of Bukowski’s work (though I’ve yet to track down the collection with “Something For The Touts…”). Again, it’s like coming across a familiar voice in a smoky bar crowd — a new derelict taking up residence in the literary condo shelves.

We should enjoy this cavalcade of literature while it still exists. Why? Well, my daughter, who’s eight, had a glimpse of the future recently, and it frightened her to distraction. She had a concerned look on her face (even a tear or two) the other day when I picked her up from school. “What’s wrong, babe?” I asked. “My classmate said all of our books are going to disappear and be replaced with iPads.” Now, many kids would be grinning ear to ear upon hearing such news. Not Isobel. She loves her books. She treasures her books. She might even be a little demented about her books, like her parents were as kids. Somehow, the idea of stormtroopers busting down our door, confiscating all of her books at gunpoint got into her head. I don’t know how; maybe she reads too many books.

I assured her that, no matter what happens, there will always be books. Just as some people still press out limited editions of vinyl recordings for the audiophile crowd, books will continue to exist as an option for those die-hard Luddites among us. That seemed to calm her down a bit.

I hope I’m right.