This is the second time that Charles Bukowski appeared in my little magazine Clock Radio of the mid to late 1980s. He and I had struck up a fairly regular correspondence by this time, probably fueled in part by my expressed interest in working with Black Sparrow Press on a Bukowski collection and in interviewing his longtime German translator, Carl Weissner. (I’ll probably post the full interview with Weissner here, so stay tuned or become a member of Open Arts Forum if you aren’t already.)
I remember that Clock Radio was just another wannabee little magazine back then. It probably ultimately ended up that way. But after I published an issue devoted almost totally to Charles Bukowski’s work (#2), the floodgates on submissions opened, and it was much easier to get a bunch of talent to contribute.
It’s worth noting that the existence of a print record like this in the form of a little magazine like Clock Radio is a testament to the superiority of print as a publishing medium, then and even now. Even if the print publication was produced on a typewriter and duplicated on a xerox machine, as Clock Radio was back then, it still has two great advantages over work published online: It exists outside of a computer, and it won’t disappear if a website is taken offline, for whatever reason.
While I didn’t mean to turn this little introduction into a debate about print vs. online publication, I did just because I was thinking about it. But I’d be happy to hear what you feel on the topic. Click the Comments link below to weigh in.
In the meantime, feel free to download this PDF version of Clock Radio #3, and enjoy.
Note that there’s now a digital version of Clock Radio (open to contemporary submissions) at this address: https://clockradiomagazine.com/
