iMpressed
There are, and I think most people will agree with me on this one, plenty of reasons to dislike the poetry of the American author Charles Bukowski. Which is not to say that I don't like his poetry, but there are the usual caveats to liking such a thing - facts such as:
-he never revised
-he wrote the same poems again and again
-his subject matter is vile
-his poetic voice is the worst kind of egoistic
-he published everything
-you have to wade through piles of terrible poems to find the couple amazing things snuck into his expansive catalogue of books
There are plenty of reasons to dislike his fiction as well, and many of those reasons are similar to the poetry-list right up there, so I'm not gonna bother re-listing them. But, at this moment, I'd like to mention a smaller, more nit-picky thing that I don't like about Charles Bukowski's poetry: (drum roll...) that is, that he always makes such a big deal about the fact that he's listening to Classical music on his radio in all the damn poems where's sitting around drinking and listening to the radio. You know what? I'm not impressed by his specifying the detail of listening to Brahms. At all. It doesn't make the poem better. It doesn't make him some kind of neo-Romantic for Skid Row. At all.
But, sometimes, in my blog posts (and really, all three of us bloggers here are guilty of it), I like to mention the fact that I listen to "classical" music. In fact, right now, I'm listening to Ligeti's Sonata for solo Viola. Impressed? Me neither. And most of you, knowing that I'm listening to, can name the two CDs that I'm most likely listening to to be listening to that particular piece.
But, all this talk about CDs gets me to where I wanted to be going (how about that!). I still remain vehemently anti-ipod (Antipod?), but I think sometimes I listen to music in the way that iPodders do. To clarify, an anecdote:
I popped the back tire on my bicycle. It was bound to happen. There's bike shop only 28 or so blocks away, so I'll get there soon. Get a new tube, maybe a patch kit, and the little special lever thing to get the tire off/on the rim. However, until then, I'm left walking to campus, and the last couple days, I've had to walk to campus just to get on the shuttle bus to go to the other campus, thats an hour-long bus-ride away (and we'll leave all the what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-in-Miami stuff out of this post). This leaves me with time to dig out the ol' portable CD player and headphones, and plan ahead enough to through 3 or 4 CDs in my backpack - listening for going places (see this).
It takes more planning than Ipod, though clearly, trying to cover the bases for potential listening needs for two half-hour walks and two one-hour bus rides (something angry, something blue, something classical, something new), but in other ways, its probably very similar. For instance, Yesterday, I had the lucky-enough foresight to have thrown a CD of Janacek's Sinfonietta (coupled (trioed?) with throw-away pieces by Martinu & Suk) in my pack, because, as I got off the shuttle bus back on the nearby campus (after one 30 minute walk and two 60 minute bus rides) I had the sudden urge to listen to the opening fanfare, really loud, over and over again (repetitive listening, while probably a common-enough human trait, is something I still tend to blame on my father (whether I inherited it through his genes or his behavior)).
That's probably just like listening to pop-rock on an iPod right?
But at least, I get to decide whether I was pre-cogniting my later-that-day need for Janacek or setting up a self-fulfilling/fulfilled prophecy. I don't think you get to have that little discussion with yourself if you listen to an iPod.
-he never revised
-he wrote the same poems again and again
-his subject matter is vile
-his poetic voice is the worst kind of egoistic
-he published everything
-you have to wade through piles of terrible poems to find the couple amazing things snuck into his expansive catalogue of books
There are plenty of reasons to dislike his fiction as well, and many of those reasons are similar to the poetry-list right up there, so I'm not gonna bother re-listing them. But, at this moment, I'd like to mention a smaller, more nit-picky thing that I don't like about Charles Bukowski's poetry: (drum roll...) that is, that he always makes such a big deal about the fact that he's listening to Classical music on his radio in all the damn poems where's sitting around drinking and listening to the radio. You know what? I'm not impressed by his specifying the detail of listening to Brahms. At all. It doesn't make the poem better. It doesn't make him some kind of neo-Romantic for Skid Row. At all.
But, sometimes, in my blog posts (and really, all three of us bloggers here are guilty of it), I like to mention the fact that I listen to "classical" music. In fact, right now, I'm listening to Ligeti's Sonata for solo Viola. Impressed? Me neither. And most of you, knowing that I'm listening to, can name the two CDs that I'm most likely listening to to be listening to that particular piece.
But, all this talk about CDs gets me to where I wanted to be going (how about that!). I still remain vehemently anti-ipod (Antipod?), but I think sometimes I listen to music in the way that iPodders do. To clarify, an anecdote:
I popped the back tire on my bicycle. It was bound to happen. There's bike shop only 28 or so blocks away, so I'll get there soon. Get a new tube, maybe a patch kit, and the little special lever thing to get the tire off/on the rim. However, until then, I'm left walking to campus, and the last couple days, I've had to walk to campus just to get on the shuttle bus to go to the other campus, thats an hour-long bus-ride away (and we'll leave all the what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-in-Miami stuff out of this post). This leaves me with time to dig out the ol' portable CD player and headphones, and plan ahead enough to through 3 or 4 CDs in my backpack - listening for going places (see this).
It takes more planning than Ipod, though clearly, trying to cover the bases for potential listening needs for two half-hour walks and two one-hour bus rides (something angry, something blue, something classical, something new), but in other ways, its probably very similar. For instance, Yesterday, I had the lucky-enough foresight to have thrown a CD of Janacek's Sinfonietta (coupled (trioed?) with throw-away pieces by Martinu & Suk) in my pack, because, as I got off the shuttle bus back on the nearby campus (after one 30 minute walk and two 60 minute bus rides) I had the sudden urge to listen to the opening fanfare, really loud, over and over again (repetitive listening, while probably a common-enough human trait, is something I still tend to blame on my father (whether I inherited it through his genes or his behavior)).
That's probably just like listening to pop-rock on an iPod right?
But at least, I get to decide whether I was pre-cogniting my later-that-day need for Janacek or setting up a self-fulfilling/fulfilled prophecy. I don't think you get to have that little discussion with yourself if you listen to an iPod.
1 Comments:
I think your last two points against Bukowski's poetry are the biggest ones for me. But then reading Bukowski's poems usually seems to be less about "reading poetry" and more about "reading Bukowski" (or sometimes just "having one of those bumper stickers that says 'I'd rather be reading Bukowski'"). Thus picking through the underdeveloped stuff (which you're encouraged to suppose is the raw intellectual detritus of his tortured, alcoholic existence) is an integral part of the experience, like cleaning a steamed crab before you eat it.
Metaphor disclosure: I was in Annapolis this weekend and ate steamed crabs for the first time, which is actually a very fun process. Though the crabs sometimes manage to cut you even in death.
I don't think it much matters what kind of music you listen to on your iPod; the potential problem is that you program your whole life to music that you already know, though like any other music-playing mechanism the iPod is just as good (and maybe better) for learning new stuff.
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