Find What You Love and Let It Kill You

"We're all going to die, all of us. What a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities; we are eaten up by nothing."

markmanson.net

Don’t try

Image: Criminal WisdomIn a letter to good friend, fellow poet, and founder of New York Quarterly magazine William Packard in 1990, then-70yr-old Charles Bukowski discusses the art of writ…

lettersofnote.com

A century after his birth, what would Charles Bukowski make of the world?

He wrote about the tyranny of menial work, three-day benders and one-night stands. Far from becoming period pieces, the American-German poet’s stories have never been more topical, writes William Cook

independent.co.uk

One letter from Charles Bukowski will make you want to quit your job and become a writer

“The kind of life that makes one feel empty and shallow and superficial, that makes one dread to read and dread to think, can’t be good for one, can it?” asked literary legend Willa Cather when pon…

nothingintherulebook.com

The Transgressive Thrills of Charles Bukowski

Rejecting the notion of poetry as a craft, Bukowski posed his own, entirely characteristic image for writing: “it has to come out like hot turds the morning after a good beer drunk.”

newyorker.com

A Literary Tour of Charles Bukowski's Los Angeles

Tracing Charles Bukowski's steps reveals that the cantankerous scribe left his mark all over the City of Angels.

discoverlosangeles.com

Charles Bukowski Wrote So Fast His Publisher Couldn’t Keep Up

It’s no news that Charles Bukowski was a one-of-a-kind writer: womanizer, boozer, Dirty Old Man, two-bit ignorant who couldn’t tell Hercules from Hitler, bar-room brawler, Shakespeare of the sewers…

lithub.com

Charles Bukowski – Brain Pickings

brainpickings.org

Bukowski on Writing, Art, and the Courage to Create Outside Society’s Forms of Approval

“Art is its own excuse, and it’s either Art or it’s something else. It’s either a poem or a piece of cheese.”

brainpickings.org

A Breathtaking Animated Adaptation of Bukowski’s “The Man with the Beautiful Eyes”

Visual poetics at the intersection of the touching and the haunting.

brainpickings.org

Charles Bukowski Reads His “Friendly Advice to a Lot of Young Men” and Shares His Advice on Creativity

Charles Bukowski (August 16, 1920–March 9, 1994) remains a poet exquisitely emblematic of the inherent contradictions of the human spirit — a man of unabashed profanity and self-conscio…

brainpickings.org

Ninety-five and going strong: the cult of Charles Bukowski

Although he died in 1993, the poet and writer is almost the perfect fit for the Internet and social reading.

scroll.in

What Charles Bukowski’s Glamorous Displays of Alcoholism Left Out

A new collection of the writer’s prose and poems, “On Drinking,” makes clear how evasive he was even in his most seemingly honest work. Can Bukowski’s view of addiction survive a new era?

nytimes.com

The Interesting Story Behind Huemn’s Latest Limited Edition Drop

Everything you need to know about this covetable limited edition T-shirt collection from your favourite streetwear brand

grazia.co.in

Huemn' latest t-shirt line is for all Charles Bukowski fans

Huemn' latest t-shirt line is for all Charles Bukowski fans, here is everything you need to know about it's second chapter.

lifestyleasia.com

Charles Bukowski Dies; Poet of L.A.'s Low-Life

Charles Bukowski, the prolific writer and poet laureate of Los Angeles low-life whose rough-hewn autobiographical poems, short stories, novels and 1987 film "Barfly" chronicled his hard-bitten alcoholic youth, died Wednesday.

