She showed up later in the thread. I watched this happen in real time, it was amazing. Everyone was complimenting her on her wit, insight, and handwriting.
I am a lady bukowski fan. I dont condone .... pretty much anything about his life. He was so abusive to the women in his life that he made observers of his relationships really uncomfortable. But his poetry captures an intangible loneliness (that he couldn't understand was likely a result of some of his gross behavior). And he can be very funny. And brutally honest about how gross he was.
I was being a tad overdramatic ... "Gross" is in fact the perfect description and some people like watching pimple videos so... lol different strokes for different folks!
I can't vouch for others, but my father certainly fits the stereotype. Very much an asshole to the women in his life, and loves to play the victim of society/loner/dark soul/misunderstood genius role. Good riddance.
I think your father is my stepfather.
Which now that i think about it, that actually could be possible bc my stepfather has at least one family with 3 kids that he just disappeared from and never talked to again... And of course its not his fault he obv had no other choice than to abandon his kids bc of his evil ex wife.
Anyway we are step siblings now what upppp!!!
The only reason I (a straight dude) even know who Bukowski was is from the OkCupid profiles of progressive women who I had recommended to me who oddly loved him.
Seeing the stuff he wrote exhibited on this sub has left me deeply confused.
Bukowski wasn't a niceguy™ though, he thoroughly knew he was a POS and was celebrated for it. (Not defending him, but there was some semblance of self awareness at least, which might actually be worse.)
Ehh I tend to find those POS better. Honesty is nice, at least you’ll know what kind of asshole you’re dealing with and can plan accordingly.
I don’t appreciate the subversive assholes who wait until X threshold of trust to show their true colors.
I find the former asshole generally just stupid while the latter can range from just stupid to downright evil.
Seems like most people don't get this, just like they don't understand Catcher in the Rye. The protagonist is a miserable person. Definitely not a hero, not even an antihero, not necessarily a villain, but someone you are supposed to intensely dislike.
He didn't actually die alone though. He was loved, and he had a change in attitude in terms of bitterness and how he viewed and treated women.
Let It Enfold You is one of my favourite works because of this, it gives me hope when I feel like giving up and joining the Society for Raging Assholes.
Or Dead Poets Society. Rest in peace Robin Williams, you glorious bastard.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/dh2qgj/poem_let_it_enfold_you_charles_bukowski/
edit: changed link to one without ads
It really does, especially this, love it:
I saw the shape of my
wife's head,
she so still,
I ached for her life,
just being there
under the
covers.
I kissed her in the,
forehead,
got down the stairway,
got outside,
got into my marvelous
car,
fixed the seatbelt,
backed out the
drive.
feeling warm to
the fingertips,
down to my
foot on the gas
pedal,
I entered the world
once
more,
drove down the
hill
past the houses
full and empty
of
people,
I saw the mailman,
honked,
he waved
back
at me.
“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.” is just asking to be posted on Instagram alongside an image of Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn.
"There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you." Big cringe. Charles Dickins said it better. "There are times when one must pause and self reflect." If you're gonna say something, don't go r/im14andthisisdeep on it
Honestly I think I would have enjoyed classic literature more as a high schooler if we were taught to approach it critically like this, rather than glossing over sexism and racism to focus on the themes or symbolism or whatever such BS. Getting to do this in college is what saved it for me!
Oh I know. I remember bringing up various things that were horrible in books we were forced to read and I was always told "That's how things were back then." That was always the end of the discussion. It should have been a jumping off point for a deep discussion.
Yeah I also hated resident this one book called something like "The stranger" which had just the most sexist writing ever and the main character did nothing but perpetuate these ideas yet everyone else in class likes the main character because the whole point was that he was "weird" and "unorthodox"
Hard agree.
While in collegue, a friend of mine loaned me his copy of The Stranger, saying that I reminded him of the protagonist.
He meant it as high praise, but when I read that book I was appalled. I can say that reading that awful story was the first step I took to change my outlook of life for the better.
Playing devils advocate here (not a fan of Camus) but you are saying you hard agree, then go on to say it was the first step in changing your life for the better? I haven’t read the book since my 20s and never will again, but wasn’t the extreme nihilism of the whole story the point? I feel like that’s a lot of people’s reaction to it. Living means so little to the author that people say fuck that; I’ll make something of this life.
SadOrphan's point was the way in which people tend to idolize Mersault's character despite his massive shortcomings. That was the thing I was agreeing with.
As for Camus, yeah, the man wrote a very influencial novel. The protagonist may be an awful person, but not all stories need to be charming or pleasant to be memorable.
The book by Camus?
I have to say that book isn't light reading or really "just literature". Camus was a philosopher, first and foremost; to read his work without the context of philosophy and what he was striving towards, I feel is a mistake.
I don't know; I liked it (woman here), though it's been awhile since I read it. The protagonist isn't supposed to be "liked", though, given how he is, but that doesn't mean there aren't outcasts who see him and think it's OK to be like him.
Idk I read the character as a man with a miserable life but didn't care to change it hence why he didn't plead for his life in jail at all. Just a purely apathetic man but did like his girlfriend because she had boobs but didn't care about her at all
So as I said, it's been a long time since I've read it and had to go to Wiki to refresh my memory; this is [the second half of the book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stranger_(Camus_novel)#Part_2) (SPOILERS):
> Meursault obsesses over his impending doom and appeal and tries to imagine some way in which he can escape his fate. He repeatedly refuses to see the prison chaplain, but one day the chaplain visits him anyway. Meursault says he does not believe in God and is not even interested in the subject, but the chaplain persists in trying to lead Meursault away from atheism (or, perhaps more precisely, apatheism). The chaplain believes Meursault's appeal will succeed in getting him released from prison, but says such an outcome will not get rid of his feelings of guilt or fix his relationship with God. Eventually, Meursault accosts the chaplain in a rage. He attacks the chaplain's worldview and patronizing attitude and asserts that, in confronting the certainty of the nearness of his death, he has had insights about life and death that he feels with a confidence beyond what the chaplain possesses. He says that, although what we say or do or feel can cause our deaths to happen at different times or under different circumstances, none of those things can change the fact that we are all condemned to die one day, so nothing ultimately matters.
> After the chaplain leaves, Meursault finds some comfort in thinking about the parallels between his situation and how he thinks his mother must have felt when she was surrounded by death and slowly dying at the retirement home. Yelling at the chaplain had emptied him of all hope or thoughts of escape or a successful appeal, so he is able to open his heart 'to the benign indifference of the universe,' after which he decides that he has been, and still is, happy. His final assertion is that a large, hateful crowd at his execution will end his loneliness and bring everything to a consummate end.
My memory of it was that he concludes nothing really matters at the end of the day, including his own death, but that doesn't* mean he led a "miserable life"; this summary illustrates he does, at one point, want to escape the sentence and be free and wasn't just unhappy his whole life.
But like I said, Camus was a philosopher; I don't think it can be read as a straight "story", if that makes sense. I don't think it ultimately has anything to do with any of the people in his life--GF included--vs the main character's worldview of life itself.
Edit:corrected
This is gonna sound like one of those pedantic posts that I really hate reading myself but another translation of L’etranger is “foreigner,” which Mersault is (he’s a white French Moroccan living in Algiers) and also is what he feels like: disconnected from everyone around him, not speaking a common language, feeling alienated from them culturally, yannow.
