Mickey Z
Cool Observer
Monday, December 12, 2005
I hate Christmas
(Yeah, I used the above title simply to see who it brings in via Google. Maybe I’ll even get mentioned in the “no spin zone.")
There’s more “anti-Christmas” hype than usual this year (e.g. http://tinyurl.com/bh7qo). Not content with a season utterly dominated by mangers, reindeer, dead trees, and conspicuously copious consumption, the virgin birth crowd is demanding even more respect. Bill O’Reilly wonders: “Will you shop at stores that do not say ‘Merry Christmas’?” (Imagine if he were this discerning, re: sweatshop labor and union busting.)
To all of them, I offer some Bukowski: “Well, the amateur drunks have taken over and will hold this town until Jan. 2…driving on the wrong side of the street, running red lights, bellowing the same songs. Figs of people, twigs of people, shits of people…MERRY CHRISTMAS, HAPPY NEW YEAR. Christomighty, yeah.”
(Btw, I had a Bukowski-related essay—a 50AR excerpt, in fact—in the free NYC newspaper, Metro, on Friday. Since you can’t access it online, you can read it by clicking on “more” at the bottom of this post.)
For the rest of us, there’s fun anti-Xmas stuff like this:
http://www.xmasresistance.org/links
http://tinyurl.com/9ybk4
http://tinyurl.com/dmv65
Have a very Cheney Xmas...
Here’s an idea I proposed last year: If we have to have holidays, wouldn’t it be cool to switch ‘em around arbitrarily? In 2006, let’s celebrate Valentine’s Day on Passover by dressing up in Halloween costumes and lighting off fireworks.
Hermy sez: “Personally, I’d prefer celebrating Kwanzaa in July.”
Just say no...
+++
Slackers of the World Unite
“It began as a mistake.” With that audacious opening line does Charles Bukowski launch his first novel, Post Office (1971). Others had challenged the vaunted American work ethic before...but none with the style and vengeance of the man they called Hank.
In the U.S., the topic of work infiltrates most aspects of our life. Consider the most common question we’re asked from the time we’re old enough to understand it: What are you going to be when you grow up? The unspoken assumption in that question, of course, is that the child or teen on the receiving end is nothing now...but he or she will be something when he or she spends 8-10 hours a day in a cubicle crunching numbers under artificial light to the sound of Muzak. Breaking free from this cookie-cutter formula has become increasingly difficult as one’s perceived worth is usually synonymous with one’s material earning power and material consumption.
Bukowski unapologetically mocked and deconstructed this American edifice, writing in Post Office: “Any damn fool can beg up some kind of job; it takes a wise man to make it without working.”
And he knew of what he wrote. To support his writing, Bukowski toiled in a wide range of job including dishwasher, truck driver and loader, mail carrier, guard, gas station attendant, stock boy, warehouse worker, shipping clerk, parking lot attendant, Red Cross orderly, and elevator operator. Other venues of employment included a dog biscuit factory, a slaughterhouse, a cake and cookie factory, and the New York City subways where he hung posters. Then, of course, came the years at the post office...the years he chronicles in his first novel.
“You won’t find Bukowski on most English professors’ reading lists, because Bukowski writes too clearly,” says novelist Anis Shivani. “It isn’t possible to fudge his message to make bourgeois life look all right, after all.”
Even in his poetry, he challenges the cookie cutter formula...as in this excerpt from “Spark”: “I always resented all the years, the hours, the minutes I gave them as a working stiff. It actually hurt my head, my insides, it made me dizzy and a bit crazy. I couldn’t understand the murdering of my years.”
“Bukowski wrote about men and women as beaten down as a crunched beer can, about endurance, rage, longing, sex and, mostly, about himself,” says William Booth, a Washington Post staff writer. “He was a bestseller in Brazil; his poetry is taught to high school students in France; in the United States, in his day, he was a symbol of rebellion.”
That rebellion lives on every time a store has to shelf Post Office and other Buk books behind the counter to prevent shoplifting. Hank’s books, it seems, are the most commonly pilfered. As one bookstore owner explained: “Bukowski was an anti-establishment writer, he took a lot of risks and pretty much did whatever he wanted. Perhaps people consider stealing his books as an act of solidarity. Because of Bukowski’s style, they most likely see it as okay to steal his books; it’s a gesture against the establishment.”
And it all began as a mistake.
Copyright © 2005-2007 Mickey Z.
