Help interpreting this Bukowski quote?
Its from Factotum, chapter 56. The narrator says "For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter. The old story of good and evil. But none of the bus drivers ever dumped us. They were thinking instead of car payments, baseball scores, haircuts, vacations, enemas, family visits. There wasn't a real man in the whole shitload. I always got to work sick but safe. Which demonstrates why Schumann was more relative than Shostakovich"
I understand it all except for the part about Schumann and Shostakovich. What does that mean? Thanks.
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04 17th, 2010 in
Enema Stories
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man, he was probably drunk when he said it. nobody tries to decipher anything he ever says.
answer my teen crime excerpt (not a long one) Thanks! http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AjHQd0.SqNyUb0OXZyc76Kjsy6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20090720121940AAvs9iE
Robert Schumann was a well-known German composer during the Romantic period. His work was liked and well-received, but he was somewhat conservative and didn’t take many chances in his pieces, causing some to say that his music is boring and conservative.
Dmitri Shostakovich, on the other hand, was a highly inventive and experimental Russian composer. As a result of his uniqueness, his work was not as well-received as Schumann’s and others’.
At least, that’s the point Bukowski is trying to make: Schumann is “safe” while Shostakovitch is different and maybe even weird (so Bukowski prefers him). However, It’s perfectly fine to like Schumann, Shostakovich, both, or neither. Bukowski has his own opinions, and we can certainly have ours.