twentyfourbit:

MF Doom was so taken with the Charles Bukowski documentary Born Into This, he used it as a jumping off point for his new record and named the album Born Like This, the first line in Bukowski’s “Dinosauria, We.” In an interview with HipHopDX, Doom talks about how reading inspires his music and that he identifies with Bukowski as someone who is born to be a writer.

“I always read a book when I’m doing a record,” he said. “When I get stuck it gets my stuff going. Bukowski was for this record. I’m reading the Bukowski shit and getting into that dude and his plight and his whole mission as a writer… He really inspired me, just from how he just did his craft without worrying about [standards]. There’s no standards to what we do, we just do it.”

It’s a brilliant move for MF Doom to evoke Bukowski’s “Dinosauria, We” amid the current political and economic climate. I hadn’t read that poem in years, but looking at it now I realize how prescient it was:

We are born into a government 60 years in debt
That soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
And the banks will burn

Bukowski’s foreboding talk about the doom (no pun intended) of human civilization isn’t really a harbinger of the actual events we’re faced with currently, but it eerily contains all the tone and substance we’ve come to expect from cable news. I can’t wait to hear MF Doom’s new record.

For his full interview with HipHopDX, click here.

hellovagina:

He tells us that his heart is drowning in vomit. Hell, all our hearts are drowning in vomit, in pork salt, in bad verse, in soggy love.

— Charles Bukowski, O, We Are The Outcasts

hellovagina:

babywolf:

digitalbath:

devface:

all theories
like clichés
shot to hell,
all these small faces
looking up
beautiful and believing;
I wish to weep
but sorrow is
stupid.
I wish to believe
but belief is a
graveyard.
we have narrowed it down to
the butcherknife and the
mockingbird.
wish us
luck.

thomaswheatley:

cvxn:nedhepburn:nosleeptillbrooklyn:

so you want to be a writer? by Charles Bukowski

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.


if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

the best often die by their own hand
just to get away,
and those left behind
can never quite understand
why anybody
would ever want to
get away
from
them

Charles Bukowski