The tragic rape of Charles Bukowski’s ghost by Black Sparrow Press (2013)
mjpbooks.com
mjpbooks.com
"Sit on a couch and look at a wall"
to
"Laying on the couch and looking at the wall"
loses a lot somehow in a hard-to-pin-down way. It's almost an impressively efficient butchering
"Lay" is from Middle English lay, from Old French lai, from Latin laicus, from Ancient Greek λαϊκός (laïkós).
In English, "sit" feels immediate and active where "lay" is passive and indirect. The distinction is both important and rooted in history.
It is incredibly stupid that we still have editors trying to force English poetry into Latinate forms almost a millenium after the battle of Hastings and all the consequent Anglo/Norman jockeying for position.
'lay, v.1 General sense: To cause to lie.
[OE. lęcgan = OFris. ledsa, lega, leia, OS. leggian (Du. leggen), OHG. lecken, legen (MHG., mod.G. legen), ON. legja (Sw. lägga, Da. lægge), Goth. (= OTeut.) lagjan, f. lag- ablaut-variant of OTeut. leg-: see lie v.'
OE = Old English, OFris.= Old Frisian etc.
This is actually one of my favorite games to play with friends, taking a word and talking about it's connotations, or contrasting it with another similar word. Nothing super academic, just our own thoughts and feelings and examples of use.
Have fun digging into that one!
As a verb, "lay it down" has Germanic roots, e.g. "liegen". The Greek cognate seems to be "lexos", "bed". (All this from Skeat's etymological dictionary.)
Fortunately I have read only a few of his posthumous works.
edit: changed very little to few
He removes the testicles while leaving the valuable meat and fat entirely unblemished.
Well, I did, and read other things, and eventually began to recognize his contribution to culture, which is kind of a last step before my awareness of a particular author might fade, the way "The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California" turns up in the concept for the Tom Petty video for "Mary Jane's Last Dance," and so on; I recognize, nod, and forget. I hadn't thought about him in years until I stumbled across "The Laughing Heart" as I was in a late night fit of hating my job. A part went "... be on the watch. the gods will offer you chances," which struck me as a kind of admonition. It was one I took to heart, because a "chance" happened not long after and I, in a rare fit of boldness, took it.
Some of his short stories stood out, the fantastical ones, and of course the poetry. The poetry here is just ... well, one can imagine the early transporters in the Trek universe not working particularly well. Something emerges at the other end, it has a similar shape to it but doesn't quite fit together well enough, and you're left with something you hope will die on its own before it realizes what has happened to it. The "vulgar poem" sample is like that, some kind of tortured Bukowski clone flopped out of a steaming vat, bleated an unnatural sound, and then you don't know if you're crushing its head out of mercy or disgust, but you'd rather not have that happen again.
And the article provides a handy index of avoiding such abominations, to boot!
Another comment mentioned The Laughing Heart, it's at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQNmu1Q9NzA.
https://www.poetrynw.org/interview-serious-books-a-conversat...
It would be interesting to see how John Martin would explain those edits. They just look so bizarre, some invert the meaning completely, others are just petty edits to change stuff just for the heck of it.
It's like there was a love-hate relationship between the two. In interview I found above, John keeps talking about himself when asked how the two of them hit it together, or how it was like seeing Bukowski rise and his response was basically "It was great, but look how much work I was doing".
One could almost write a book about their relationship just based on the edits and reading into them all kinds of interesting things. It's like John hated the drinking and the vulgarity and try to correct some of it, but ended up ruining the work in the process.
Edit: While substitutions and what you do, when your Mom sees you writing a piece and points at a word, asking, if you maybe could do without it, are a not so much a necessary thing, the writer of this comment doesn't fully understand how this is the professional accomplishment that it is. Last Christmas, I didn't go skiing. How is this even editing? ;-)
Did this editor really think nobody would notice? That nobody would get pissed and complain? I just don’t get it
Besides, Bukowski the writer is famous but Bukowski the poet, like all poetry, enjoys very limited popularity.