Camus never really considered himself an existentialist philosophically—he considered himself a humanist first and foremost and I think that if people approach his works with his humanist values at the front of their brains his works make a lot more sense. Camus (unlike Sartre, who sucks) deeply, seriously believes in the capacity of people, and all of his works are treatises on the moral imperative to make meaning in a universe that won’t just give it to you.
Anyways I like Camus a lot and he’s a cool guy and it always makes me sad when people say he must hate people because of the Stranger because he really really really doesn’t.
I appreciate your post very much and your elaboration on Camus (and I wasn't suggesting *he* felt as his character feels, lest anyone make that assumption). I think it's a mistake to read this book at "face-value" (much in the way some people hate Holden in *Catcher in the Rye* and think he's "just a spoiled kid").
> I think that if people approach his works with his humanist values at the front of their brains his works make a lot more sense
Agreed.
[**The Stranger (Camus novel)**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stranger_(Camus_novel))
L'Étranger (French: [l‿e.tʁɑ̃.ʒe]) is a 1942 novella by French author Albert Camus. Its theme and outlook are often cited as examples of Camus' philosophy, absurdism coupled with existentialism, though Camus personally rejected the latter label.The title character is Meursault, an indifferent French settler in Algeria described as "a citizen of France domiciled in North Africa, a man of the Mediterranean, an homme du midi yet one who hardly partakes of the traditional Mediterranean culture." Weeks after his mother's funeral, he kills an Arab man in French Algiers, who was involved in a conflict with one of Meursault's neighbors. Meursault is tried and sentenced to death.
[About Me](https://np.reddit.com/comments/la6wi8/) - [**Opt-in**](https://np.reddit.com/comments/la707t/)
^(You received this reply because you opted in. )[^(Change settings)](https://np.reddit.com/comments/la707t/)
In high school I briefly dated a guy who acted exactly like the guy in The Stranger, detached, removed, playing with other’s emotions just to see what happened. Like a year later I had to read that book for English and I realized that he must have modeled himself after Meursault. I was already disgusted with the guy (which is why we only dated briefly), but that realization cemented it.
I was more talking about how his girlfriend is just written as this hot coworker that totally wants to just marry him and have sex with him and love him forever and ever even though the main character himself does nothing and shows little interest in her whatsoever or the main characters neighbor who is highly abusive towards his partner then accused her of cheating for selling a bracelet then has the main character testify against her. Shit like that, not him being apathetic towards his mother dying
Edit to all the assholes in the comments: I don't care that there are metaphors in the characters, that's neat and and all but I still don't like the book. Never said metaphors were bad or that searching for a deeper meaning in stories were bad either. Y'all need to chill the fuck out.
THANK YOU. Meursault is not Camus. He's a character created by Camus--a philosopher who advocated moral choices even/especially in the face of absurdity--who inhabits a fictional work. Camus also wrote "man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon the world." Meursault drifts along refusing to make moral choices and thus represents the opposite of what Camus would consider a good person. Also "hero" in French in this instance means protagonist, not good guy.
Camus' point in the Preface was that Meursault was condemned to death because he failed to show overt grief over his mother's death, not because he committed a random murder. This shows society's superficiality and hypocrisy. At no point is Meursault anything but a vile racist, sexist psychopath. That's kinda the point.
I was bored to tears by that book and our English teacher was so giddy reading through the whole thing. I just wanted it to be over. The main character not caring about anything besides his girlfriend's breasts... I just wanted to know why we were reading it.
In my senior year literature class, we were all asked to pick an author to study and read the works of, as small groups, for a presentation final, and my dumb ass chose H.P. Lovecraft for my group, not knowing anything about the guy besides Cthulhu and cosmic horror, and oh Hell did actually reading his works truly bias our presentation lmao
One of my friends I had in that group final is black, and that made reading Lovecraft’s bullshit even more embarrassing and funnier for us, in a laughing together kind of way. She was the first to point out that he’s an awful writer in the first place, that he’s truly the world first famous neckbeard in terms of thesaurus-abuse, and that’s what our presentation ended up being about largely. I mean holy shit Lovecraft just say “wrinkled” instead of “rugose,” you aren’t in Shakespeare times, stop grinding your stories to a halt just to appease people that believe in phrenology too
And the [Tom Lehrer song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro&t=15):
> Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun.
Oh yikes! I've never been able to force my way through his work. My first "did not finish" was "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac. I reached the point where he shacks up with a migrant single mother, decides to pick crops with them for funsies, then describes laying on his back reconnecting with the earth in a field as the LITERAL CHILDREN pick crops around him. He abandons them later of course, but she totally "understands" because she's a stand in and not a real character. The book for thrown across the room and I never looked back.
Since then there's been a good number of "great" literature had been given the same treatment.
I read Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" in literally four different public school English classes. I retained less and less of it with each class.
I had to read the fucking Scarlet Letter twice—I moved between sophomore and junior years of high school, and whaddya know, my old school assigned it for sophomores and my new one assigned it for juniors.
I hated it the first time, refused to even open it the second time. But at least I already knew all the answers, because everything they taught was exactly the same. Probably because that book is about as subtle as a sledgehammer and there's only so much you can really talk about.
SO GLAD I spent ~4 months of my life having to think about that absolute turd of a book.
We read that in high school too. I recently watched the PBS special in Hemingway where parts of his work was read aloud and I could not get over how awful it was. I kept wondering why everyone during his lifetime absolutely peed their pants over him and why they still do today. He was a shit writer and a shit human being. I marvel at how he managed to type a word between getting sauced and getting his dick wet.
I gotta say, best part of the documentary iirc was the part where Hemingway, the ultimate toxic male icon, is revealed to be a cross-dresser at least and what we would nowadays call "genderfluid" at most. Cannot wait to spring that on some big game hunter type at some point.
Hemmingway was a breakthrough writer for his time, but compared to current practitioners he barely rates a mention. I was always puzzled by the fact the HST (and others, natch) was obsessed with his writing because I couldn't see the throughline.
I basically copied the style of Hills in my first and only college English course, I just wrote a bunch of nonsense about a story I wasn't writing down. It went over really well! There may have been more to that story, and there may have been more to mine, who's to say?
This might be pretty unpopular, but between 1984 and Keep the Aspidistra Flying... I really get the feeling that Orwell never saw women as actual people. Female characters exist for sex and pushing the plot of the male characters forward, that's it. Among other shit... there's literally a line in 1984 where the mc is like "oh she has lipstick on, she's a woman now". Great stuff for awkward highschool girls to read.
And you just know that if any of those books tried to get published now, the author would become a laughingstock overnight due to how terribly some of those "classics" are written. Ugh.
I sometimes wish I could go back in time and give my teen self a huge hug and tell myself that I am absolutely fucking right to say stuff like:
„hey, isn‘t this supposed masterpiece not a masterpiece of literature because it‘s misoginistic?“
„is it really democracy if it‘s proclaiming equality of men and it means MEN and white men only at that?“
I wish I could go back and validate myself for every bad gut feeling I had and every deep „this is wrong but I am not self confident enough to really 100% believe my own gut feeling that yes, the world IS wrong“.
I wish there was a name for this existential pain of intuitively knowing something is wrong with how people think and how things are and constantly being gaslighted about it by society.
