[HN Gopher] Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, and the Compute...
___________________________________________________________________
Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, and the Computer (2009)
Author : zdw
Score : 83 points
Date : 2025-05-10 00:45 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (realitystudio.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (realitystudio.org)
| zabzonk wrote:
| For what it is worth, William Burroughs (Naked Lunch etc.) was
| the grandchild of the founder of the Burroughs computer company.
| As far as I know, the later Bill didn't profit much, if anything,
| from this.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| I assume the name is a pun on Williamsburg.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Um, why?
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| I was going off the fact the article linked to an archive
| page of the New York Public Library, so I assumed they had
| some connection to New York and decided to make a pun when
| naming their kid.
|
| Its more common than you'd think. I used to know a guy
| whose middle name is "Brusch" and last name is
| "Rohde"..."Bush Roadie".
| pentaphobe wrote:
| I dunno - seemed to low key have some casual wealth, being the
| one Beat who was always in a nice suit, had an extensive drug
| habit...
|
| and all those trips to Interzone don't pay for 'emselves!
| pentaphobe wrote:
| So yeah, seems like despite some unfortunate liquidation
| choices by his parents just before the depression, they still
| retained enough wealth to make certain lifestyle choices
| easy...
|
| > His parents, upon his graduation, had decided to give him a
| monthly allowance of $200 out of their earnings from
| Cobblestone Gardens, a substantial sum in those days.
|
| > It was enough to keep him going, and indeed it guaranteed
| his survival for the next twenty-five years, arriving with
| welcome regularity. The allowance was a ticket to freedom; it
| allowed him to live where he wanted to and to forgo
| employment. [1^]
|
| And $200 in 1937 gets you a fair bit of freedom (roughly
| $4500 in today's money) - sure, it's not private jet money
| but notable. And would have gone pretty far in Mexico and
| Tangier.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs
|
| [2]:
| https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1937?amount=200
| zabzonk wrote:
| It's a long time ago that I read about this, but I think he
| got money from his parents, who owned something of a tourist
| shop. I think they divested any shares they had in Burroughs
| long before this. In any case Bill (Naked Lunch) didn't have
| any shares in the company, and more or less parasitised his
| parents - but who amongst us can say that we haven't done
| that? certainly not me.
| jajko wrote:
| Not parasiting as an adult from one's parents? Certainly
| many not only here. Giving back is more the name of the
| game.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Divested doesn't mean they didn't inherit their wealth from
| it. Most people do not parasitize from their parents after
| reaching adulthood; it is in fact the status quo. You might
| want to be a bit more embarrassed about it.
| narrator wrote:
| For those who want to get a feel for Burroughs dark art, here
| he is reading his poem, "The Last Words of Hassan Sabbah":
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGJ7Z6AEzpY
| huxley wrote:
| Burroughs was also one of the great comic monologuists, in
| March 1975 he was asked by Harper's Magazine (along with
| others including Ronald Reagan, who had just finished his
| last term as governor of California) to contribute an essay
| on the topic "When Did You Stop Wanting to be President",
| it's a funny essay but delivered best as a monologue:
| https://youtu.be/ir0JDok2TDE?si=W7JExK7VeMbL9Ky-
| Hilift wrote:
| The US has a lot of people that were from affluent families and
| sort of drifted away. Another fascinating person is Huntington
| Hartford. He inherited most of the wealth of the Atlantic and
| Pacific Tea Company. He funded the Gallery of Modern Art at
| Columbus Circle in NYC in the 1960's. He later became a heroin
| addict. His daughter found him in NYC being looked after by
| someone who was supporting them by selling off his art, one
| painting at a time.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington_Hartford
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> On Christmas Day, 1990, Charles Bukowski received a Macintosh
| IIsi computer and a laser printer from his wife, Linda. The
| computer utilized the 6.0.7 operating system and was installed
| with the MacWrite II word processing program
|
| Bukowski was born in 1920. Lived to be 73 years old.
|
| So, the article is true, he used a word processor for the last
| few years of his life. Those poems, with a few exceptions, were
| not the good ones.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| I was under the impression that much of his work was not "the
| good ones." He was popular among the fringe, mostly because it
| was "cool" to be a part of the non-conformist subculture. I
| read some of his stuff in the 1970's and it never grabbed me.