At the time there were only 3 channels, and that show was very popular, so it's a famous moment. What I find surprising is how elegant he is, even in that situation.
This comment about the editor struck me:
> "Now, when I bring this subject up among a certain crowd, they bristle. They become very defensive of Martin and downright antagonistic toward me while they list the many ways in which he is a wonderful man..."
Does anyone know more about the relationship between Bukowski and Martin, and why Martin would be revered today? Why he would have supporters? Why he would even need supporters? (It seems odd that he'd have any role that meant he needed either detractors or fans; either seems a mistake in an editor.)
Right, as I was reading along, I thought how bad could this possibly be. But they changed:
>I lost $40
>at the track
>today
>so I'm somewhat
>bitter.
To this:
>and I won $400
>at the track
>today
>so I'm somewhat
>pleased.
Not that I've ever been a reader of Bukowski, but this is just changed into something that he simply didn't write.
I had no idea that this was something that people did.
Altering a poem is a whole different animal than editing a book or a movie, for instance.
I don’t know about that. George Lucas has managed to butcher his own movies after the fact, and newer audiences would never know.
Hundreds of thousands of people still believe that “Go Set a Watchman” is a new book as opposed to the first draft of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
IMO his deal with Martin made it so Bukowski was able to write full time in the later years of his life. Otherwise he may have had to still work at the Post Office and only be able to write part time.
>and why Martin would be revered today? Why he would have supporters? Why he would even need supporters?
He's revered because he (Black Sparrow Press) published many works by authors who would have otherwise never gotten a publishing deal. His supporters are most likely fans of the authors he published and those from the San Francisco Beat Generation. He, and Black Sparrow Press, had/have a close relationship with City Lights Books and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
John Martin was the manager of an office supply business in LA and also a rare book collector. He founded Black Sparrow Press specifically to publish Bukowski, who at the time was publishing mostly in obscure magazines or in "chapbooks", which were essentially cheaply produced pamphlets. Martin sold some of the first editions from his collection to fund the company.
He offered Bukowski $100 a month back then, something like $700 a month in today's dollars, to quit his post office job and write full time. Without that, Bukowski, who was what almost 50 years old at the time?, had the choice of either continuing to work at the post office and write on the side, or quit and write full time and face desperate poverty.
Don't get me wrong, if this is accurate about what John Martin has done with his editing, it's horrible and wrong and contrary to some of the other comments here I do not think rape is too strong of a word for it. Hopefully the original works get published at some point.
But without John Martin, most of the poem and stories that Bukowski wrote would have gone unwritten. I found out about Bukowski just randomly browsing the stacks in a university library in the 1980's and I remember the titles jumping out at me. Burning in water drowning in flame. South of no north. The days run away like wild horses over the hills. War all the time. Without John Martin, those books wouldn't have been in the stacks.
I don't know about revered. I can defend John Martin but I can't defend his editing.
He says, with disgust, "It's Bukowski."
The original meaning of the word was “to take by force”. Using it to exclusively describe sexual assault is a more modern thing.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/rape
This kind of double meaning in English is very common. The word murder can also be used as “to perform badly”.
A way to look at it is English often has two forms of words like this. There is murder (general) and there is Murder (specific).
As someone who is bipolar, the “misuse” of labels around mental health is aggravating. The misuse of “rape” is the same.
The general usage of words dilutes the impact of the specific use. I’d love to bring back capital letters to English nouns. That way we could use Murder and murder to clarify what which meaning is used.
English is frustratingly imprecise.
If we all spoke Lojban, I'm sure the poetry would be very precise, but I wonder if it could convey the same things.
Also, is sexual contact with a corpse rape? As of 2015 it was not in Massachusetts and many other US states:
When you die, you lose your status as a person, Troyer explains, although you are still human, your body or your remains are quasi property. “You’re not really a subject, but you’re not fully an object,” he says.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/sep/04/necroph...
In this case, they are taking the original work, corrupting it, and passing it off as the original. Legal, but definitely not moral or ethical.