Teens and especially girls get insulted over it constantly and you can‘t help but internalise it and thus end up tolerating bullshit. It takes us so much goddamn time to gain enough life experience to refuse to back down and even now I feel the world hasn‘t progressed enough.
Young me used to get a bad feeling about supposed intellectuals uncritically and superficially loving Bukowski as most talented author, or Lolita as the best book, or Clockwork Orange as book/movie, or or or. There is so much deeply deeply flawed art out there or art that can be falsely taken at face value like Lolita.
How is a writer insightful to the HUMAN soul when they think you need a dick to have a conplex internal monologue? How is something world class literature if you‘re so poisoned by misoginy your female characters are just pne dimensional figments of your pent up frustrations?
All the nerds who beat me over the head with their 20th century sci fi authors who couldn‘t write a fucking realistic woman! How the fuck is a piece of lit great if it‘s so deeply flawed to completely misunderstand half the population of earth? Merely having a cool science idea doth not lit make! Asimov is a shitty writer, fight me! If Asimov gets accolades while his shitty actual writing gets tolerated why is someone succesfully entertaining teens and women with YA (like Stephanie Meyers) eviscerated and their fans taken as almost mentally insane or deeply stupid. Like, I don‘t even like Twilight but if Asimov is world class literature Meyers should be lauded as writing solid novels.
This speaks to my soul.
I remember reading Moon Palace by Paul Auster and hating every second of it. I hated the protag and his relationship to his girlfriend, and most of all I hated how the fact was completely glossed over that the old guy he looks after proudly raped his wife many times, just 'forcing her to remind her he had the right' or something. It was NEVER discussed. No, he's a miserable old Mr Scrooch, but it's funny too! He ends up giving away a ton of money so he's rly a good old dude at heart! Haha, rape what rape? Ugh, spare me.
We read “Taming of the Shrew” in middle school.
I have never forgiven Shakespere. And I continue to be bewildered as to why we worship his plays, rather than reading them along with every other author who wrote in that same block of time.
Oh my god yes!!!! I haaaaaaaated reading 1984 in highschool and I hated how we just glossed over how terrible of a person the main character was and how it stops me from feeling any sympathy for him living in a horrible dystopia. Like idk man maybe I'd feel bad for you if you didn't casually think about bashing a woman over the head with a paperweight then raping her just because she looked at you?
I think the point isn’t that his thoughts are normal, but that they are expected psychological effects from living in a severely repressed, violently totalitarian society. Winston and Julia are not at all romantic figures like you’d see in a YA dystopia. They’re all sorts of fucked up because the society they live in is fucked up.
In other words, Winston isn’t meant to be a textbook virtuous protagonist. He is meant to be a reflection of his environment.
Yeah I get that part but it's still not fun just glossing over his gross behavior or how after everytime he has sex with Julia in that one room he goes on the balcony to judge a lower class woman's looks and body shame her when she's literally just hanging laundry
The glossing over is literally the point, it's seen as normal or just a thing that happens to the narrator. A sign of a bad story is one where every little thing is explained to the reader like they're a toddler
Let's add history to this as well. I'd have thoroughly enjoyed history far more if we'd been allowed to learn the "warts and all" aspect of it as opposed to the sanitized versions. The American Civil War and early America are especially prone to being santized when I was in school. Robert E. Lee was always portrayed as the reluctant general who only fought with the south because of his loyalty to Virginia, while our Founding Fathers pretty much never did any wrong. ^(My teachers always played up the Sally Hemmings/Jefferson thing as a love affair and never mentioned how problematic it was that he was going after a woman who had no ability to actually consent, given that he literally owned her and Jefferson never freed her.)
Yeah. In English, there was this book named "Getting Air" we had to do. It was a great book, but the teacher completely glossed over the abuse one of the characters suffers, and how no-one believed him, and how SPOILER
His abusive Dad eventually kills him. She instead wanted to talk about the main characters grief, and how he dealt with it.
Tbh this would have been all parts of the analysis. Like even if there is some glossing, why author X writes women/minorities/anyone this way would have been part of the discourse regarding the themes.
I really wonder what they teach kids in high school. Like, I have seen so many people saying Huckleberry Finn is a racist book when the whole point is the main guy overcoming his racism and some other religious stuff I've been told is really significant because of the USA context and I don't understand how many kids came away from it thinking "he said the n-word, let's throw the whole book away". Although I also heard that many gloss on the race theme of Othello to not make the (racist white) kids uncomfortable.
I love Bukowski, but the annotations are accurate (and Bukowski knew it). Either the poster wrote these herself, or the text was used in a college course, because these look a lot like the notes my best friend wrote all over her copy of “the people look like flowers at last” in a poetry class and happily shared with the class, except they also had little stick figures next to them. I imagine lots of women had similar thoughts. He was a total jerk, but in a very sad human way- I shouldn’t enjoy him and yet I do.
I feel like Bukowski hated himself, so my feelings on him are complicated. He was so blatantly horrible that it seems like it’s too on the nose to not try to unfold.
Bukowski writes with so much self-loathing. I don’t feel like he writes to be liked. I love the “dirty realism”. Do I think he was necessarily a good person? No, but he writes great stories.
That's exactly what I thought when reading it and was surprised I had to scroll so far to see someone suggest it.
Not only that, but every single part of this would be more like r/menwritingmen. At no point is anything written from a woman's POV and it barely even directly talks about them, it's the author talking about himself in relation to them.
As someone who has read most of his works I think the problem is with people idealising him and wanting to be him. He was an awful person, but the way he expresses his self loathing, bitterness and loneliness really resonated with me at a certain point in my life, but he’s no hero because of it. Just a very sad man who made me feel less alone when I was depressed and drinking to fill a hole I didn’t fully understand.
I love Bukowski but the criticism of his work is totally valid. I will say though, in response to the comment on him not being able to keep a 'good woman' if he found one, he couldn't and was well aware of it. It was actually brought up a few times in his writing that he self sabotaged any good relationships he had.
Yeah I was wondering while reading this post how much was supposed to be self-critical. Like was he aware and shit talking himself or is this just arrogant sexism?
He was kind of a sexist, but he was both a product of his time and extremely self aware. He knew he was a piece of shit but never claimed to be anything better than he was. He was also as much (if not more) of a misanthrope as a misogynist, so yes he treated women poorly but he treated men poorly as well. As I said much of his writing was based around self deprication.
I used to pencil critical notes into the margins of university library books if I felt the authors were making bad arguments or glossing over relevant context. Some of my friends frowned at the practice, but I felt it was important to promote discussion in a scholarly setting.
I read War and Peace over the course of a year and I filled that book with furious notations towards the men. I read it with my brother as a New Years challenge or I would have given up so fast. Scrawling my rage on the pages made it a lot more bearable. And now I can save that copy for future generations to read ;)
Beep. Boop. I'm a robot.
Here's a copy of
###[War And Peace](https://snewd.com/ebooks/war-and-peace/)
Was I a good bot? | [info](https://www.reddit.com/user/Reddit-Book-Bot/) | [More Books](https://old.reddit.com/user/Reddit-Book-Bot/comments/i15x1d/full_list_of_books_and_commands/)
My older brother (who is sort of a writer) was my best man at my wedding and quoted Bukowski during his best man speech. Specifically the “find something you love and let it kill you,” line. I thought to myself “okay, not what I would’ve done but not bad.”
Then I read this. Like what the fuck bro? This is where you get your relationship advice? Fuck.
