This novel is mainly dealing with gabling, drinking and whoring which Bukowski is really good at, but what I find him to be even better at is his way with words and that does not show its true colours in this book.

Between each success he would work unfulfilling jobs, drink more than usual, and take advantage of the generosity of anyone offering it.At times, I found the collection sophomoric, as though he were daring me to read on, and read on I did. So in a sense Bukowski `celebrates' life and not wholly -wholly- leaves us a portrait of self destruction and nihilism. Notes of a Dirty Old Man” is a collection of a column with the same title that Bukowski was writing for an underground newspaper, Open City, starting in 1967.

During his lifetime he published more than forty-five books of poetry and prose including the novels Post Office (1971), Factotum (1975) and Pulp (1994), all available from Virgin Books. my pure and beautiful slim and magic little girl glorious fuck with the hair dangling down to the asshole, and next to her the tragedy of the ages: slime and horror, the machine gone wrong, frogs tortured by little boys and head-on car collisions and the spider taking in the ball-less buzzing fly and the landscape brain of Primo Carnera going down under the dull playboy guns of cocksure Maxie Baer — new heavyweight champ of America — I, I rushed at the Tragedy of the Ages — that fat slob of accumulated shit. that life was mixed, nothing was cut and dried, muddled, beauty was touched with horror, love was tainted with hate and other passions that would sometimes lead to actual murder and that it wasn't that bull shown in the movies, society wasn't as rational and good as I was told, that there was always something awful under the surface of things, that God could be dead, that I was full of contradictions and instincts which had the power to overtake me -and perhaps the whole of humanity was afflicted with the same inconsistent nature, that there seem to be no meaning to life (with or without religion) and the universe was a blind absurdity, everything shocked me, and on and on.Which makes for a hilarious companion, where we tend to stick around near him and cannot wait to see what he will say or do next, but never want him to be anywhere near our children. Others were sad to me, such as a vivid recounting of how years of beatings and other abuse turns someone into a living but kind of mostly dead person. Of course, that doesn't make any of his literal and figurative woman-bashing acceptable, but it's part of the entrance fee for reading this shit. The stories tend to get disgusting, but if you dig deep enough in the shit that the author presents, you are able to find the harsh truth.

Some are pure fantasy (like a guy with wings playing baseball) while many others happened to some extent, and almost all include some kind of graphic sex (I’m not going there to describe it). Notes of a Dirty Old Man has all the stickiness of ill mannered sex, sordid situations, crass thoughts, and broken down poetry, but it does feel good to read it, like taking hard liquor that burns the throat, once it hits the belly it loosens you up.

I’ve seen too many intellectuals lately, I get very tired of the precious intellects who must speak diamonds every time they open their mouths. Along with the series Notes of a Dirty Old Man, Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook includes another deep look into Charles Bukowski's life. This is a POSSIBLE life, he seems to say to me, this is a life I've lived and lived it the way I wanted -at least the way I saw fit for a man in my position: ugly, poor, abused, disenfranchised. The Free Press circulation of nearly 100,000 gave Bukowski the largest consistent audience he would ever have.

it’s blood and guts and madness; it’s little kids killed who get in the way, it’s little kids who don’t understand what the fuck is going on.the reason the average person is at the track is that they are driven screwy by the turn of the bolt, the foreman’s insane face, the landlord’s hand, the lover’s dead sex; taxation, cancer, the blues; clothes that fall apart on a 3rd wearing, water that tastes like piss, doctors that run assembly-line and indecent offices, hospitals without heart, politicians with skulls filled with pus … we can go on and on but would only be accused of being bitter and demented, but the world makes madmen (and women) of us all, and even the saints are demented, nothing is saved. This is lik a stream of consciousness from Buk and he doesn't have an editor to reign him in at all.