30 For 30: Trout Fishing In America by Richard Brautigan

I turned 30 on February 18th. I want to celebrate this, and get myself back into writing, by spending a few weeks rambling about the 30 things that have meant the most to me over the years. These will be from music, movies, books, videogames, and maybe even art and other things for good measure. I feel like my life has been much more about the things I've experienced than it has the people I've known or the places I've traveled to, and these 30 things have helped to make my 30 years more than worth all the innumerable bad things. Expect heartfelt over-sharing and overly analytical explanations galore! In part 11, I shy away from high brows, accept the middle ground...and end with the word mayonnaise.

I have a confession to make, one that may knock down my pseudo-intellectual street cred: I've owned One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez for years and haven't read it. To be honest it's for a petty reason and also a very good reason. The petty reason is that I think there's no way it can live up to how stunning its title is; the very good reason is that, holy shit, that book is dense. And I mean dense in the physics sense of the word, because it's almost overwhelming how many characters there are. I feel bad, because I'm sure it's as amazing a novel as everyone says, but I feel like I'd have to read it over a week long vacation and take notes. Something so grand in scope just overwhelms me these days.


What's more, the last time I read Ulysses by James Joyce was in college. Somehow that makes sense, right? I even wrote a long essay for a Mythology class wherein I compared the novel to Homer's The Odyssey, a work which it famously parallels. Yes, that's the sort of trouble you get up to when you're a young pseudo-intellectual who spends most of his free time in the campus library. Not starting bar fights or having sex with several women in a night, oh no no no!


It almost boggles my mind to think I read Ulysses because it's the sort of reading that doesn't interest me at all nowadays. In different ways but for similar reasons, I think of it as being as 'difficult' and 'dense' as One Hundred Years Of Solitude, and I think I simply have too many things I want to do with my free time. Also, my poor short term memory is taxed enough as it is without having to keep track of seven generations of a family like One Hundred Years demands of a reader.


Yet I feel guilty about this, and I think I know why. It's this whole elitist notion that only serious/difficult literature is worth reading and discussing. Don't get me wrong, I (used to) love that kind of stuff, but it's not for everyone. It's like insisting the people who like Adam Sandler movies should be watching The Tree Of Life or The Seventh Seal instead: do you really think they'd enjoy it or get anything out of it? You have to have an entire background and the right type of mind to enjoy, let alone understand, what is being done in those films. There's a happy middle ground to be found, so that as much as I think Christopher Nolan films are a bit overrated by people who haven't seen enough movies, they are still veritable art films compared to anything Michael Bay scrapes off his boot and releases in theaters.


This, finally, brings us to Trout Fishing In America by Richard Brautigan. Well, it brings us to how I discovered it and what it means to me.


Anyway.


During the Summer of 2012, I was going through a real low point in terms of caring about literature. I was exclusively reading non-fiction and ignoring the unread copy of One Hundred Years Of Solitude on my shelf. I kept feeling as though I wanted something new and experimental in fiction reading but not in a difficult or dense way. Probably the last time fiction had really excited me was while devouring the works of Mark Z. Danielewski after the recommendation of a friend. His books are still brilliant and exciting...but in a difficult and dense way. I mean, Only Revolutions isn't a book I want to re-read any time soon.


Something you should know if I've never brought it up before is that at my job, I get to see a lot of random vintage items. This has led to some fun gems, like a semi-rare Bob Dylan 45 single and a book of Monet prints suitable for framing. But this chaotic way of scavenging for diamonds in the rough isn't a good way to find the next fiction to excite my mind, or so I always thought. For, one day during the Summer of 2012, amongst a mound of other used books, I came across a collection of works by Richard Brautigan (which not only has Trout Fishing in it, but also one of his poetry collections, The Pill Versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, and another of his novels, In Watermelon Sugar). I'd never heard of this guy before, but I was intrigued by the cover and the titles.


