On Writing

by Charles Bukowski

Blazek told me about a year or 2 ago the F.B.I. came around to him and asked about me. you know, the National Foundation is govt. sponsored? that could be Carolyn’s silence and maybe I’ve fucked you too. think I told you a bigwig interviewed me in a long dark room with a lamp down at the end of big table. real Kafka-nazi stuff. I was told they didn’t like my column “Notes of a Dirty Old Man.” I asked, “are we to presume that the postal officials are the new critics of literature?” “uh, no, we didn’t mean that.” like hell. then he told me, “if you had stuck to poetry and poetry books you would have been all right.” “but this . . .” and he tapped the newspaper and my column, and left the rest unspoken. it is the writing itself that simply pisses them, but I’m hardly even obscene. they don’t know how to hook me. and we keep shaking hands. but they are waiting for my one slip and then they are going to step in and break my neck. meanwhile, they are hoping that I will get paranoid about the whole thing and start jumping at shadows and flush my supplies of luck down the crapper.