I think “rape” is a little strong, but not inaccurate.
No I'm not.
When we "kill" a program there's no life murdered or equivalent moral issue involved either.
But I don't take issue with the wording just because I've had a relative killed in a bad situation. And I don't think anybody should (or if they do, they should get over it).
"Kill" is used in many less severe circumstances. We kill plants and mold and bacteria. "Kill" does not nearly universally refer a specific severe act with a real human victim. Notice we don't murder programs.
Regardless of historical usage (words do not have some innate meaning which persists through all time), the current usage of the word is almost exclusively limited to a very particular crime. A better comparison would be "genocide". We should ask ourselves how we would feel about a company transitioning from cross-platform to a single OS being described as committing a genocide of other OS users. Or even better, we should ask actual survivors of genocide how they would feel.
And in this case, survivors are already telling us how they feel. For example: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/stop-saying-rape-out-of-conte...
There are terms which because of their specificity and severity (in modern usage) cannot be used metaphorically without calling to mind the non-metaphorical meaning. This is quite distinct from more standard metaphors which we barely recognize as metaphors at all (no one thinks of a sprinter when we ask them to run a program).
Regardless of what decision we end up making on what terms we are comfortable using, we can recognize that not all violent terms are equal in how concretely they call to mind their violent meaning when used metaphorically and that victims of violence are speaking out about the usage of certain terms. How we should respond to that is a judgment call we all have to make.
Also since this submission hasnt been downvoted into oblivion, your personal, anecdotal reaction is not the norm (on HN)
He literally used the word “equating”.
> Notice we don't murder programs.
And if someone does say that, will you swoop in to tell them that it’s inappropriate? Because I have absolutely heard people use the word “murder” metaphorically.
> And in this case, survivors are already telling us how they feel.
Interestingly those are all cases where I can easily imagine someone saying “murder” instead of “rape”. I also think those examples are pretty flippant and waste the impact of the word.
For the record, I think this particular use of the word “rape” to describe the poem’s butchering is reasonable. The work shown was utterly destroyed.
The argument I'm trying to make is first that it's not arbitrary to question the use of this word but not "kill" or other violent words. There is a distinction because of the specificity and linguistic contexts in which the word is used.
And second that because it's not arbitrary, the complaints from survivors are also not arbitrary and should be considered--not taken as absolute unassailable truth, but considered.
For comparison, I can imagine those who lost loved ones in the infamous Air France Flight 447 might be upset to be reminded of Air France. But Air France is a 10+ billion euro company operating hundreds if not thousands of flights per day. It is stunningly rare that "Air France" is used to refer to that accident and on balance, I think most would conclude Air France is of positive or neutral impact to the world. I would be quite suspect of an argument that "Air France" is inappropriate language.
On the other extreme you have a term like "Holocaust" which effectively has no other meaning or usage than a reference to that genocide.
Now you may conclude that no usage of any word is inherently inappropriate, and if that's the case, we're simply at an impasse, and I'm fine with that. I won't try to stop you or change your mind. But for most people, I think there is a point where the triviality of the use and the severity of the word add up to inappropriateness.
It's not clear-cut. You'd probably be hard pressed to find anyone genuinely bothered by "killing" a process. But you also won't find too many people who would defend say... being kicked out of a bar for causing a drunken fight being described as being persecuted like in the Holocaust. There's a spectrum.
So my point is just this... there are some logical reasons why many people consider a usage like this article on the inappropriate side of the spectrum. We can at least acknowledge that and recognize that there's a legitimate judgment call to be made here. We aren't in "killing a process" territory. And we certainly aren't in arbitrary word policing because we happen to be bothered by it territory.
Unless of course you fundamentally disagree that any metaphor could be inappropriate because of the thing which is alluded to in the metaphor. In which case we're just starting from different fundamental assumptions, which is fine. I'm not trying to challenge anyone's values.
I'll end here. There are obviously legitimate grievances in the article regardless of the word choice in titling it, and I've done enough to derail the discussion of those already. For that, I apologize.
