Back in the mid 90s, all the cool kids and wannabe hipsters in the creative writing programme at York were obsessed with Charles Bukowski. Having already completed a degree in English at McMaster, I was understandably skeptical, and the Xeroxed poems and vignettes circulated by my classmates only served to confirm that Buk was little more than a charlatan trading in the casual profanity of Henry Miller and the abject underclass ennui of Orwell and Celine.
Whether through attrition or osmosis, I slowly came to Jesus. But I was late to the party. Used book sellers in the city like Eliot’s and Balfour Books had already been picked clean of whatever inventory they might have possessed, and upon politely inquiring if any of the newer Black Sparrow editions were available when I stopped in at Nicholas Hoare, the proprietor disdainfully remarked, “Everybody under thirty’s reading that smut.” Then he showed me the door.
