Charles Bukowski's humour and originality, his free sense of form and understanding of people, insights into contemporary lives and society are formidable.
He knows culture, society and the ironies and conflicts of life. The problems people face, our rituals, our habits, vices, dissolution, ambiguities, fallacies, banality, temptations, desires, and moments of joy are expressed thru concise language that is playful and full of succulent prose. His writings influenced my own work.
Loved it!
'He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels' Leonard Cohen
The definitive collection from a writer whose transgressive legacy and raw, funny, acutely observant writing has left an enduring mark
Here is Bukowski eating walnuts and scratching his back, rolling a cigarette while listening to Brahms, showering with Linda in the mid-afternoon.
Here is Bukowski knowing that the secret is beyond him, that people who never go crazy live truly horrible lives, that there's a bluebird in his heart that wants to get out.
For me, Leonard Cohen stretched the boundaries for writing in this book. I feel he was facing crises within his own life to write such a book.
The world he creates is surreal and an emotional ride. I identify with the characters and the reasons people do what they do. Anger, surprise, fear, anxiety. These are all part of human existence and our social beings. To isolate is one thing but to engage in relationships can be an exhausting, daunting task that can end badly or not.
We as beings are fallible, we do things we don't always intend. Life throws us a hardball, and we either eat it, toss it, or avoid it.
One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, Beautiful Losers is Cohen’s most defiant and uninhibited work. The novel centres upon the hapless members of a love triangle united by their sexual obsessions and by their fascination with Catherine Tekakwitha, the 17th-century Mohawk saint.
By turns vulgar, rhapsodic, and viciously witty, Beautiful Losers explores each character’s attainment of a state of self-abandonment, in which the sensualist cannot be distinguished from the saint.
I learned a lot from the first chapter. The writing is dense but so informative and insightful into the complexities and aesthetics of De Kooning's life and art. Because life is art.
Art projects us into the future, our imagination, our dreams, our fantasies, the indescribable, emotions, visual pleasure and introspection. It evokes memories, violent or non-violent, sexual or not sexual.
But this book taught me how much there is that I didn't see when I looked at a De Kooning painting or any painting for that matter.
The intention of the artist, their marks, their lives, their intellect, the society they live in, their fears, insecurities and triumphs, politics, psychology and ingenuity cannot be covered in ten pages. Because there is a world inside a De Kooning painting that I wasn't prepared for.
With more than 100 illustrations -- approximately 48 in full color -- this innovative series offers a fresh look at the most creative and influential artists of the postwar era. Modern Masters form a perfect reference set for home, school, or library. Each handsomely designed volume presents:
This story is about an Asian schizophrenic female artist named Cathy who navigates her way through life with self-deprecation and skepticism.
Told with humour and heartache, her group, The Big Six, earns a commission for an upcycled outdoor sculpture in downtown Vancouver. As they explore the creative process, the relationship dynamics surface between them. Their lives go sideways through a series of strange events, a disappearance, mystery, intrigue, a Molotov cocktail, and mayhem. Cathy grows as an artist in fits and starts, moving toward new insights into herself and the reality of life.
