Charles Bukowski’s writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambience of the city of Los Angeles. As a result of his rough social and physical upbringing Bukowski is able to capture the reality of life by drawing on personal experience and uses themes of sex, alcohol and violence in his raw style of writing. His work speaks volumes on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing itself, alcohol, relationships with women, and daily grind of work. While Bukowski did end up having an FBI kept a file on him as a result of his column, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, in the LA underground newspaper Open City, and his possible draft evasion, he also wrote countless poems, short stories, six novels and would eventually publish over sixty book, I have decided to focus on a single piece of his work, Love is a Dog From Hell, and three poems entitled The 6 Foot Goddess, Sandra, You and Pacific Telephone. In these poems we can see the sexual tendencies that Bukowski is known for, while also revealing his inner machismo. It is by using this poem that I will show that Charles Bukowski may have been an extremely talented writer, but he was also a very sexually oriented person that had a constant obsession with women that could never be quenched, only abated through his writing.
Charles Bukowski was born as Heinrich Karl Bukowski in Andernach Germany to his father Henry, a sergeant in the United States Army, and his mother Katharina. At the age of two Bukowski’s parents immigrated back to the United States from Germany where they settled in Los Angeles. His father believed in firm discipline, both mental and physical and often beat Bukowski for the smallest offenses, Bukowski would later describe his early life as saying...
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...l more appealing and he cannot escape the life of drugs or alcohol in his writing any more than he could escape them in reality.
Even More of this narcissistic writing comes to play in the poem entitled “You”. In this selection he is describing a women talking to her lover in which she is continuously feeding into his ego and physical vanity. She also continues to bolster his machismo by comparing him to a beast. This mentality is something that Bukowski seems to feed off over during the course of his writing. She is constantly comparing her lover to an animal, or a beast. She refers to his hands as paws and his and the woman tells her lover that his balls are the biggest she’d ever seen and that he “shoots sperm like a whale shoots water out of the hole in its back” (You). Again feeding into the self promoting ways that we find prevalent in many of Bukowski’s works.
Benjamin Banneker was a primarily self-educated child of a former slave who became a prominent African American renaissance man and activist during the 18th century. In 1791, Banneker wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson, the aim of which was to challenge Jefferson on the topics of slavery and racism, and hopefully get him to change his opinions and eventually take further action. He called upon tone, alluding to historical events, and juxtaposing the difference between Jefferson’s own writings and actions in order to drive his point home.
Baym, Nina, and Robert S. Levine. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 7th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. 348-350. Print.
Written in 1904, Lee’s My Bicycle and I is perhaps the earliest representation of objectum sexuality expressed in literature. Objectum sexuality is a relatively new concept, although it has gained some small amount of public attention with individuals of this sexuality appearing in media such as The Tyra Banks Show and Good Morning America. Objectum sexuality can be defined as the sexual attraction to nonhuman objects. These relationships are as completely valid as those with people and, as in the case of Erika Eiffel, can also end in marriage. In this work, objectum sexuality is possibly portrayed through multiple references to being a companion to her bicycle, an almost excessive amount of time spent with her bicycle, and gratuitous amounts of praise towards her bicycle. However, it can be assumed that her talk of bicycles and horses is a metaphor for relationships in general.
Beacham, W. (Ed.). (1986). Beacham’s Popular Fiction In America, Volume 3. Washington DC: Beacham Publishing.
Locklin, Gerald. "The Day of the Painter, the Death of the Cock: Nathaniel West's Hollywood Novel." Los Angeles in Fiction. A Collection of Original Essays. Ed. David Fine. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984.
Throughout history, society has been used as a means of inspiration for writers of all genres. More often then not, writers do not shine a light on the positive aspects of society, they chose to focus on the decline of the modern world. For a writer to truly capture this societal decline, they must be brave enough to accept it. For one writer in particular, her passion and style are what fuel her to create masterpieces of literature centered on that very topic. With her ability to focus on modern American society with topics such as rape, child abuse and murder, Joyce Carol Oates’s novels have been able to capture the sometimes cruel reality of American life in an unorthodox way.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. Print.
...Lowell and he may have been a bit crazy from the alcohol abuse but his writing has impacted everyone. His themes are used wonderfully, and he has mastered the art of poetry through his different and intriguing dark gothic genre.
Baym, Nina, and Robert S. Levine, eds. The Norton Anthology: American Literature. 8th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2012. Print.
Bartholomae, D., & Petrosky, A. (2011). Ways of reading: an anthology for writers (9th ed.). Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's. “Judith Butler; Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy.”
Homosexuality remained illegal in most parts of America until the 1960s, but Ginsberg refused to equate his Gay identity with criminality. He wrote about his homosexuality in almost every poem that he wrote, most specifically in ‘Many Loves’ (1956) and ‘Please Master’ (1968), his paeans to his errant lover Neal Cassady. Ginsberg’s poems are full of explicit sexual detail and scatological humour, but the inclusion of such details should not be interpreted as a childish attempt to incense the prudish and the square.
By 1930, Bukowski’s family had settled in South Central Los Angeles where his father and grandfather had previously worked and lived but by the 30’s, but Bukowski’s father was often unemployed. During Bukowski’s early childhood, he was shy and anti-social and constantly ridiculed at school for his German accent, his clothing and as a teenager for his severe case of acne; although he was praised for his art work from his teachers, he suffered a battle with dyslexia. Sadly, his home life was not well, either. In his autobiography, Ham on Rye, Bukowski brings the reader to understand that he was repeatedly abused both physically and mentally by his father, beating him for the smallest offence imaginable, while his mother stood by, watched, and agreed with his father. (Miles).
Similar to the characters in his novels, Jack Kerouac lived a wild and unpredictable life filled with travelling, hitchhiking, drugs, alcohol, and rock n roll. He met new people every day, and discovered new things daily. He also attended countless numbers of parties with his fellow beatniks in attendance. Due to his bizarre and unusual behavior, literary critics and book publishing companies often despised Jack Kerouac and they dismissed his novels as being obscene and inappropriate for people to read (Jack Kerouac). However, his rejection by critics didn’t bother him very much. As long as he had his typewriter, some paper, and the American frontier, then Kerouac was a happy man. It can be argued that his travels are the reason why he suffered from such a severe drug and alco...
Heller, Joseph. The Chelsea House Library of Literary Criticism. Twentieth-Century American Literature Vol. 3. New York. Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.
Joyce Carol Oates, an American writer, holds a unique place in twentieth century literature. She won acclaim during her lifetime as a novelist and essayist and short story writer. The themes of Joyce Carol Oates are imposing and she portrays the social and psychological problems which are faced by the contemporary men and women in their day-to-day life. She is at her best in projecting the harsh and violent world of the present time. She presents a realistic sensation of life with a moral lesson to the reader. Joyce Carol Oates, like any other writer, selects out of the vast store of her experience. Daniel Hoffman says in his Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, “Creativity thrived with alienation, some postwar writers insisted-or at least they held that the condition of alienation which had played a nurturing role in fostering modern art, literature, and thought was too precious a heritage to sell for an academic chair or a government post” (8).