Bukowski, Women

Tuesday, August 28, 2001

It’s late at night. I’m trying to write a review of the Bukowski book I just finished, “Women,” but it’s not coming out right, so I’m going to leave it out for now and come back to it when I’m more alert. Maybe the best description of the book is that it’s 300-or-so pages of sexual encounters with women, interspersed with trips to read poetry at clubs and universities around the US and Canada. If you’re a male looking for a template to live your life so that you, too, can have affairs with many women and drink lots of booze — a not uncommon fantasy — reading Bukowski’s a great place to start. You’ll learn what Bukowski and countless English-majors before him have learned: that for some inexplicable reason some women go bonkers for boys who can pour their spirit onto the page. There you go.