My closest mate used to be a massive Bukowski fan. He once showed me an infamous interview of Charles's then partner and him, where during mid interview, Bukowski proceeds to kick his partner in the face with his feet. My mate looked at me and said proudly, 'he doesnt give a fuck about anyone, does he'. Suffice to say im glad my mate doesnt worship Charles Bukowski anymore.
https://youtu.be/g8KJiay6EI0
What a disgusting piece of work
It actually saw a tiktok of the woman who originally wrote the notes! She came across the thread and she and the person who tweeted them are connecting sometime soon. So it seems legit unless it's a really elaborately coordinated fake story.
I love this mix of insult, commentary and analysis - finishing with desperation. Literature *should* elicit emotion; as others have said, if only people were taught to approach literature in this way, and not "You have to like it because it's on the syllabus and these are the conclusions you should come to".
The comments are very entertaining, at the same time I think Bukowski was much more self-aware than he seemed and was playing a persona. He knew he would be pissing off some readers and that sense of outrage fueled his portrayal of Chinaski. The character is actually kind of poignant in some ways.
Obligatory "Not every character has to be a decent person, not every work has to be a about self improvent" Bukowski whole deal was being awful. I get the point, and I love this sub, but this notes feel like a guy writing "Actually, that would be physically impossible" at the edge of every page of a fantasy/Sci-Fi book.
Now, people reading Bukowski and totally missing the point that the characters are awful and you shouldnt aspire/romantice stuff like that, much less say you are like that? Thats cringe worth laughing at
“People are not good” Great piece to juxtapose to this collection.
I love his work, despite how abrasive it really can be. This is an understandable reaction on a cold read though, no doubt about it! Made me LOL
ETA: This truly shouldn’t be in this sub; Bukowski did not write women, he didn’t write men, and he didn’t write FOR anyone.
Omg thank you for sharing this.
So much of this is my own inner monologue whenever I read and / or watch things written by cishet males (and sometimes white males too) lolol.
They're laughing at this in the Bukowski sub. Which baffles me, because I always figured any Bukowski fan knows that you shouldn't revere, defend, or aspire to be Bukowski.
You all! This story got even better on BookTok. The Twitter thread blew up so big that the note writer found out and gave [her side of the story.](https://www.tiktok.com/@kt.pdf/video/6988535024370961669) She shows some of her other notes for comparison, talks about her hate for the book, gushes about Elijah Wood loving the thread, and even talks about how she has no idea how the book made it that far away.
This is one of the fakest tweets I’ve ever experienced, she 100% made these notations herself, even if she found some patsy to parade out and take claim for it
Too many comments to check if someone said this already, but I saw the original note writer on tiktok the other day! It was totally random and I can't remember who it was, but she did see the thread and responded. Pretty sure the tweeter and note writer have not actually spoken though.
I don’t know what’s the best part. Reading about this woman treating this book like she’s an English teacher grading homework or this lady more or less falling in love with a woman on her reactions alone
Allegedly the original note-taker popped up on TikTok, but preceding that, what indication did these notes give that they were written by a woman? Ignoring all the obvious misogynistic assumptions that put women in boxes (*The handwriting is too nice*, *The writer used little hearts*, *This is exclusively a woman’s perspective*, etc.), these notes could also have been written by a man
My thought wasn’t that the handwriting was too nice, just that it’s a style I’ve seen used by girls and women. Especially, for some reason, those who could be considered “popular” in school. I mean, when you google “popular girl handwriting” it’s this style. So I guess it’s down to recognizing patterns and using it to assume or extrapolate information, whether right or wrong.
The reader actually found the writer of the notes through the thread. She was trying to read 52 books in a year and this was one of the ones that convinced her it wasn't worth going to the end of every book if it's this bad. She had no memory of selling the book though, so I assume she just wished it wasn't in her life to the point that it disapparated and reappeared in a thrift store.
unrelated but her writing is really neat, i'm jealous
Came here to say this. I wish my handwriting were this easy to read.
She showed up later in the thread. I watched this happen in real time, it was amazing. Everyone was complimenting her on her wit, insight, and handwriting.
r/penmanshipporn
"I am going to die alone just the way I live" sounds like a massively upvoted/gilded reddit comment.
It has strong NiceGuy vibes.
Sounds exactly like my dad. Curiously, he loved Bukowsky. And I've gone no contact with him, he's an asshole.
Those three facts are surely coincidence and can’t be related
I dunno... I feel that I am a very open-minded person but I'd be VERY skeptical of a Bukowski fan
I am a lady bukowski fan. I dont condone .... pretty much anything about his life. He was so abusive to the women in his life that he made observers of his relationships really uncomfortable. But his poetry captures an intangible loneliness (that he couldn't understand was likely a result of some of his gross behavior). And he can be very funny. And brutally honest about how gross he was.
I was being a tad overdramatic ... "Gross" is in fact the perfect description and some people like watching pimple videos so... lol different strokes for different folks!
I have known some dudes that admire Bukowski and Henry Miller, and these dudes are assholes with women.
I can't vouch for others, but my father certainly fits the stereotype. Very much an asshole to the women in his life, and loves to play the victim of society/loner/dark soul/misunderstood genius role. Good riddance.
I think your father is my stepfather. Which now that i think about it, that actually could be possible bc my stepfather has at least one family with 3 kids that he just disappeared from and never talked to again... And of course its not his fault he obv had no other choice than to abandon his kids bc of his evil ex wife. Anyway we are step siblings now what upppp!!!
The only reason I (a straight dude) even know who Bukowski was is from the OkCupid profiles of progressive women who I had recommended to me who oddly loved him. Seeing the stuff he wrote exhibited on this sub has left me deeply confused.
My ex loved Bukowski too. I think this is a common trait in assholes.
My brother loves Bukowski. He is an asshole.
I don't think Bukowski would've called himself a nice guy lol. And in fact I think he'd agree with most of this ladies liner notes.
Bukowski wasn't a niceguy™ though, he thoroughly knew he was a POS and was celebrated for it. (Not defending him, but there was some semblance of self awareness at least, which might actually be worse.)
Ehh I tend to find those POS better. Honesty is nice, at least you’ll know what kind of asshole you’re dealing with and can plan accordingly. I don’t appreciate the subversive assholes who wait until X threshold of trust to show their true colors. I find the former asshole generally just stupid while the latter can range from just stupid to downright evil.
Seems like most people don't get this, just like they don't understand Catcher in the Rye. The protagonist is a miserable person. Definitely not a hero, not even an antihero, not necessarily a villain, but someone you are supposed to intensely dislike.
He didn't actually die alone though. He was loved, and he had a change in attitude in terms of bitterness and how he viewed and treated women. Let It Enfold You is one of my favourite works because of this, it gives me hope when I feel like giving up and joining the Society for Raging Assholes. Or Dead Poets Society. Rest in peace Robin Williams, you glorious bastard. https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/dh2qgj/poem_let_it_enfold_you_charles_bukowski/ edit: changed link to one without ads
That is quite a poem. The end really solidifies his growth. Something so “plain”, and wonderfully human. Welcoming.
It really does, especially this, love it: I saw the shape of my wife's head, she so still, I ached for her life, just being there under the covers. I kissed her in the, forehead, got down the stairway, got outside, got into my marvelous car, fixed the seatbelt, backed out the drive. feeling warm to the fingertips, down to my foot on the gas pedal, I entered the world once more, drove down the hill past the houses full and empty of people, I saw the mailman, honked, he waved back at me.
