Bukowski pt. 2

I went to see the documentary "Bukowski: Born into this" a couple of years ago. It is a decent movie about Bukowski. It definitely deals with the whole man. It shows the great pain and violence contain in him, the hard worker, the romantic, the poet, the writer and all the other things that make up a dynamic human being.

The disturbing part for me was the footage of him reading in the clubs and theaters. It was more performance art than poetry reading. The audience was there to see the atrocity. He was nervous, angry and scared on stage. He would drink to calm his anxiety and then the crowd would egg him on and he would drink more in a vicious cycle.It was sort of sad. These performances were a necessary cash cow, they advanced his career through exposure and the creation of the myth of the man. He is reported to have hated these gigs. Hank would have been more interested in writing or being at the race track.

When I was watching the movie there were several inebriated members of the audience, probably over half. They cheered the excesses of his alcoholism. Like at his poetry reading, they were drawn in by the spectacle and not the man.

Bukowski really curtailed his drinking after illness late in life. He dabbled in mediation,healthier living and using his beloved Apple computer. He wrote his last book "Pulp" and some of his best poetry during this period. It seems to me that he had found a little peace at the end of a turbulent life.

This taken from wikipedia:

Bukowski died of leukemia on March 9th, 1994 in San Pedro, California, at the age of 73, shortly after completing the novel "Pulp", his last. His funeral rites were conducted by Buddhist monks. His gravestone reads: "Don't Try".
According to Linda Lee Bukowski, her husband's epitaph means something along the lines of "If you spend all your time trying, then all you're doing is trying. So don't try. Just do."