The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship

The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship is the latest of Charles Bukowski's posthumously published books, of which there are at least five in the world (and possibly still more to come from the estimable Black Sparrow Press of Santa Rosa, California). The press release accompanying the review copy of The Captain Is Out describes the book as a collaboration between Bukowski, who died in 1994, and Robert Crumb, who created the illustrations during 1995 and '96—so the collaboration, if it can be called that, was one-sided to say the least. Crumb's style, which might be called irritationist, is wonderfully suited to Bukowski's equally irritationist rendering of his own life, the diurnal contents of which are here recorded in thirty-three journal entries made between August 1991 and February 1993. Most of the entries were written within an hour of midnight, and they chronicle days spent at the track or driving around, days spent pondering the cutting of toenails, the art and the act of writing, the habits of editors and neighbours, poets and moviemakers: "listening to the radio, the old body, the old mind mending. I belong here," he writes at the end, and we agree with him, and are grateful to be reading him, at seventy-one years old, "still writing the way I wanted to and felt that I had to. I was still trying to explain this goddamned life to myself." (Bukowski's face alone was made to belong in a Robert Crumb drawing.)