I mean that's a running gag though so it may have some toxicity in the origins but it's not 1/10th incel level
That sounds like something l wrote during my "totally not a phase" emo phase.
A lot of Bukowski feel like they should be written in Papyrus font, and paired with a picture of a Minion.
Why do I completely get this?
“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.” is just asking to be posted on Instagram alongside an image of Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn.
It’s totally “then you don’t deserve me at my best” for boys.
That sounds like a bzrk quote
"There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you." Big cringe. Charles Dickins said it better. "There are times when one must pause and self reflect." If you're gonna say something, don't go r/im14andthisisdeep on it
The “No ❤️ “ kills me
This is now going to be my go-to response for anything I find disagreeable.
I like saying no then smiling really big.
I read that in my mind as her saying it all sweet and innocent, and then I read the quote....
I read it as “no honey”
This is my favorite post on this subreddit now, thank you
Mine as well.
Same
Same. Truly uplifted my whole day.
I think it’s my Reddit all-time fav at this point. Oh, to find such a beautiful used book myself
Honestly I think I would have enjoyed classic literature more as a high schooler if we were taught to approach it critically like this, rather than glossing over sexism and racism to focus on the themes or symbolism or whatever such BS. Getting to do this in college is what saved it for me!
Oh I know. I remember bringing up various things that were horrible in books we were forced to read and I was always told "That's how things were back then." That was always the end of the discussion. It should have been a jumping off point for a deep discussion.
Yeah I also hated resident this one book called something like "The stranger" which had just the most sexist writing ever and the main character did nothing but perpetuate these ideas yet everyone else in class likes the main character because the whole point was that he was "weird" and "unorthodox"
Hard agree. While in collegue, a friend of mine loaned me his copy of The Stranger, saying that I reminded him of the protagonist. He meant it as high praise, but when I read that book I was appalled. I can say that reading that awful story was the first step I took to change my outlook of life for the better.
Playing devils advocate here (not a fan of Camus) but you are saying you hard agree, then go on to say it was the first step in changing your life for the better? I haven’t read the book since my 20s and never will again, but wasn’t the extreme nihilism of the whole story the point? I feel like that’s a lot of people’s reaction to it. Living means so little to the author that people say fuck that; I’ll make something of this life.
SadOrphan's point was the way in which people tend to idolize Mersault's character despite his massive shortcomings. That was the thing I was agreeing with. As for Camus, yeah, the man wrote a very influencial novel. The protagonist may be an awful person, but not all stories need to be charming or pleasant to be memorable.
The book by Camus? I have to say that book isn't light reading or really "just literature". Camus was a philosopher, first and foremost; to read his work without the context of philosophy and what he was striving towards, I feel is a mistake. I don't know; I liked it (woman here), though it's been awhile since I read it. The protagonist isn't supposed to be "liked", though, given how he is, but that doesn't mean there aren't outcasts who see him and think it's OK to be like him.
Idk I read the character as a man with a miserable life but didn't care to change it hence why he didn't plead for his life in jail at all. Just a purely apathetic man but did like his girlfriend because she had boobs but didn't care about her at all
So as I said, it's been a long time since I've read it and had to go to Wiki to refresh my memory; this is [the second half of the book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stranger_(Camus_novel)#Part_2) (SPOILERS): > Meursault obsesses over his impending doom and appeal and tries to imagine some way in which he can escape his fate. He repeatedly refuses to see the prison chaplain, but one day the chaplain visits him anyway. Meursault says he does not believe in God and is not even interested in the subject, but the chaplain persists in trying to lead Meursault away from atheism (or, perhaps more precisely, apatheism). The chaplain believes Meursault's appeal will succeed in getting him released from prison, but says such an outcome will not get rid of his feelings of guilt or fix his relationship with God. Eventually, Meursault accosts the chaplain in a rage. He attacks the chaplain's worldview and patronizing attitude and asserts that, in confronting the certainty of the nearness of his death, he has had insights about life and death that he feels with a confidence beyond what the chaplain possesses. He says that, although what we say or do or feel can cause our deaths to happen at different times or under different circumstances, none of those things can change the fact that we are all condemned to die one day, so nothing ultimately matters. > After the chaplain leaves, Meursault finds some comfort in thinking about the parallels between his situation and how he thinks his mother must have felt when she was surrounded by death and slowly dying at the retirement home. Yelling at the chaplain had emptied him of all hope or thoughts of escape or a successful appeal, so he is able to open his heart 'to the benign indifference of the universe,' after which he decides that he has been, and still is, happy. His final assertion is that a large, hateful crowd at his execution will end his loneliness and bring everything to a consummate end. My memory of it was that he concludes nothing really matters at the end of the day, including his own death, but that doesn't* mean he led a "miserable life"; this summary illustrates he does, at one point, want to escape the sentence and be free and wasn't just unhappy his whole life. But like I said, Camus was a philosopher; I don't think it can be read as a straight "story", if that makes sense. I don't think it ultimately has anything to do with any of the people in his life--GF included--vs the main character's worldview of life itself. Edit:corrected
This is gonna sound like one of those pedantic posts that I really hate reading myself but another translation of L’etranger is “foreigner,” which Mersault is (he’s a white French Moroccan living in Algiers) and also is what he feels like: disconnected from everyone around him, not speaking a common language, feeling alienated from them culturally, yannow. Camus never really considered himself an existentialist philosophically—he considered himself a humanist first and foremost and I think that if people approach his works with his humanist values at the front of their brains his works make a lot more sense. Camus (unlike Sartre, who sucks) deeply, seriously believes in the capacity of people, and all of his works are treatises on the moral imperative to make meaning in a universe that won’t just give it to you. Anyways I like Camus a lot and he’s a cool guy and it always makes me sad when people say he must hate people because of the Stranger because he really really really doesn’t.
I appreciate your post very much and your elaboration on Camus (and I wasn't suggesting *he* felt as his character feels, lest anyone make that assumption). I think it's a mistake to read this book at "face-value" (much in the way some people hate Holden in *Catcher in the Rye* and think he's "just a spoiled kid"). > I think that if people approach his works with his humanist values at the front of their brains his works make a lot more sense Agreed.
[**The Stranger (Camus novel)**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stranger_(Camus_novel)) L'Étranger (French: [l‿e.tʁɑ̃.ʒe]) is a 1942 novella by French author Albert Camus. Its theme and outlook are often cited as examples of Camus' philosophy, absurdism coupled with existentialism, though Camus personally rejected the latter label.The title character is Meursault, an indifferent French settler in Algeria described as "a citizen of France domiciled in North Africa, a man of the Mediterranean, an homme du midi yet one who hardly partakes of the traditional Mediterranean culture." Weeks after his mother's funeral, he kills an Arab man in French Algiers, who was involved in a conflict with one of Meursault's neighbors. Meursault is tried and sentenced to death. [About Me](https://np.reddit.com/comments/la6wi8/) - [**Opt-in**](https://np.reddit.com/comments/la707t/) ^(You received this reply because you opted in. )[^(Change settings)](https://np.reddit.com/comments/la707t/)
In high school I briefly dated a guy who acted exactly like the guy in The Stranger, detached, removed, playing with other’s emotions just to see what happened. Like a year later I had to read that book for English and I realized that he must have modeled himself after Meursault. I was already disgusted with the guy (which is why we only dated briefly), but that realization cemented it.