So I opened it up and the interior of the cover says “Welcome, you are just a few pages away from Trout Fishing In America.” Then I flipped to the first actual page of the novel and see that it begins by describing the cover of the book. “Huh,” I thought to myself, “this is either one of the best books I've never heard of, or it's the most precious and annoying things ever.” I don't have to tell you which it was, but I do have to tell you that I think of Trout Fishing as being like that middle ground I spoke of earlier. It's not exactly a low-brow book—there's a running post-modernist stunt wherein 'trout fishing in America' can be used as a character's name, an activity done in the book, the name of a hotel, etc—yet it's also not completely high-brow, because there isn't really a plot and no greater meaning or themes to take away. To put it another way, if you think about the book afterward, it won't be to ponder the symbolism or figure out who the real villain was.


Trout Fishing In America is just this fun, whimsical, and clever little novel that came along at the right time of my life. I don't tend to re-read books all the time in the way that I tend to re-play the same music all the time, so I hope it says something that I have to make myself read other things because otherwise I'd just keep reading the Brautigan collection I got from work. I find it to be exciting and inspiring literature; it feels like something that wants to be read and enjoyed and isn't some insular work of a depressed or deranged outcast. If Charles Bukowski's Post Office made me want to write a novel, Trout Fishing In America makes me want to write another. Perhaps one that other people might read and enjoy and tell their friends about, the way Trout Fishing is passed around by word of mouth. Perhaps, too, I'll write a novel that doesn't take itself seriously, and is willing to end with the word 'mayonnaise' because the author expresses a desire to do so in the previous chapter.


Expressing a human need, I always wanted to end one of these 30 For 30 pieces with a quote from Trout Fishing In America. Until now, it just never would have made sense or worked effectively.



“Expressing a human need, I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise.”

30 For 30: Post Office by Charles Bukowski

I turn 30 on February 18th. I want to celebrate this, and get myself back into writing, by spending a few weeks rambling about the 30 things that have meant the most to me over the years. These will be from music, movies, books, videogames, and maybe even art and other things for good measure. I feel like my life has been much more about the things I've experienced than it has the people I've known or the places I've traveled to, and these 30 things have helped to make my 30 years more than worth all the innumerable bad things. Expect heartfelt over-sharing and overly analytical explanations galore! Today in part 2, we get very introspective with the novel Post Office by poet/author/professional drunk Charles Bukowski.

Discovering Charles Bukowski when I was a year or so out of college made me want to go on living. At the time I was working a part-time dead end job and still living with my parents. All of my friends had moved away, so all I had to do, all I wanted to do, was write, drink, and listen to music. I knew with my college degree in Communication that I couldn't get the kind of job that I really wanted, especially in the city I live, so it was a long process of trying to find something that was both full-time and would put enough money in my pocket month-to-month to let me live on my own. Until I finally was able to do this in the summer of 2009, I spent close to three years drinking and writing. And if you know anything about Charles Bukowski, you know where I'm going with this.



The odd thing is, I don't think Post Office is his best book. It's the one most people are likely to have read, yet compared to Women it's far shorter, with fewer memorable characters and passages. In fact, there's quite a few pages of Post Office which reproduce, verbatim, actual documents from Bukowski's post office job, including disciplinary memos for his absenteeism. What makes Post Office resonate so much with me is that it's the beating heart of a suffering man at a dead end job held up for all to see. There are parts of this book that are torn right out of thoughts I've had at various jobs I've had over the years, including my current one. If you've ever felt like a job took and took from you, never rewarded you for your years of hard work until you just stopped caring, then this is a book for you, too.

Bukowski has always had a mixed reputation, with some calling him the poet of the gutters and others calling him a misogynistic asshole who drinks too much and just happens to write. The truth is somewhere in between, I suppose. You can find as many passages of his writing which prove he was an egotistical braggart full of bravado as you can passages where he basically undermines his entire reputation—like the part in Women where he sobs like a child. Or the ending of Factotum, where he watches a stripper but is unable to “get it up.” I think this is just a thing with alcoholic writers who had rough childhoods—they go back and forth between thinking they're undiscovered geniuses the world should recognize, and self-pitying sad sacks who don't care about being embarrassed by admissions of great vulnerability and pathetic stories taken, and embellished, from their lives.

