Notes of a Dirty Old Man

It's been many years since I have returned to Henry Chinaski (Charles Bukowski) and through Notes of a Dirty Old Man, I was taken on yet another sometimes befuddling and sometimes profound reading experience. Bukowski mixes his prose with personal anecdotes and downright ridiculous absurdity, like a train wreck of thought. As he was churning these out for the Open City press, I gather Bukowski would have been writing many of the stories for his own amusement, just to see how far he could stretch a tale into the obscenely bizarre - as there are many in this collection that defy reality, but it is pertinent as it is free flowing intoxicating imagination peppered with some predicaments like the piece about Bukowski's parents and the Frozen Man that is quite introspectively sad. As with the story of Neal Cassady, there is something profoundly swift in the way it opens up the wounds of humanity, to drain the infection. As the title suggests, these are notes, and the man penning them is dirty minded and getting on in life. You can't argue with that.

Bukowski has morality and ethics, but they are measured within a tawdry urban world that is collapsing inside itself. For instance his shirt cardboard reflections, 'if you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence', in other societies and circles, the test of friendship would not be so extreme, but in Bukowski's world, a jail sentence would suffice as best a test of friendship as you can get. A writer like Wordsworth would draw for us the beauty of nature, but Bukowski points out that nature may be drawn as one thing but how it goes about its business of being natural is another thing entirely. He also speaks for the thoughts and actions of humanity that is not dogmatic idealism, some people are embarrassed when they fart, but imagine if they farted and had a follow through? This is what Bukowski is about. When the mind is roughing it, not taking the usual route.

Notes of a Dirty Old Man has all the stickiness of ill mannered sex, sordid situations, crass thoughts, and broken down poetry, but it does feel good to read it, like taking hard liquor that burns the throat, once it hits the belly it loosens you up. This book is not for those seeking Dostoyevsky or Chekhov, tales of the poor, set in earnest poverty - if misfortune is a stream, some writers would write about people trying to get out of it, or simply being carried away by its current, but Bukowski writes about splashing, bomb diving, paddling, skinny dipping and fishing in that stream of misfortune. That's what you'll discover in its pages.