latimes.com

“Don’t Try” - Charles Bukowski’s Advice to Creators — Amy Harrison

German-American poet, novelist and short story writer Charles Bukowski consciously absorbed the world around him as he inhabited the bars and rooming houses in the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles. It was here that the “Laureate of American Lowlife” gathered material for much of his writing career - telling the story of drunks, gamblers and down-and-outs, of which he was all three. After achieving fame, his advice to other writers seeking literary success was so simple and pithy that it rattles in the space on his headstone where it is engraved: Don’t Try Bukowski was adamant that the writing should burst out without coercion or commercial ambition. You don't try. That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. In a world of 101 things to do the idea of waiting for your creativity to come and lend a hand might seem absurd or luxurious at best, but as creative people can we learn from the journey he travelled following his philosophy of “Don’t Try"? Photo by Hryck Too Soon for Success Despite being published in Story magazine at just 24, Bukowski turned down an agent, believing he wasn’t ready to be a writer and hadn’t “lived enough”. This lack of life experience and self doubt in promoting himself meant he made a conscious decision to stop trying. I simply gave up. It wasn’t because I thought I was a bad writer. I just thought there was no way of crashing through. I put writing down with a sense of disgust. Drinking and shacking with women became my art form… It was then that he began amassing a wealth of encounters and episodes that would be featured repeatedly in various forms throughout his vast body of work; he began his ten years of drunkenness. Bukowski: Ten Year Drunk The decade from 1945 was a collage of dead end jobs, bars and rooming houses; his existence one of drunkenness, poverty and trouble. He spent his time drinking-in experiences, figuratively and literally, in bars where fights broke out in front of unflinching, still-pouring bartenders. Whilst working only to make enough money for booze and rent, he enforced no creative schedule and no set number of words to be written each day. Instead he ploughed himself into drinking and women and was often on the brink of starvation; his diet at times just a slice of bread a day. Despite casting aside his intentions to “try”, there were moments when the writing would seek him out. With his typewriter often pawned and without electricity in his room, he would sometimes write by moonlight, shivering from the cold and using pencil stubs to fill newspaper margins with his words. Even at his lowest ebb, torn between suicide and his grim existence, he claimed that the desire to write about his pain rather than escape it kept him alive: It’s no good quitting, there is always the smallest bit of light in the darkest of hells. His lifestyle eventually caught up with him: after 10 years of personal destruction, a near-fatal bleeding ulcer gave him an intense desire to write once more. The drinking didn’t stop, but his years of not trying had stored a vast amount of inspiration and he had reached bursting point. On leaving the hospital he began producing work prolifically in a literary outpouring that would bring with it the by-product of worldwide fame and success. My Own Break Such an intense experience obviously isn’t a blueprint for everyone’s creative success but I believe there is something to be gained creatively in having periods of not “trying”. I began reading Bukowski shortly before taking my own break. After studying scriptwriting for three years I knew my creativity was dying on me, and it was my own fault. I was trying too hard to impress and my work reflected this in stilted and contrived pieces that currently gather dust in a drawer. At the end of the course I wasn’t happy with anything I’d written and I decided I was done. Writing wasn’t for me, it made me miserable and so on a whim I decided to seek my fortune working in Toronto, Canada. It was a year of indulgence and excitement, and of relationships that would bring me laughter and heartbreak. It certainly wasn’t on Bukowski's scale, but it managed to rejuvenate a spark and by the time I came home I was welcomed by a bashful muse who almost looked pleased to see me. The year gave me new resources to draw upon and as I discovered more about my own personality I found myself impassioned to write about subjects I’d never previously considered. There was water in the creative well once more. It would be a bit extreme to dart off for a year every time I felt frustrated with writing but I have found that the occasional short sharp reminders of the world outside versus a blank page can do wonders for my productivity. Of course, every time I decide to hit the town and “Don’t Try” there is the nagging feeling that I should be doing “something”. Then again, when I find myself in a pub, drinking whiskey and singing Janis Joplin with girls visiting from Texas and a former WW2 Spitfire fighter pilot I can’t help but feel that might just be the “something” that kick starts my creativity. "Don’t Try" Is Not “Don’t Do” The ethos behind Lateral Action is creativity coupled with productivity as the route for success, which also means creatively looking at our productivity. Perhaps sitting and squeezing out every drop of inspiration by sheer force isn’t the best way to get results and we can improve our work and well-being with a little “Don’t Try”. "Don’t Try" is not about embarking on a hedonistic lifestyle like Bukowski’s for the sake of it. It’s about taking time to let your creativity speak to you. It may arrive through activities and environments that make you elated, or angry, or through putting yourself in situations that are new, perhaps even uncomfortable. Or it may arrive from just sitting still and taking a break. How Not to Try Give It Up Not forever, but when it feels like you’re whipping that donkey of a muse and it still refuses to budge no matter how many carrots you dangle, try just walking away. Try it for 10 minutes, half an hour or half a day and do something else. Shelve your ideas, hide your work in a drawer, file or under the sofa and set a reminder in your calendar for a set time to come back and revisit it after a break. When you return to your work how do you feel? Are you itching to get back to it? Do you have new ideas? If you still feel you’re forcing your creative spirit you might want to take a break for even longer or work on something else altogether. Find Fuel for Your Muse Swap working on your art for actively seeking the activities that get you fired up. Meet a friend whose company inspires you, spend the day napping in the park, party till the early hours or try something completely new. Look for things that incite a reaction and remind you you’re alive. Let yourself be a vessel to fill with new encounters and see if you can use these experiences in your creative process. Tap into Unexploited Resources Not trying might not be walking away from your work, but creating without a specific purpose. What happens if you sit and write or design or make the first thing that comes into your head regardless of what it is? Do you surprise yourself with what you come up with? Is there a winning idea inside you that has been missed? Like any productive process it’s all about balance and finding a way to suit the way that you work. Compare days when you haven’t tried with your work and days where you’ve forced yourself. Is there a difference in quality? Is there a difference in how you feel towards your work? Are you more refreshed with regular little breaks or do you feel better slaving away at the end goal before letting off steam? Try something new. “Don’t Try”. Over to You Have you ever stopped trying - with unexpected positive results? What did you do? What did you learn from the experience? About the Author: Amy Harrison is a freelance copywriter based in Brighton. You can find further creative contemplation with a dash of country-music philosophy at HarrisonAmy.com or find her on Twitter at @littleunred.

lateralaction.com

Project Bibliotherapy on Instagram: “The Bukowski Collection”

Quotes laced with honesty of the brutal kind

instagram.com