The Captain Is Out To Lunch And The Sailors Have Taken Over The Ship - Charles Bukowski

THE CAPTAIN IS OUT TO LUNCH AND THE SAILORS HAVE TAKEN OVER THE SHIP - CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Written in the style of his classic newspaper columns disguised as diary entries, The Captain Is Out To Lunch And The Sailors Have Taken Over The Ship was published in 1988, four years after Charles Bukowski's death and was the last thing he ever wrote. Bukowski was 71 years-old and having survived the senselessness of life he was only too aware that the end was fast approaching. What then to do with the finite time left to a man? Never mind 'to be or not to be', that is the question.  Having spent his life drinking and fighting and in the spaces in-between working dead end jobs, going hungry, reading books and writing, Bukowski gets to wondering what is a life well spent? 'Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.' Bukowski writes 'Sometimes I feel as if we are all trapped in a movie. We know our lines, where to walk, how to act, only there is no camera. Yet, we can't break out of the movie. And it's a bad one.'

Has Bukowski's life been a wasted one? Hardly. At least no more wasted than anyone else's. His life's saving grace, of course, has been his writing and it's that flame that he has kept alight through the thick and thin right up to the point of where he is at the age of 71. 'The whole world is a sack of shit ripping open. I can't save it. But I've gotten many letters from people who claim that my writing has saved their asses. But I didn't write for that, I wrote it to save my own ass. I was a fool. And yet, even when I was a fool I knew that I wasn't a complete fool. I had some little corner of me that I was protecting, there was something there.'

Bukowski is hardly a role model and his cynicism is often over-bearing but there are aspects to him that are identifiable particularly in regard to his love of 'the word' and his respect for the masters of it. The Great Writers. The Great Novelists. They are the only people he's ever really respected and the inspiration he has derived from them is the fuel to his own creativity. They were the keys to the unlocking of the doors to his own writing and to the release of the words that have subsequently poured forth. It was they who first lit the fire he has shielded and kept alight his whole life. This, in my eyes, is a significant point because in my own small way I have also endeavoured to keep a little flame alight. A candle lit to the act of writing.

On leaving school at aged 16 I can guarantee that most of my peer group never used a pen again and the closest most would get to writing anything nowadays would be when sending a text message or some kind of work-related report. I guarantee it. Whether it's actually important or not I don't know but I feel that once you discover something of some semblance of good within yourself you should try at least to keep it alive. This is what I think Bukowski is saying and it's this that he ruminates on in this book alongside horse racing, humankind, readers, specific writers, workers, gamblers, life, death, the universe and everything therein.

Whereby in the past Bukowski would always use a typewriter, at this late stage in his life he uses a computer of which he extols its virtues. No dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist he possessed of misguided notions of the purity of the soul transferred through the click clack of tapped keys. No, a computer makes the act of writing that much easier that subsequently makes for an easier life. As he said, he might be a fool but he's not a complete fool.

At one point in the book Bukowski writes about him and his wife being invited to a concert by a millionaire rock musician who reads his books and how during the set the rock star announces to the audience of 25,000 people "This concert is dedicated to Linda and Charles Bukowski!" 25,000 people then cheer as if they know who the Bukowski's are. It's great that rock stars read his work, Bukowski thinks, but so too do men in jails and madhouses. So what's the difference? Though he doesn't name them, the band that Bukowski is referring to can only be U2 whom he describes as being 'simplistic' and what a very apt description, it must be said.

At the after-show party in the VIP bar Bukowski wonders what he's doing there among the rich and famous who though he doesn't dislike at all, he knows he has very little in common with and is not impressed by. In fact the one person he finds he has something in common with and has respect for is the huge black bartender who Bukowski at first light-heartedly offers outside for a fight. The bartender, however, actually knows who Bukowski is from reading his Notes Of A Dirty Old Man columns of old in the LA free press. "Well, I'll be god-damned," Bukowski says and they shake hands. The fight was off. For Bukowski, meeting this bartender is better than meeting Bono and the various actors and film directors also present.

The Captain Is Out To lunch And The Sailors Have Taken Over The Ship is illustrated throughout with pictures drawn by Robert Crumb - another so-called derelict loser from the Sixties of a life mis-spent - and it's a perfect match. Crumb obviously knows where Bukowski's coming from and captures him perfectly in his classic black-and-white pen and ink style that makes for the book being even better, more of a novelty, and even more worthy of reading.

John Serpico

The Basketball Diaries - Jim Carroll

THE BASKETBALL DIARIES - JIM CARROLL

Patti Smith always spoke highly of Jim Carroll, saying how great a poet he was and in fact his book The Basketball Diaries whilst dedicated to the memory of folksinger Phil Ochs, singles Patti out for special thanks. Apart from the film of course starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Carroll is probably best known for his song People Who Have Died that is exactly what it says on the can as in a list of Carroll's friends who have died along with the circumstances of their deaths. It's a cracker. When it comes to his poetry, what tends to stand out first and foremost about it is where it's coming from as in New York on the Lower East Side, the kind of impoverished place that in the Sixties was ghetto-like and not somewhere you'd expect to find a lot of poetry. No gleaming spires of Cambridge, moons in June and chasing butterflies there. No, Jim Carroll was a proverbial flower in the dustbin, an original angel with a dirty face.

The Basketball Diaries chronicles tales of his growing up in New York and involves his playing basketball, drinking, smoking reefer and sniffing glue. It's the story of a wise-cracking, street-smart kid growing up with the city as a playground and what better playground than New York in the mid-Sixties? In fact what better playground than New York in any decade? The drawback is that the city is also a jungle wherein dwell monsters be they in the form of over-zealous police, predatory paedophiles and easily if not near freely available heroin.

So, at the age of thirteen Carroll takes his first heroin hit and loses his virgin veins, as he puts it. By the age of fifteen he's a recreational heroin user turning tricks on Third Avenue for middle-aged homosexuals on New York vacations. A veritable mini-Midnight Cowboy. A toilet trader rather than a rose by any other name. He's in control, however, and in spite of his usage becomes a talented if not erratic Junior High School basketball player though over time the more books he reads the more he realises that what he actually needs to do is write. Alas, also over time he proves to be no exception to the rule and ends up like Bowie's Major Tom strung out in heaven's high hitting an all time low, with nothing else to be done apart from spending all day chasing a fix.

Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries is a stir of echoes channelling Jean Genet, Arthur Rimbaud, Lou Reed and Christiane F. A majorly interesting aspect of it is in the fact that it's the voice of a genuine working class street kid that at the time was a rare thing though arguably it's even more of a rarity nowadays with culture at all levels becoming increasingly the domain of the University-educated middle class. Jim Carroll, however, is/was the real deal and for that if for nothing else makes The Basketball Diaries a thing of rare if not dark, tainted yet entertaining beauty.

John Serpico