I love getting a list of like “The 75 Best Books of All Time.” It’s like great, now all I have to do is read 75 books. That doesn’t sound that hard.
Ya know, I hate to be a “killjoy,” but the whole thing does reek a bit of “name-dropping.” And of course, all of this wouldn’t be half so inexcusable, in my big clustered mind in which one person is responsible for all the evil in the world, if our public library still carried Bukowski in the fiction section.
And yes, they do still have his poetry, something like five titles or so around the 813 mark, but I looked in the Classics (presumptive? no?) and also the general fiction, and couldn’t find my old favorite, Tales of Ordinary Madness, one I’ve reviewed already on goodreads.com. But for evidence that his fiction is better than his poetry, I think you only need note that in his poetry he praises Carson McCullers. Whereas those fiction blurbs, they were just so funny: like one of them ends with the passage “I picked up War and Peace. Nothing had changed. It was still a lousy book.” And then there’s one where he’s “trying to read Kangaroo by D.H. Lawrence,” but this lamp keeps falling on him and the bulb keeps burning his arm or something like that. See, it had everything: bloopers, other people’s misfortune… it was just right as rain, in a general sort of way. Plus it had this hilarious story about when he went to stay in the “poet’s cottage” in Tuscon, AZ in the middle of summer and about how miserable of an experience it was, with no one around and, and this is one of the full sentences: “nothing to do but drink beer.” And then there were other stories about a dude cutting a dude to death in the shower. And they have that brief, declarative syntactical essence which I just exhibited there.
I mean, where is THAT? Who the hell is gonna display THAT? Half these liberal yuppies these days don’t have the balls to say anything at all. Prose, as much as we hate to admit it, is all about spiritual experiences. I mean hell, it’s hard to even cram 75 of those things in your head at a time, even on the off chance that they DO exist (and I’m not betting on it).