Perhaps one of the most accurate photos of the man ever taken 

I opened this piece by saying that discovering Bukowski made me want to go on living, so I guess I should explain some more. I have always struggled with depression and fitting into society; it's not that I'm anti-social, I simply can't get along very well with most people and would prefer to be alone. It would take my entire life story to show that I'm not being some whiny emo teen by saying such things, but suffice it to say that I often feel “at odds” with what society seems to value and prize. I usually get a reputation at jobs for being the quiet, depressed looking guy who complains a lot but works really hard, so reading Post Office for the first time was like discovering a kindred soul. When you think that your unhappiness is unique to you, that there is no way out, you become hopeless but not in a suicidal way. You just kind of shut down, I guess. And I was in that state until I found Bukowski.


Post Office ends, quite tidily, with Bukowski—or I should say his alter-ego, Henry Chinaski—quitting his job and going on a lengthy bender. Coming to one morning, he decides to write a novel. Even without reading the book, you can guess that the book he wrote is Post Office. This ending has always stuck with me; it's a little too clever to be a truly great ending, I admit, but something about it's matter-of-factness really got to me and still does. It was something like when bands in the 70s were inspired by the punk rock scene and said to themselves, “I thought you had to be a rich, good looking, musical virtuoso to be a musician! But I guess anyone can do it!” The key is to realize you can be a musician, artist, writer, or creative type in general without looking at it as your career. My career will never be writing but I consider myself a writer. This wasn't always the case.



For whatever reason, I assumed that you had to be an English major and/or have a publisher already lined up to write a novel, to be a writer. But nope, anyone can do it. Finishing Post Office was one of those “ah-ha!” moments of my life. “So wait, you can write a novel and it doesn't have to be some high minded, high falutin' epic? It can be about how you drink too much, hate your job, and can't seem to exist in society like normal people do?” It was only after reading Bukowski that I realized any novel I wrote could be about whatever I wanted it to. Chances are nobody would read it anyway, so what was the big deal? 

I had always toyed with the idea of writing a novel, after close to a decade of writing poetry, short stories, and reviews of albums just for the fun of it. Since they weren't getting published and I wasn't getting paid to do them, I figured I wasn't “really” a writer. So I'll let you in on a secret: all you have to do to be a writer is to write, and to have to write. I have spent many months of writer's block from time to time questioning why it is that I do what I do. Nobody seems to read my stuff or care, so why do I bother? Why not just think those things to myself and not write them down somewhere? Isn't it the same thing?


What I've realized recently is that it's not the same. It's the difference between visualizing a painting and actually painting something. You do it not because you think you're good at it or to have something to brag about. You do it because you have to and you love it. Why am I compelled to write something like this piece about my own life and Bukowski's Post Office? I don't know, but I do know that I have to. It helps me in some way; it gives me something. This “something” I can't explain but I know I need it to keep on living. It's like medication or religion, and the more I want to fight it or give up on it, the more it tries to get me back.

I would quote Bukowski's "if you're going to try, go all the way" quote here, but I once saw Bono reciting it and it made me like it a little less

I hate writing more than you can imagine, but I also love it more than anything else in the world. I hate it because I have to do it and it won't ever leave my life even if I think most of what I write is pointless garbage no one cares about. I love it because I have to do it and it makes me not want to leave this life.

