04/03/2022
By the time Mr. Waits discovered Charles Bukowski’s Notes of a Dirty Old Man column in the LA Free Press (aka the Freep) it was actually on its second run.
The inaugural “OG version” of Notes of a Dirty Old Man first graced the pages of a somewhat grittier if shorter-lived Los Angeles-based underground newspaper called Open City (1967-1969.)
Variably, this column — which often featured a mixture of poetry and prose accompanied by original ink doodles drawn by Bukowski himself — was described by its author as…
“a rambling, erotic collection of experiences and sense-impressions, written with the free hand of a man who has lived his life to the fullest, unaware and unconcerned with the limits of a cautious existence — a scabrous and scatological vision of life and love in the underground world of s*x, drugs, and crime.”
During Notes of A dirty old Man’s lifespan with LA free Press (1972-76) it was picked up by several countercultural publications in other parts of the country including but not limited to NOLA Express in New Orleans and the Berkley Tribe.
Unknown to most of his non-local readers, Buk famously re-worked the material from his Dirty Old Man columns into episodes and short stories that feature heavily in many of his subsequent books.
Along with Post Office (1971) and Factotum (1975) some of the most prestigious literary offspring of his newspaper career are Tales of Ordinary Madness (1972), The Most Beautiful Woman in Town (1983) and Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook (2008).
Documental : Bukowski: Born into This. John Dullaghan, 2003.
