Charles Bukowski

Hi all, Bukowski newby just starting to really dig in. I come at this as an aspiring writer and there is something that nobody has really touched on and it's just pure speculation on my part as to how this pertains to Mr. Bukowski.

Writing (or any kind of creative process) for some people is dependent on "opening up the flow" and tapping into the subconscious. That can be really hard to do for some people with music playing that demands attention and constantly breaks into one's thoughts. Music with words can often tend to seep into one's writing, sometimes in subliminal ways or sometimes obvious. Pop music jars and involves, and to some that is good but to some it isn't. I've found that the noisier genres of jazz does this also, and have personally found I work purest with almost ambient music or classical playing, better than with nothing playing. It can act as a focusing lens, like sonic wallpaper, that lets a person get into the creative zone. Maybe he just found something that focused him.

It seems he liked classical whether creating or not so maybe this invalidates my whole line of thought but this all just occurs to me because I like jarring noisy music 90% of the time but during the times I am trying to write or create it is always classical or something else that I can just kind of soak up without it breaking into my flow. Like I said I'm fairly new to the Bukowski world and have no idea if this has any relationship to his reality at all, but the thoughts occurred to me in an insistent enough manner as a remote possibility that they made a lurker sign up for an account! Cheers all.

P.S. I live in Minneapolis and am friends with people in the building where Factotum had it's "bike shop" segments filmed in. The building is actually anchored by a bike shop called One on One Bikes and it was years and years between when the movie was shot and when it finally came out. Matt Dillon visited the bike shop a few times and apparently was quite the friendly and "normal" dude, no pretense or star trip.