Youd has taped a second sheet behind the first, and it has begun to pick up ink smudges and letter fragments through the tears as he continues on. The monotonous repetition of keystroke atop keystroke is slowly but steadily shredding the paper. Every re-typed page is completely different yet finally indistinguishable from the one that came before it.īy Sunday, the sheet was a dense and impenetrable rectangle of silvery-black ink.

He starts at the top and, when he gets to the bottom of the page, feeds it back into the cylindrical roller and begins again. Youd, as he did on a Brooklyn sidewalk in May with Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Capricorn,” is re-typing the 200-page novel onto a single sheet of 8.5” by 11” paper. “You wait,” Bukowski once said of any writer’s normal predicament, “and if nothing happens, you wait some more.” That the job site for the writer back then and the artist today is called Terminal Annex, with its end-of-the-line overtones of offering just a bit more space for reflection, is an irony hard to miss. His famously unadorned style of writing juxtaposed the indifferent routine of his workaday world with irresistible bouts of drinking, debauchery and equivocal stabs at human connection. When he worked at the post office Bukowski was an ordinary wage-slave, tied to the dull repetition of modern industrial labor. Youd’s 10-day performance involves drudgery, not glamour. That stark lack of entertainment value seems part of the point. Visit the Terminal Annex parking lot and there isn’t much to see, although Youd is happy to take a break and chat.

The schedule leads up to the evening-long Perform Chinatown performance-art festival, which features two-dozen artists and begins on Chung King Road at 5 p.m.

The artist is facing the vast and imposing facility where Bukowski worked for 14 years, first as a substitute letter carrier and later as a mail sorter, and where he took inspiration for his 1971 novel “Post Office.” Youd will be there through Saturday. until 4 p.m., he is retyping poet and novelist Charles Bukowski’s first book, word for word and page by page, on the same model of Underwood typewriter that the late author used. Post Office Terminal Annex in downtown Los Angeles. While perhaps not quite as grueling as these predecessors, Tim Youd for the past week has been sitting at a typewriter set up in the bed of a rented pickup truck in the parking lot of the U.S.

Post office bukowski review