A few years after reading Post Office, I self-published a novel, and a couple years after that I published a collection of blog posts from Whiskey Pie. I don't know that they'll make any difference to anyone else's lives but they did to mine. I had to do them and I feel more alive for having done so. I write because I feel that I have to write, and Charles Bukowski taught me that if you have to write, you should. I doubt he knew why he wrote Post Office but I'm sure he would've agreed that writing will make all the hungover mornings at work and all the long nights of insomnia and apathy worth it, somehow. It may sound strange to take inspiration from a writer whose every book is suffused with depression, solitude, bad relationships going even worse, and a lingering aroma of stale cigarette smoke and spilled beers, but with inspiration, sometimes you have to take it wherever you can get it.

Breakfast Of Champions

Kurt Vonnegut's writing always had an informal, conversational tone to it, as if he were a wise Grandfather dispensing bittersweet lessons about life instead of a legendary professional novelist. With Breakfast Of Champions, he made the leap to full on meta-fictional conceits, inserting himself as a character and making crude-yet-charming drawings to accompany the text. It wasn't enough that he talk directly to the reader; in Champions there's a scene where he, as narrator/writer, and he, as a character in the novel, worry together about whether or not they'll commit suicide like his Mother did.

So, it's an uplifting book.

Though the aforementioned drawings are perhaps better known than the book itself, especially the simplistic asterisk-looking asshole (see below) which inspired the Red Hot Chili Peppers' logo, it's important to point out how they complement the often emotionless and literal descriptions Vonnegut gives of things in the world. It reveals how ridiculous and arbitrary they are while also showing that we take a lot of things for granted and don't question them. The bits about penis sizes and women's measurements read like scientific reports, as if to say that it's meaningless data and not something to fixate on. Likewise, the bits about how Vonnegut-esque writer Kilgore Trout refers to mirrors as "leaks" and how people name things what they do because they "like the sound of it" still ring true in this era of slang terms and ridiculous names for companies and products.

Written during a mid-life crisis, Breakfast Of Champions is as bleak and self-reflexive as Vonnegut ever got. With poignant passages undercut by his severe depression and characters borrowed from his other works, the novel is in many ways the most quintessential book Vonnegut ever wrote. One could also make the case that it has the most contrived, meandering, and plot-less premise of any book Vonnegut ever wrote...though that's by necessity. Many scenes seem thrown in just so he can hold forth on this or that subject, but then again, that was often the appeal of Vonnegut's style: that thrilling sense of an uncle or Grandpa telling you dirty jokes and irreverently mocking American society.

It's rare that fiction writers put so much of themselves into a novel without things crossing over into parody or pretension. It speaks both to his personable prose, full of repeated phrases and concepts, and to his disregard for telling a story in a linear order that the silly moments or matter-of-fact plot contrivances feel more like a whimsical god toying with his or her creations than they do self-parody or artsy fartsy, post-modern nonsense.

Hunter S. Thompson's Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas was published a couple years before Breakfast Of Champions and I think of them as parallel commentaries on American society during the early 70s. Yes, I think of both as being timeless works, too, but they also perfectly capture that time when the hippie movement was dying out and the self-centered cynicism of the full-on 70s was just beginning. Where Thompson sought escape and revelation in drugs and the counter-culture lifestyle, taking swipes at mainstream society and bemoaning the death of the 60s dream, Vonnegut came from the perspective of neither the hippies nor the 'silent majority' that Nixon spoke to. His problem was that bag drugs already existed in his mind, and the revelation that bad chemicals could make people do horrible things beyond their control seemed to bother him tremendously. He implies, to some extent, that we are like the robots who lack free will in the short story that sets off the main action of the plot.

Still, Breakfast Of Champions works not because it has anything concrete to say about the nature of man, free will, or American society. It works because it feels so personal and so raw. Vonnegut doesn't hold back and goes even further than Thompson, demonstrating that all of society was rotten to the core, that mankind was a blight on the Earth, and so on. It's odd to think that this was his follow-up to the beloved classic Slaughterhouse-Five, since bleak ruminations on suicide and lists of the precise measurements of different character's body parts and sex organs are not exactly the kind of material that holds a newly won audience. However, it would be difficult to imagine him as the cantankerous old cult hero he went on to become without books like Breakfast Of Champions.

