I've been reading literary and movie blogs recently.   Not that I'm denying that Iraq and AWB are important or anything, it's just that there's only so many times you can say the same thing before  outrage fatigue begins to set in. Chekhov's Mistress is a tasty US literary blog by Bud Paar, and I especially  liked his take on pseudo-Beat poet Charles Bukowski, who made Kerouac look like a limp-membered wooz.   Bukowski wasn't actually  a great  poet per se, think Eminem 30  years earlier:

Bukowski and friend

Bukowski was an ornery ugly man who didn't care what anyone thought of him (until he softened up just a little bit later in life). This it would seem was the key to his success, this ugliness and fuck-you to the worldedness.

However, like Marshall Mathers, Bukowski had a talent for expressing raw, authentic experience succinctly:

Born into this Into hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to die Into lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guilty Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes Born into this Walking and living through this Dying because of this Muted because of this ...

Bud Paar has a not dissimilar gift in prose:

Bukowski says it for you. It ain't complicated, but he says it with an authoritative rhythm. In fact, I noticed that Bukowski speaks and reads his poetry with the same type of cadence, like he was a walking smoking drinking cursing poetry machine and there was only a thin line between life and poetry.

There's some damn good writing out on them thar blogs. If only I had twenty pairs of eyes.