I see the flies in the green leaves and I think,

it’s strange, they’ve never read Richard Aldington…

“Nash,” mentioned in the next letter, was Jay Nash, who, Bukowski notes, “ran the underground newssheet, The Chicago Literary Times.” He had published Bukowski’s Run With the Hunted in his Midwest Poetry Chapbooks series in 1962. Bukowski notes that he was “obsessed with Hemingway and the twenties.”

[To Douglas Blazek]

[late April 1965]

[* * *] I don’t see how Ole gets around so much. I hear on the phone. 2 guys knocked on the door and brought me beer. all the same thing: “I read your article in Ole.”

on Confessions, of course, I’m glad you accept. actually it’s going to destroy a lot of IMAGE that has been built up and it’s going to make me freer to move around. yes, I know that any section could be extended, and there were more acts to add, I think of them now: the gang of fascists who carried guns, screamed heil Hitler!, drank wine; hanging posters in New York subways; coconut man in a cake factory; the colored maid with big legs who fucked me in a St. Louis hotel; a Fort Worth redhead; myself insane in Dallas and more more more, the things that happen to almost everybody while they are waiting for the executioner.

but look, on doing the novel sort of thing something holds me back. maybe it hasn’t jelled, maybe it seems like work, maybe dropping poems off the tips of my elbows is easier. technical point—in Confessions I have a place in the slaughter house scene—I think I say something like, “The Negroes rolled up the wheelbarrows, they were painted a white, a kind of chicken-shit white” or some such line. I remember thinking of correcting it but forgot. I mean the people might think the Negroes were painted a chicken-shit white. should read something like: “The Negroes rolled up the wheelbarrows. the barrows were painted a—” or let it go the original way. who cares? [* * * ]