But I Am Going To Swim In It: Lester Bangs Revisited

Lester Bangs is a name that haunts music journalism, along with other titans such as Nick Kent, Robert Christgau, and Greil Marcus. His greatest influence, at least in my opinion, was in making the process of writing about music—whether it be an album, band profile, concert review, interview, or travelogue—much more personal, informal, and poetic than it used to be. He intellectualized and romanticized music and music listening while also bringing the god-like stars of the 60s, 70s, and 80s down to a human level. Other writers certainly contributed to this trend, but Bangs is most associated with it, to the point where over the past few years some have called for a new Lester Bangs, or more specifically, a Lester Bangs of videogames journalism. However, I have to wonder if these people are basing this desire more on their memories of what he stood for and what his writing was like compared to the actual facts.

Bangs's work is featured in two collections, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung and Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader. Together they serve not as a comprehensive compilation of his work so much as they are a complete sampling of his style. You get the drug fueled gonzo/New Journalism type stuff that is sometimes only tangentially related to music, such as excerpts from his unpublished Drug Punk novel. You get travel stories that humanize The Clash as good, regular guys but far from angelsl a typically first person account of meetings with most of the major forces in reggae/dub at their peak in the 70s in Jamaica; a strange rant about a visit to California. You get concise reviews of albums that are more memorable and interesting than the albums themselves. You get entertaining, sometimes antagonistic, profile/interview pieces on Lou Reed, ELP, Jethro Tull, et. al. You get moving, brilliant examinations of classics like Astral Weeks and The Marble Index. And you get a mountain of phrases and irreverent wordplay that make you want to believe what he says even if history frequently proved him wrong—would anyone alive today really claim that Led Zeppelin and 'Stairway to Heaven' aren't going to be around for hundreds of years?

The reason I wondered whether people remember Bangs more in theory and memory than in practice is that, at least in the cases where it's allowed to get out of hand, his writing is something you end up reading more for his personality (or perhaps the persona he projected to the world) and rambling style than the actual content and what he has to say. A lot of it is borderline unreadable Beat-like writing that you'll indulge once and skip on re-visitings of Psychotic Reactions or Mainlines. This is why people who wonder “where is the new Lester Bangs?” are partially wrong, because he was very much a product of his time and place, and you couldn't get away with today what he often did in the past and still expect to get published, not to mention get interviews.

Bangs acknowledged Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Bukowski as influences, and to be sure the former's rambling, hallucinatory prose and the latter's alcoholic, dirty old man persona are part of Bangs, most obviously in pieces like 'Notes On Austin' and 'New Year's Eve', respectively. Sure, blogs might publish this kind of stuff today, and former Pitchfork writer Brent DiCrescenzo was a bald faced Bangs acolyte with his lengthy conceptual/experimental (many would say pretentious) prose, but most modern readers and critics will agree this kind of writing holds no appeal for someone who wants to know what an album is like and if it's any good. There's an answer in the writing, sure, but it takes way too long to get there, has paragraphs that don't seem to relate at all or (like Christgau's often florid intellectualist capsule reviews) are neigh incomprehensible. As for getting interviews, when the modern press does attempt to confront artists today or stand by its writers, it ends up being a mess like the recent M.I.A. piece by Lynn Hirschberg or videogame developers/publishers blacklisting magazines/websites based on unfavorable reviews or coverage.

