There comes a point in every young college student’s school career when they have to make a choice: honesty? or safety? It is the inclination, I believe, for most of us to choose safety. I am not altogether innocent of forgoing the truth to maintain a squeaky-clean record. Today is not one of those days for Declan Goldenbogen.
I have been working harder than I have ever worked for the past three weeks. Band practices, setlist adjustments, fine tuning song structure, writing, hanging fliers, supporting my friends at their events, restringing my instrument, etc., etc., etc. In hindsight, scheduling two shows one day apart may have been a mistake, but to my credit the date of the first show changed from the 28th to the 24th. Regardless, preparing for my RAD services sponsored Concert in the Courtyard show, and then having to turn around and prepare for my Browser’s Bookstore acoustic show incredibly quickly managed to drain me incredibly quickly. I didn’t even have much left to drain after the amount of physical labor and hard thinking that I had to do leading up to that.
That said, my point is this: we were assigned to read Art on My Mind: Visual Politics by Bell Hooks and I did not touch it. Normally, I would try to have a friend catch me up on the reading, but the blatant fact that I didn’t even open the book, combined with my current total exhaustion has caused me to throw my hands in the air and choose honesty today.
I knew that I could not simply turn just this admission of guilt on its own, however. I did find some time this week to make my way all the way through Charles Bukowski’s On Writing (assigned for week 8). Since it’s my other writing handbook after Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing, I thought it might be interesting to compare the two writer’s philosophies concerning their craft, and what I learned from each of them.
Bukowski is a fascinating man. I’ve taken a sincere interest in his work since I learned about his very harsh and shocking writing style. Earlier this year I managed to get through about a quarter of Women, and I’ve been meaning to return to it ever since. Over winter break I read his final novel, Pulp, in about 2 days. I ate it up, and it’s easily one of my favorite books that I’ve read. Everything about Bukowski is fascinating to me. He seemed to move through the world so bitterly and so nihilistically, yet he created some of the most compelling and famous novels and poems ever written. He just absolutely didn’t give a damn, and I really admire that about him. Thus, I was really excited to read On Writing, which is simply a selection of letters he wrote in his lifetime to publishers and close friends. I was not disappointed by what I found.
Though Bukowski and Bradbury seemingly were entirely different men, some of their writing philosophies are fairly aligned. Most notably, the two of them seem to agree on the fact that writing doesn’t work right away until you’ve practiced a ton, and that you can’t try too hard at all or you come across as fake, and you will find no satisfaction in your craft. Bradbury very sternly expressed his distaste for people that go to lengths to impress certain literary cliques, and Bradbury very clearly feels the same about lazy imitators. In a letter he wrote to James Boyer May in 1960 he said this: “…yes, the ‘littles’ are all an irresponsible bunch (most of them) guided by young men, eager with the college flush, actually hoping to cut a buck from the thing, starting with fiery ideals and large ideas, long explanatory rejection slips, and dwindling down, finally, to letting the manuscripts stack behind the sofa or in the closet, some of them lost forever and never answered, and finally putting out a tacked-together, hacked-together poor selection of typographically botched poems before getting married and disappearing from the scene with some comment like ‘lack of support.’ Lack of support? Who the hell are they to get it? What have they done but camouflage themselves behind the façade of art, think up the name of a magazine, get it listed and wait for submissions from the same 2 or 3 hundred tired names that seem to think they are the poets of America because some 22 year-old jackass with a bongo drum and a loose 50 dollar bill accepts their worst poetry.” I really love the way that Bukowski writes. I’m always completely enthralled, and often incredibly amused by his blunt and brash writing.
But as much as I love his writing, Bukowski is almost a perfect example of what I don’t want to happen to me. After a lack of success early on, Bukowski went through a long phase of getting incredibly drunk every day and never writing. Eventually, he got his act together, started writing poetry, gained some notoriety, and wrote some classic novels. Not exactly the best model of a road to success. I much prefer Bradbury’s advice to practice writing 1,000 words per day and using nouns for word association. Bukowski also kept no copies of his stories, and if he was ever rejected he simply destroyed the story and never came back to it. I think it’s important to keep your drafts and learn from your mistakes.
Reading both of these books taught me a lot about writing. I think that after this quarter I will take up some combination of the philosophies of both of these genius writers. The work ethic and organization of Bradbury, with the intensity and frustrated determination of Bukowski. Personally, I think that reading these two books have had more of an educational impact on me than Art on My Mind ever could.