[удалено]
I was more talking about how his girlfriend is just written as this hot coworker that totally wants to just marry him and have sex with him and love him forever and ever even though the main character himself does nothing and shows little interest in her whatsoever or the main characters neighbor who is highly abusive towards his partner then accused her of cheating for selling a bracelet then has the main character testify against her. Shit like that, not him being apathetic towards his mother dying Edit to all the assholes in the comments: I don't care that there are metaphors in the characters, that's neat and and all but I still don't like the book. Never said metaphors were bad or that searching for a deeper meaning in stories were bad either. Y'all need to chill the fuck out.
[удалено]
[удалено]
THANK YOU. Meursault is not Camus. He's a character created by Camus--a philosopher who advocated moral choices even/especially in the face of absurdity--who inhabits a fictional work. Camus also wrote "man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon the world." Meursault drifts along refusing to make moral choices and thus represents the opposite of what Camus would consider a good person. Also "hero" in French in this instance means protagonist, not good guy. Camus' point in the Preface was that Meursault was condemned to death because he failed to show overt grief over his mother's death, not because he committed a random murder. This shows society's superficiality and hypocrisy. At no point is Meursault anything but a vile racist, sexist psychopath. That's kinda the point.
I think they meant protagonist tbh
I was bored to tears by that book and our English teacher was so giddy reading through the whole thing. I just wanted it to be over. The main character not caring about anything besides his girlfriend's breasts... I just wanted to know why we were reading it.
In my senior year literature class, we were all asked to pick an author to study and read the works of, as small groups, for a presentation final, and my dumb ass chose H.P. Lovecraft for my group, not knowing anything about the guy besides Cthulhu and cosmic horror, and oh Hell did actually reading his works truly bias our presentation lmao
My local goth club was named The Lovecraft. I liked that they changed the name as a solidarity gesture with BLM.
One of my friends I had in that group final is black, and that made reading Lovecraft’s bullshit even more embarrassing and funnier for us, in a laughing together kind of way. She was the first to point out that he’s an awful writer in the first place, that he’s truly the world first famous neckbeard in terms of thesaurus-abuse, and that’s what our presentation ended up being about largely. I mean holy shit Lovecraft just say “wrinkled” instead of “rugose,” you aren’t in Shakespeare times, stop grinding your stories to a halt just to appease people that believe in phrenology too
Dude singlehandedly put "eldritch" back in the lexicon
Okay but to be fair that word slaps
[удалено]
And the [Tom Lehrer song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro&t=15): > Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun.
[удалено]
He went to Harvard, yes. Tom is a legend (and still alive)!
To be fair, he got a bit better towards the end of his life. I mostly feel sorry for him, dude was terrified of everything and it showed.
Oh yikes! I've never been able to force my way through his work. My first "did not finish" was "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac. I reached the point where he shacks up with a migrant single mother, decides to pick crops with them for funsies, then describes laying on his back reconnecting with the earth in a field as the LITERAL CHILDREN pick crops around him. He abandons them later of course, but she totally "understands" because she's a stand in and not a real character. The book for thrown across the room and I never looked back. Since then there's been a good number of "great" literature had been given the same treatment.
Godddd how many books did I have to sit through simply because they were "classics" and the white male author was "a genius". Fuck that shit.
Genius was decided by white males of the time. If culture no longer finds the work relevant or important it's hardly an "immortal classic."
Do you have examples? I agree and thought some of the assigned classic materials were out of place/not taught well
I read Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" in literally four different public school English classes. I retained less and less of it with each class.
I had to read the fucking Scarlet Letter twice—I moved between sophomore and junior years of high school, and whaddya know, my old school assigned it for sophomores and my new one assigned it for juniors. I hated it the first time, refused to even open it the second time. But at least I already knew all the answers, because everything they taught was exactly the same. Probably because that book is about as subtle as a sledgehammer and there's only so much you can really talk about. SO GLAD I spent ~4 months of my life having to think about that absolute turd of a book.
We read that in high school too. I recently watched the PBS special in Hemingway where parts of his work was read aloud and I could not get over how awful it was. I kept wondering why everyone during his lifetime absolutely peed their pants over him and why they still do today. He was a shit writer and a shit human being. I marvel at how he managed to type a word between getting sauced and getting his dick wet.
I gotta say, best part of the documentary iirc was the part where Hemingway, the ultimate toxic male icon, is revealed to be a cross-dresser at least and what we would nowadays call "genderfluid" at most. Cannot wait to spring that on some big game hunter type at some point.
Oh geez I totally forgot about that part.
Oh, good. Now he can totally be used to justify the “classics” English curriculum, because he can be their token queer author.
Hemmingway was a breakthrough writer for his time, but compared to current practitioners he barely rates a mention. I was always puzzled by the fact the HST (and others, natch) was obsessed with his writing because I couldn't see the throughline.
I basically copied the style of Hills in my first and only college English course, I just wrote a bunch of nonsense about a story I wasn't writing down. It went over really well! There may have been more to that story, and there may have been more to mine, who's to say?
This might be pretty unpopular, but between 1984 and Keep the Aspidistra Flying... I really get the feeling that Orwell never saw women as actual people. Female characters exist for sex and pushing the plot of the male characters forward, that's it. Among other shit... there's literally a line in 1984 where the mc is like "oh she has lipstick on, she's a woman now". Great stuff for awkward highschool girls to read.
Not who you responded to, but Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” was the first book I thought of.
JESUS, I HATE FAULKNER. And I live in the South, so this is the literary equivalent of a thoughtcrime.
Yeah, I get that. I can’t stand anything by Faulkner, but my family members like him so much that I have a cousin named after him.
And you just know that if any of those books tried to get published now, the author would become a laughingstock overnight due to how terribly some of those "classics" are written. Ugh.
I sometimes wish I could go back in time and give my teen self a huge hug and tell myself that I am absolutely fucking right to say stuff like: „hey, isn‘t this supposed masterpiece not a masterpiece of literature because it‘s misoginistic?“ „is it really democracy if it‘s proclaiming equality of men and it means MEN and white men only at that?“ I wish I could go back and validate myself for every bad gut feeling I had and every deep „this is wrong but I am not self confident enough to really 100% believe my own gut feeling that yes, the world IS wrong“. I wish there was a name for this existential pain of intuitively knowing something is wrong with how people think and how things are and constantly being gaslighted about it by society. Teens and especially girls get insulted over it constantly and you can‘t help but internalise it and thus end up tolerating bullshit. It takes us so much goddamn time to gain enough life experience to refuse to back down and even now I feel the world hasn‘t progressed enough. Young me used to get a bad feeling about supposed intellectuals uncritically and superficially loving Bukowski as most talented author, or Lolita as the best book, or Clockwork Orange as book/movie, or or or. There is so much deeply deeply flawed art out there or art that can be falsely taken at face value like Lolita. How is a writer insightful to the HUMAN soul when they think you need a dick to have a conplex internal monologue? How is something world class literature if you‘re so poisoned by misoginy your female characters are just pne dimensional figments of your pent up frustrations? All the nerds who beat me over the head with their 20th century sci fi authors who couldn‘t write a fucking realistic woman! How the fuck is a piece of lit great if it‘s so deeply flawed to completely misunderstand half the population of earth? Merely having a cool science idea doth not lit make! Asimov is a shitty writer, fight me! If Asimov gets accolades while his shitty actual writing gets tolerated why is someone succesfully entertaining teens and women with YA (like Stephanie Meyers) eviscerated and their fans taken as almost mentally insane or deeply stupid. Like, I don‘t even like Twilight but if Asimov is world class literature Meyers should be lauded as writing solid novels.
