Linda King has sculpted from life the heads of many great beat and post-beat literary figures familiar to us here on the west coast… her lover Charles Bukowski as well as Ferlinghetti, Hirschman, Micheline, Norse, Winans and more. Buk’s head is in the window at Bird & Beckett for the next few weeks… Linda just brought it this morning to a rendezvous at Higher Grounds, the cafe down the street, where some of her paintings will hang later in the spring…

This Sunday, March 3rd, at 2 pm, Linda will read from her just-published memoir, Loving and Hating Charles Bukowski. Back in the 1970s, Linda King, then a fetching young poet and the publisher of the lit rag called “Purr”, spent several feisty years in Buk’s intimate company, and she carries the torch and the tongs to this day.

She’s a great character herself — a terrific woman, a really wonderful sculptor, a fabulous poet, a notable publisher in the day and a sly, funny and eminently readable memoirist, and she lives in these parts these days, frequenting the store for jazz and poetry events. You may have encountered her here and not realized it…

Buk’s novel called Women (published by Black Sparrow in 1978) is the thinly veiled account of his tumultuous and intense love affair with this one woman — Linda King.  During their love affair and after, they both wrote reams of material about it, and her take on it in the memoir is every bit as gritty, funny and supercharged with emotion as what they wrote in the day…

Hear her read from her memoir at Bird & Beckett this Sunday, then buy the book and pick up some of Buk’s work while you’re at it…  In the meanwhile, you can read a bit more on Linda at this link.

With luck, Neeli Cherkovski, close Bukowski friend, collaborator on the little mag “Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns” and Buk’s biographer, and one of our most important local poets/essayists/novelists, may be on hand to lend a word or two in sage concurrence and playful asides.  Come and you’re ensured close contact with the spirit of the gruff and unlovely but oddly lovable old man himself, plus the very enjoyable company of a living treasure!