Charles Bukowski On Creativity, Poetry, and Becoming a Writer

That most men don't gamble with their lives or their creativity is not my fault. And it makes for dull writing and dull writers.

Poetry has long been an in-game, a snob game, a game of puzzles and incantations. It still is, and most of its practitioners operate as professors in our safe and stale universities.

I'd never advise anybody to become a writer, only if writing is the only thing which keeps you from going insane. Then, perhaps, it's worth it.

Charles Bukowski, 1988

The Power of a Good Lawyer and Lying Defense Witnesses

Courts are more and more distinguishing between mere opinions and clear, demonstrative evidence; between honest and competent witnesses and dishonest and incompetent fakers and pretenders, but the facts alone, even in good cases, do not often prove themselves, especially against bold perjury and resourceful advocacy.

Albert S. Osborn, Questioned Documents, 1910. Albert S. Osborn is considered the father of modern forensic document examination.

Crimes the Media Loves

The media focus on the most extreme variants of criminal behavior often causes people to forget that most crime does not involve stranger abductions, sadistic torture, chopping off of body parts, or using commercial airliners as bombs. Although the real-life catalog of bizarre and extreme crimes is filled with horror, tragedy, and untold human harm and loss, it includes an even longer list of more benign offenses that most TV producers would have no interest in devoting a one-hour prime time show to.

Jacqueline B. Helfgott, Criminal Behavior, 2008

Co-Authorship

I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties.

Agatha Christie (1930-1976) bestselling British mystery novelist

Literary Eunuchs

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem. They're there every night, they see it done every night, they see how it should be done every night, but they can't do it themselves.

Brendan Behan in Rotten Reviews and Rejections, 1998

Bret Easton Ellis On His First Novel

When I was writing my first novel, I had no serious hopes of publishing it. I was sophisticated enough to know that twenty-year-olds don't publish novels. I was writing it because I enjoyed writing and because it was cathartic. Some people release their pain and anxiety through, oh, I don't know, playing sports, or a hobby, or through sex or drugs. Writing for me was always a great stress reliever. It was Joe McGinness who thought the book had commercial potential, so he showed it to his agent. Less Than Zero was published in May 1985.

Bret Easton Ellis, Paris Review, Spring 2012 

The Harassment of Female Runners

According to a 2021 Pew Research study, 1 in 3 women under 35 say they have been sexually harassed online. Harassment is a particularly prevalent problem for women runners who often cover long distances alone and with little protection. In a recent Runner's World survey, 84 percent of women said they have been harassed while running, and a 2017 survey found 43 percent of women have experienced harassment more than once.

Aishwarya Kumar and Paula Lavigne, "Olympic Runner Emily Infeld's Harrowing Three-Year Ordeal With a Stalker," espn.com, July 30, 2021

False Evidence Can Lead to a False Confession

In the effort to acquire a confession, detectives in every state but Illinois are allowed, pursuant to criminal procedural law, to lie to the people they are interrogating. Specifically, they can allude to evidence they don't have, and quite often this nonexistent evidence is a crime scene fingerprint or incriminating crime scene DNA. The theory that permits this interrogation technique holds that an innocent person will not be swayed by the lie into making a false confession. But innocent people do confess, and when a person is so inclined realizes that the police are determined enough to fabricate evidence, that realization alone can push that person into confessing falsely. 

Edgar Allan Poe's Postmortem Recognition

      Edgar Allan Poe never lived to be as old as he looked. He was born poor and died poor, and in the forty years separating those events he knew success just often enough to know what he was missing, supporting himself in the meantime with hack writing and routine editorial work, never staying in one place long. Sixty years after his death, the Baltimore Sun put this sentiment more poetically: "He raised the cup of prosperity many times in his life and every time, just when he was about to place his parched lips to the draft, Fortune cast it away from him." Of course, prosperity was not the only cup he raised to his lips. Poe nurtured an artist's rage--he also gambled with money he did not have, accrued debts he could not pay, and quarreled regularly with men in a position to do him harm. In short, he acted a great deal like a genius well before posterity bestowed that laurel upon him.

     Like many artists, he comforted himself with the idea that a future age wold treat his work more kindly than his own. But not even his opulent imagination could have foretold how right he was. In the century after his death, the popularity of his written work grew so much that even the physical artifacts of his publishing career would acquire the value of relics. A single faded copy of any number of his printed works took on astounding value, becoming worth several times the sum total of money he had made in his entire life. This was particularly true of his early poetry.

Travis McDade, Thieves of Books: New York's Notorious Rare Book Ring and the Man Who Stopped It, 2013

The Original Fact Checkers

The New Yorker was launched in 1924. Initially, the magazine was somewhat sloppy with the facts. As Ben Yagoda writes in his history of The New Yorker, it's meticulous checking system didn't begin until 1927, when "a profile of Edin St. Vincent Millay was so riddled with errors that the poet's mother stormed into the magazine's offices and threatened to sue if an extensive correction was not run." The New Yorker's founder, Harold Ross, had a passion for accuracy. His biographer Thomas Kunkel says that Ross's obsessive concern that the magazine be irrefutable was partly defensive. In its "Newsbreaks" section, The New Yorker ridiculed other publications' inaccuracies. Ross was afraid the magazine would be tarred with its own brush. In a 1927 memo he wrote: "What with our making fun of other publications and what with the nature of the magazine, The New Yorker ought to be freer from typographical errors than any other publication....A SPECIAL EFFORT SHOULD BE MADE TO AVOID MISTAKES IN "THE NEW YORKER." By the mid-1970s, The New Yorker had seven checkers on staff. When Tina Brown became editor in 1992, there were eight. This number doubled during her tenure, partly as a result of an increase in the timely and controversial nature of the pieces published. In 2003, there were sixteen checkers at the magazine.

Sarah Harrison Smith, The Fact Checker's Bible: A Guide to Getting it Right, 2004