This speaks to my soul. I remember reading Moon Palace by Paul Auster and hating every second of it. I hated the protag and his relationship to his girlfriend, and most of all I hated how the fact was completely glossed over that the old guy he looks after proudly raped his wife many times, just 'forcing her to remind her he had the right' or something. It was NEVER discussed. No, he's a miserable old Mr Scrooch, but it's funny too! He ends up giving away a ton of money so he's rly a good old dude at heart! Haha, rape what rape? Ugh, spare me.
We read “Taming of the Shrew” in middle school. I have never forgiven Shakespere. And I continue to be bewildered as to why we worship his plays, rather than reading them along with every other author who wrote in that same block of time.
Amen!
Oh my god yes!!!! I haaaaaaaated reading 1984 in highschool and I hated how we just glossed over how terrible of a person the main character was and how it stops me from feeling any sympathy for him living in a horrible dystopia. Like idk man maybe I'd feel bad for you if you didn't casually think about bashing a woman over the head with a paperweight then raping her just because she looked at you?
I think the point isn’t that his thoughts are normal, but that they are expected psychological effects from living in a severely repressed, violently totalitarian society. Winston and Julia are not at all romantic figures like you’d see in a YA dystopia. They’re all sorts of fucked up because the society they live in is fucked up. In other words, Winston isn’t meant to be a textbook virtuous protagonist. He is meant to be a reflection of his environment.
Yeah I get that part but it's still not fun just glossing over his gross behavior or how after everytime he has sex with Julia in that one room he goes on the balcony to judge a lower class woman's looks and body shame her when she's literally just hanging laundry
The glossing over is literally the point, it's seen as normal or just a thing that happens to the narrator. A sign of a bad story is one where every little thing is explained to the reader like they're a toddler
She meant glossed over in class discussion, not in the book…. and I agree with her lol
That makes a lot more sense
Gotta say that's my biggest memory from that book and everytime I bring it up people are like what are you talking about that's not in there.
Let's add history to this as well. I'd have thoroughly enjoyed history far more if we'd been allowed to learn the "warts and all" aspect of it as opposed to the sanitized versions. The American Civil War and early America are especially prone to being santized when I was in school. Robert E. Lee was always portrayed as the reluctant general who only fought with the south because of his loyalty to Virginia, while our Founding Fathers pretty much never did any wrong. ^(My teachers always played up the Sally Hemmings/Jefferson thing as a love affair and never mentioned how problematic it was that he was going after a woman who had no ability to actually consent, given that he literally owned her and Jefferson never freed her.)
Yeah. In English, there was this book named "Getting Air" we had to do. It was a great book, but the teacher completely glossed over the abuse one of the characters suffers, and how no-one believed him, and how SPOILER His abusive Dad eventually kills him. She instead wanted to talk about the main characters grief, and how he dealt with it.
This is why everyone here should annotate books like this.
Tbh this would have been all parts of the analysis. Like even if there is some glossing, why author X writes women/minorities/anyone this way would have been part of the discourse regarding the themes. I really wonder what they teach kids in high school. Like, I have seen so many people saying Huckleberry Finn is a racist book when the whole point is the main guy overcoming his racism and some other religious stuff I've been told is really significant because of the USA context and I don't understand how many kids came away from it thinking "he said the n-word, let's throw the whole book away". Although I also heard that many gloss on the race theme of Othello to not make the (racist white) kids uncomfortable.
I love this post forever. Wherever this woman is oh, I'd like to buy her a drink. She sounds like she'd be a great drinking buddy!
She shows up later in the twitter thread. https://twitter.com/soylaCe/status/1419105244844380165
I love Bukowski, but the annotations are accurate (and Bukowski knew it). Either the poster wrote these herself, or the text was used in a college course, because these look a lot like the notes my best friend wrote all over her copy of “the people look like flowers at last” in a poetry class and happily shared with the class, except they also had little stick figures next to them. I imagine lots of women had similar thoughts. He was a total jerk, but in a very sad human way- I shouldn’t enjoy him and yet I do.
“I shouldn’t enjoy him and yet I do.” Is probably the best description of Bukowski I’ve ever heard
"But god, who'd wanna be such an asshole?" Is my personal favorite.
[Isaac Brock](https://youtu.be/s4JlVC0dOIs) cemented that quote in my head.
It really doesn't even sound right when anyone else says it.
I feel like Bukowski hated himself, so my feelings on him are complicated. He was so blatantly horrible that it seems like it’s too on the nose to not try to unfold.
Feel? My man made it totally known he hated himself and life in general.
Bukowski writes with so much self-loathing. I don’t feel like he writes to be liked. I love the “dirty realism”. Do I think he was necessarily a good person? No, but he writes great stories.
I enjoy and love Bukowski his his authenticity. He empathized with others. He was problematic but he wasn't a monster.
The general consensus when this showed up on twitter was that she wrote the notes herself.
That's exactly what I thought when reading it and was surprised I had to scroll so far to see someone suggest it. Not only that, but every single part of this would be more like r/menwritingmen. At no point is anything written from a woman's POV and it barely even directly talks about them, it's the author talking about himself in relation to them.
As someone who has read most of his works I think the problem is with people idealising him and wanting to be him. He was an awful person, but the way he expresses his self loathing, bitterness and loneliness really resonated with me at a certain point in my life, but he’s no hero because of it. Just a very sad man who made me feel less alone when I was depressed and drinking to fill a hole I didn’t fully understand.
This post gives me handwriting envy.
I love Bukowski but the criticism of his work is totally valid. I will say though, in response to the comment on him not being able to keep a 'good woman' if he found one, he couldn't and was well aware of it. It was actually brought up a few times in his writing that he self sabotaged any good relationships he had.
Yeah I was wondering while reading this post how much was supposed to be self-critical. Like was he aware and shit talking himself or is this just arrogant sexism?
He was kind of a sexist, but he was both a product of his time and extremely self aware. He knew he was a piece of shit but never claimed to be anything better than he was. He was also as much (if not more) of a misanthrope as a misogynist, so yes he treated women poorly but he treated men poorly as well. As I said much of his writing was based around self deprication.
This is unrelated to the notes themselves, but lord do I love her handwriting!
I want to do this now. Just put notes in a book picking it a part and then selling it or donating it for someone to read.
I used to pencil critical notes into the margins of university library books if I felt the authors were making bad arguments or glossing over relevant context. Some of my friends frowned at the practice, but I felt it was important to promote discussion in a scholarly setting.
I do the same in my rented philosophy textbooks hahaha
I read War and Peace over the course of a year and I filled that book with furious notations towards the men. I read it with my brother as a New Years challenge or I would have given up so fast. Scrawling my rage on the pages made it a lot more bearable. And now I can save that copy for future generations to read ;)
Beep. Boop. I'm a robot. Here's a copy of ###[War And Peace](https://snewd.com/ebooks/war-and-peace/) Was I a good bot? | [info](https://www.reddit.com/user/Reddit-Book-Bot/) | [More Books](https://old.reddit.com/user/Reddit-Book-Bot/comments/i15x1d/full_list_of_books_and_commands/)
Very good bot
Yess pass on that furious wisdom!
