For what it is worth, William Burroughs (Naked Lunch etc.) was the grandchild of the founder of the Burroughs computer company. As far as I know, the later Bill didn't profit much, if anything, from this.
pentaphobe · 2h ago
I dunno - seemed to low key have some casual wealth, being the one Beat who was always in a nice suit, had an extensive drug habit...
and all those trips to Interzone don't pay for 'emselves!
pentaphobe · 2h ago
So yeah, seems like despite some unfortunate liquidation choices by his parents just before the depression, they still retained enough wealth to make certain lifestyle choices easy...
> His parents, upon his graduation, had decided to give him a monthly allowance of $200 out of their earnings from Cobblestone Gardens, a substantial sum in those days.
> It was enough to keep him going, and indeed it guaranteed his survival for the next twenty-five years, arriving with welcome regularity. The allowance was a ticket to freedom; it allowed him to live where he wanted to and to forgo employment. [1^]
And $200 in 1937 gets you a fair bit of freedom (roughly $4500 in today's money) - sure, it's not private jet money but notable. And would have gone pretty far in Mexico and Tangier.
It's a long time ago that I read about this, but I think he got money from his parents, who owned something of a tourist shop. I think they divested any shares they had in Burroughs long before this. In any case Bill (Naked Lunch) didn't have any shares in the company, and more or less parasitised his parents - but who amongst us can say that we haven't done that? certainly not me.
IIAOPSW · 2h ago
I assume the name is a pun on Williamsburg.
zabzonk · 2h ago
Um, why?
rufus_foreman · 2h ago
>> On Christmas Day, 1990, Charles Bukowski received a Macintosh IIsi computer and a laser printer from his wife, Linda. The computer utilized the 6.0.7 operating system and was installed with the MacWrite II word processing program
Bukowski was born in 1920. Lived to be 73 years old.
So, the article is true, he used a word processor for the last few years of his life. Those poems, with a few exceptions, were not the good ones.
brudgers · 18m ago
However worse those poems were, they were made worser Bukowski poems by posthumous editing.
I was under the impression that much of his work was not "the good ones." He was popular among the fringe, mostly because it was "cool" to be a part of the non-conformist subculture. I read some of his stuff in the 1970's and it never grabbed me.
It's cool though that he adapted to computers. Some more modern authors still won't touch them.
and all those trips to Interzone don't pay for 'emselves!
> His parents, upon his graduation, had decided to give him a monthly allowance of $200 out of their earnings from Cobblestone Gardens, a substantial sum in those days.
> It was enough to keep him going, and indeed it guaranteed his survival for the next twenty-five years, arriving with welcome regularity. The allowance was a ticket to freedom; it allowed him to live where he wanted to and to forgo employment. [1^]
And $200 in 1937 gets you a fair bit of freedom (roughly $4500 in today's money) - sure, it's not private jet money but notable. And would have gone pretty far in Mexico and Tangier.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs
[2]: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1937?amount=200
Bukowski was born in 1920. Lived to be 73 years old.
So, the article is true, he used a word processor for the last few years of his life. Those poems, with a few exceptions, were not the good ones.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bukowski#Poetry_edit...
It's cool though that he adapted to computers. Some more modern authors still won't touch them.
https://mashable.com/archive/modern-writers-technology
He was popular among me, because when I worked in a factory doing manual labor in the 90's, his poems described the life I was living.
It was neither fringe, nor "cool", nor non-comformist, nor part of a subculture.
He was a good writer who wrote about what I was going through.
Burroughs was just fucking crazy. I liked his writing too. Not the cut-up stuff.
Exterminator!