I also think there is balance. The fact that some claim offense or hurt at a word does not mean no one should use it.
This asswipe, Martin. He fucked up Bukowski's poems. With his mincing, middle-class stink.
Oh, it's not a dirty poem anymore, it's a vulgar one. By the time he's done, it sounds like Bukowski went to Vassar.
Now you? You're going to mince around like this too?
But Michael Phillips -- he respects Bukowski. He knows how to write. He uses the right goddamn word in the right goddamn place.
Like: "castrating". Because Martin took the balls from his poems. "shitty". Because he shat all over them. "unmolested". Because it's like he diddles kids.
That's the same thing you're doing. You're trying to castrate Phillips. And you know what that is?
Rape.
By changing "ancient" to "medieval" and "dirty" to "vulgar", he's trying to invoke the switch from Church Latin to the vulgate. I mean, there's the organ music in the background, the red wine like the blood of Christ. And then he's saying, "Look at Charles Bukowski, he writes in the language of the common people".
He then reinforces "no vulgarity" later. An addition about "clean[ing] up my act" is also there, to go with the "cleaning the shit stains" (now also explicitly "cleaning"). Which is about devulgarifying the poems.
To go along with all this he makes the poem about why he writes "like" that, not just "why he writes". To make clear that it's about why the poems are vulgar specifically, not why the poems exist at all.
And then he emphasizes that Bukowski is pleased with the result (he puts "pleased" in twice).
So there's a logic to it. It's a little pedantic and a little pretentious. And it changes the meaning of the poem. And it does some of the very devulgarification it's talking about. But it's not totally dumb.
But I can't help but wonder, would you had felt the same way had the author chosen other shockingly violent acts such as "disembowelment", "lobotomy", "castration", or "amputation"?
It works against the author's apparent interest. They throw the dials to 11 as a bit of norm-setting editorializing about supposed severity of the unjust edits, but it just ends up being more bullshit clickbait, blending in to the background of every! other! desperate! headline!
I guess it depends on how much you like Bukowski if it feels overdone or not.
Why?
If you are, however, under a constant, low-level threat of being raped, then you kind of want people to take that seriously. You don't want people to make light of it. You don't want people to devalue that.
And we, who are not under that threat, can and should respect that.
I understand the argument about being sensitive to the topic of rape. I do not think that extends so far that no one can use the word except in its literal meaning.
I get what you’re going for and have already stated elsewhere that I think rape jokes are tasteless. But your criteria doesn’t make much sense. Good for you for wanting to be sensitive to others. But if you’re going to be sensitive to others, maybe ask why your care doesn’t extend to victims in general and somehow only applies to this one word.
Odd then that you seem so dismissive of the other concerns called out.
Murder and torture and suicide occur at nowhere near the same scale, and in two of those the primary victims are not around to suffer poor choice of words. For what it's worth, I also wish we didn't speak so trivially of "killing" e.g. UNIX processes. "Rape" is an easy word to avoid.
You didn't care about the quote on "castrating him" in this article, or being analytical or relating this to dirty realism so you clearly are.
The article is literally about people like yourself wanting to edit these things from history (article is 2013)
Read Charles Bukowski "The Fiend" and then understand why words like rape and castrating were chosen if you care at all about what's being talked about and why the article was written this way.
I despise trigger warnings but surprises are also unfair on a tech forum even if we are talking Bukowski, it is about child rape -
https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/charles-bukowski/page,22,416... (The Fiend starts half way down)
sure, we can but in fact using rape as a metaphor for really bad things that one person does to another person is not used to downgrade rape but really to point a finger at why the thing being done is bad. Because rape has power as a bad thing.
Sure, but I mean we must not use rape as an analogy for anything that is not rape, holocaust for anything that is not holocaust, fraud must only be used for things that are legally prosecutable as fraud and so forth. The language must be cleaned and simplified, metaphor and analogy while a seemingly necessary component of the human mind must be excised.