|
| It's cool though that he adapted to computers. Some more modern
| authors still won't touch them.
|
| https://mashable.com/archive/modern-writers-technology
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> He was popular among the fringe, mostly because it was
| "cool" to be a part of the non-conformist subculture
|
| He was popular among me, because when I worked in a factory
| doing manual labor in the 90's, his poems described the life
| I was living.
|
| It was neither fringe, nor "cool", nor non-comformist, nor
| part of a subculture.
|
| He was a good writer who wrote about what I was going
| through.
|
| Burroughs was just fucking crazy. I liked his writing too.
| Not the cut-up stuff.
|
| Exterminator!
| pimeys wrote:
| Burroughs also wrote a lovely book on cats he met.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_Inside
|
| I always liked that one. Naked Lunch grew on me, but was a
| bit tough when I read it for the first time. I was 13 back
| then.
| memonkey wrote:
| bukowski wrote over 5,000 poems. he was bound to have some
| good ones and plenty of bad ones. also had a couple o' good
| novel/a hits.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| "Ham on Rye" resonated with me as an adolescent.
| Interestingly the German title is "Das Schlimmste kommt
| noch", meaning "The worst is yet to come". I also liked
| "Post Office".
| brudgers wrote:
| However worse those poems were, they were made worser Bukowski
| poems by posthumous editing.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bukowski#Poetry_edit...
| gabriel666smith wrote:
| Off topic, somewhat: Bukowski's work - especially the late work -
| will always be bound, for me, to a boy I knew when I was 16/17
| who I'll call Martin.
|
| Martin was very thin, short, with an already-receding hairline,
| flaking skin, and tiny, black, always-shifting eyes.
|
| Martin was also very mean: a defense against the bullying I'm
| certain he endured most of his life. My best friend and I tried
| to hang out with him. We were weird kids too, and liked strange
| people, but Martin would never be pleasant or sincere with us.
| Sometimes he wouldn't even tolerate our company.
|
| I remember he loved horseracing, and gambling on it (underage).
|
| One day, at a teenage house party - some parents out of town -
| Martin got far too drunk. He was lying on his side, vomiting onto
| a friend's parents' upholstery, sobbing. He was sobbing because
| he had been in love for years with a family friend - a pretty
| girl who was in one of my classes - but who would never, ever
| love him back, because he was so hideous, and because his
| personality, or the surface of it, was so abhorrent. That
| probably he should just kill himself, he thought, etc etc.
|
| I'd just read a late Bukowski poetry collection and loved it the
| way you love Bukowski when you're 16/17. I remember it was 'The
| Last Night of the Earth', so it would have contained the poems
| the article talks about Bukowski typing into his new computer.
|
| I'd read that collection, and the yearning - from a place of
| perceived ugliness - and the beauty in that - I guess moved me,
| and made me think of Martin.
|
| So I bought Martin a copy (it was expensive - PS18, I think,
| which was a lot more back then, especially if you're 17) and
| quietly gave it to him. I wanted him to see what I saw: that
| there was a nobility and dignity and a romance in his adoration
| of this girl, and in his ugliness.
|
| Martin took the book, confused at the gift (kind of a gay thing
| to do), and then I didn't see him for weeks. As if he was
| avoiding me.
|
| When I finally did see Martin, he was so angry. So angry that it
| surprised me. He was a mean guy but I'd never seen him quite so
| angry.
|
| He was angry that I'd seen him in the poems. He was angry at the
| poems themselves. He said he'd never been more insulted in his
| life.
|
| I stopped trying to hang out with Martin so much after that. I
| felt bad that I'd hurt his feelings so much.
|
| I check in every year or so using social media. Not to talk, just
| to look. The girl Martin was in love with is married now. Martin
| himself has grown into his age: he looked middle-aged then and it
| suits him better now that he's approaching it. I think he does
| something in insurance.
|
| I've always wondered: how many of the poems did Martin read? Was
| he so hurt because of Bukowski's ugly author photo, and the
| content of the first few? And whether he read them or not, did he
| ever return to them, and find them beautiful? Or did Martin just
| throw the book away?
|
| I hope he didn't. Or, if he did, I hope he found another way than
| books of poetry to see himself better, now, compared to how he
| saw himself then.
| urban_alien wrote:
| What a beautiful story, thanks for sharing.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-05-10 23:01 UTC)