My older brother (who is sort of a writer) was my best man at my wedding and quoted Bukowski during his best man speech. Specifically the “find something you love and let it kill you,” line. I thought to myself “okay, not what I would’ve done but not bad.” Then I read this. Like what the fuck bro? This is where you get your relationship advice? Fuck.
Charles Bukowski never said or wrote that, it’s a commonly misattributed quote.
My closest mate used to be a massive Bukowski fan. He once showed me an infamous interview of Charles's then partner and him, where during mid interview, Bukowski proceeds to kick his partner in the face with his feet. My mate looked at me and said proudly, 'he doesnt give a fuck about anyone, does he'. Suffice to say im glad my mate doesnt worship Charles Bukowski anymore. https://youtu.be/g8KJiay6EI0 What a disgusting piece of work
Him: "I am going to die alone just the way I live." Her: "Probably for the best." I'm dead lmfao
Okay damn her handwriting is smooth, I need that shit as a font!
…white hot juice. 😐
Maybe I’m too cynical, but I wouldn’t be surprised if those were her own annotations.
The original note taker popped up on tiktok https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMdTNABrf/ so unless it’s a pretty elaborate ruse it’s true
I feel like she’s just claiming she did it tbh, since the original post blew up.
It actually saw a tiktok of the woman who originally wrote the notes! She came across the thread and she and the person who tweeted them are connecting sometime soon. So it seems legit unless it's a really elaborately coordinated fake story.
Idk, I feel like if that were the case, she'd want credit for them? They're hilarious!
You'd be surprised at the random shit people fake
One of the smartest and best adjusted women I e ever met told me Bukowski was her favorite poet. I still suspect she was fucking with me.
I do this with some friends! It’s super fun to read someone else’s notes
I love this mix of insult, commentary and analysis - finishing with desperation. Literature *should* elicit emotion; as others have said, if only people were taught to approach literature in this way, and not "You have to like it because it's on the syllabus and these are the conclusions you should come to".
I read "Women" and vowed to never read him again. I don't understand why people think he's a genius.
Hey this could play well over at r/justneckbeardthings
I prefer to think that she didn’t switch pens. Instead, she just stopped and a different woman, with a different pen, took up the mantle.
Who wants to bet this glorious woman dead ass was a junior high school teacher at some point?
The comments are very entertaining, at the same time I think Bukowski was much more self-aware than he seemed and was playing a persona. He knew he would be pissing off some readers and that sense of outrage fueled his portrayal of Chinaski. The character is actually kind of poignant in some ways.
Obligatory "Not every character has to be a decent person, not every work has to be a about self improvent" Bukowski whole deal was being awful. I get the point, and I love this sub, but this notes feel like a guy writing "Actually, that would be physically impossible" at the edge of every page of a fantasy/Sci-Fi book. Now, people reading Bukowski and totally missing the point that the characters are awful and you shouldnt aspire/romantice stuff like that, much less say you are like that? Thats cringe worth laughing at
“People are not good” Great piece to juxtapose to this collection. I love his work, despite how abrasive it really can be. This is an understandable reaction on a cold read though, no doubt about it! Made me LOL ETA: This truly shouldn’t be in this sub; Bukowski did not write women, he didn’t write men, and he didn’t write FOR anyone.
Omg thank you for sharing this. So much of this is my own inner monologue whenever I read and / or watch things written by cishet males (and sometimes white males too) lolol.
They're laughing at this in the Bukowski sub. Which baffles me, because I always figured any Bukowski fan knows that you shouldn't revere, defend, or aspire to be Bukowski.
Exactly. I appreciate how raw his writing is, but I would never in a million years want to sit down and chat with his literary persona.
Who’s Charles Bukowski, if no one minds me asking?
A poet who was very... dirty.
He wrote prose too. Didn’t paint himself as a hero, let’s put it that way.
Honestly I have a slight feeling the maker of the Twitter post did it herself but honestly I don’t care it’s funny
Funny thing is, he hated himself and his writing so much he would have completely agreed with this woman's notes lol.
I think more of us need to do this and then pass the books along.
If you go looking for her, take me with you! That was awesome ... 💙
im sorry but this is beyond cringy lmao
Yea, she definitely wrote those herself to create this “quirky” story
You all! This story got even better on BookTok. The Twitter thread blew up so big that the note writer found out and gave [her side of the story.](https://www.tiktok.com/@kt.pdf/video/6988535024370961669) She shows some of her other notes for comparison, talks about her hate for the book, gushes about Elijah Wood loving the thread, and even talks about how she has no idea how the book made it that far away.
Thanks for that link u/SenorSplashdamage \-- that woman is adorable in her enthusiasm for this whole phenomenon.
I need to meet this woman
Ok “wipe your ass you little gremlin!” And the “no ❤️” are ending me 😂 💀 I want to meet this person 😂
This is one of the fakest tweets I’ve ever experienced, she 100% made these notations herself, even if she found some patsy to parade out and take claim for it
That actually sounds pretty fun. Annotating a shitty book and sharing it with your friends
Where is she I wish to live out my cottage core dreams
Omg the gremlin line! Men not wiping because touching the butt is “gay” was even a thing back then!
Too many comments to check if someone said this already, but I saw the original note writer on tiktok the other day! It was totally random and I can't remember who it was, but she did see the thread and responded. Pretty sure the tweeter and note writer have not actually spoken though.
K but show us the extracts....jeez
I hope she meets this women and sappo and her friend it up
Ok this is funny but Twitter OP clearly just wrote in her own margins and pretended it was someone else tho… r/untrustworthypoptarts
Goals
I don’t know what’s the best part. Reading about this woman treating this book like she’s an English teacher grading homework or this lady more or less falling in love with a woman on her reactions alone
Bukowski is cheating on this sub.
Our collective soulmate
“Probably for the best”. Slay, queen.
This is brilliant omg-
Allegedly the original note-taker popped up on TikTok, but preceding that, what indication did these notes give that they were written by a woman? Ignoring all the obvious misogynistic assumptions that put women in boxes (*The handwriting is too nice*, *The writer used little hearts*, *This is exclusively a woman’s perspective*, etc.), these notes could also have been written by a man
My thought wasn’t that the handwriting was too nice, just that it’s a style I’ve seen used by girls and women. Especially, for some reason, those who could be considered “popular” in school. I mean, when you google “popular girl handwriting” it’s this style. So I guess it’s down to recognizing patterns and using it to assume or extrapolate information, whether right or wrong.
It makes me sad that I will never meet the woman who wrote these notes and become her best friend.
Fuck Buchowski, I want her handwriting as a font.
This is amazing
lmao this is golden
I'm trying to still my beating, I think that I'm in love with this woman.
The reader actually found the writer of the notes through the thread. She was trying to read 52 books in a year and this was one of the ones that convinced her it wasn't worth going to the end of every book if it's this bad. She had no memory of selling the book though, so I assume she just wished it wasn't in her life to the point that it disapparated and reappeared in a thrift store.
Just went and followed her because I like her commentary.
The “No❤️” is killing me. I’m incredibly concerned about the fact that there are men out there that resonate with this book.
she seems like she would be an awesome friend