Of course, I love Bangs, and these two collections are part of what I would consider required reading for anyone with a passing interest in music journalism and criticism in general. The key is not to see Psychotic Reactions and Mainlines as a style guide or handbook for how to write, but as a helpful tool to see that music writing can be more than just “I liked this because it's good. 5 stars. The End.” He's instructive as much for helping you get more personal with writing as he is for knowing how far not to take getting more personal with writing. After all, Bangs seemed to have little concern for the audience digesting what he released...or maybe he had so much regard for them that he didn't water anything down. Whatever the case, his love of and deeply felt personal relationship with music are the most important element of both collections. You get the feeling when you're reading through long sections about how miserable and numb he was feeling at the time that it had more to do with a dearth of good music coming out instead of any social or psychological problems he was having. By this criterion, he was indeed one of the greatest critics of any artform. Critics aren't just consumer guides; we deeply feel and immerse ourselves in art, and when there's a string of crap, it affects us more than we realize. Now, whether Bangs was one of the best writers...well, that's still up for debate.

Penny Arcade: The Warsun Prophecies

In the first sentence of the introduction to this, the third volume of Penny Arcade webcomic collections, Jerry Holkins (aka Tycho) says that 2002 "might be [his] favorite year of Penny Arcade." He then closes by saying "[e]very good thing that has ever happened to me has been the result of your enthusiasm, your kindness, and your support." These two statements are fairly significant, taken together, and represent something about this year in particular.

The 'something' I refer to is the fact that this was the year when--apparently--Penny Arcade became fully reader supported. The introduction also mentions the advertisers, but Tycho seems to be specifically talking to the readers, especially when he thanks them so graciously. You really get the feeling that through these statements, and the very strips themselves, 2002 was the year where Tycho and Gabe realized they had an audience and began to write toward their own whims because they knew hundreds, thousands, indeed, millions of readers would eat it up.

It'd be easy to make a case for this being one of the best Penny Arcade years, too. Setting aside the origins of the ever popular Fruitf*****, Cardboard Tube Samurai, and Mr. Period characters, 2002 also has a lot of my personal favorite strips, such as the paint huffing one, Claw Shrimp, the Space Devil, the surge protector/"harmful Martian Rays" one, and Tribes 3/4/5's "beating a dead horse." While I suppose it's true that the strip became more insular, vulgar, and "you might need to read the newspost to get the joke" during 2002, that's always been the big appeal for me, anyway. Furthermore, I often find that violence and gross out humor are done best when they are written by very intelligent people, and to that extent, Penny Arcade's creators are two of the most intelligent, critical, and sharp minds in the whole videogame industry. And they like to swear.

Other than all the strips from 2002, The Warsun Prophecies contains Tycho's commentary on every strip, his introduction, an angry and funny introduction by PvP creator Scott Kurtz, and a few pages of concept art from the forthcoming Penny Arcade game. While this isn't the wealth of bonus content that the second collection had, it's still enough for any fan to appreciate and want to buy. In my opinion it's worth the price of admission just for Tycho's commentary, which, as always, is funny, informative, and other words that mean 'funny' and 'informative.'

If you're a fan, you simply must have this.

Bukowski On Film: Barfly Vs. Factotum

There are certain authors who make for great film adaptations, and almost all the others make for miserable ones. The difference, as near as I can tell, is that authors who focus on plot as the primary strength of their writing adapt well to film, while authors who's main strength is their words and style make for bad films. This, then, is my main problem with Barfly and subsequently my love for Factotum.

Bukowski novels and short stories are never good for what happens. By this I mean, they're mostly about the same things--drunks, bums, sex, smoking, fighting, depression, filth, etc. It's a thousand times the same story, but the genius comes in how he tells them each time. Bukowski definitely falls into the less-is-more, use-plain-language school of writing--meaning that the brilliant lines he manages are all the more meaningful because they cut to the quick.

Barfly fails and Factotum succeeds on the basis of two things: what they focus on and what the characters are like. Barfly chooses to focus on a plot, following the main character Henry Chinaski, an alcoholic who fights to win money and occasionally writes. We see him come full circle, from having almost nothing to having slightly more by movie's end. His romance with Faye Dunaway's character feels artificial and conceited, and her fight with Alice Krige's character at the end is embarrassing. All the while, the movie completely fails to make us believe in or care about Chinaski because we so seldom get to hear Bukowski's words through him. We're told he's a great writer because Alice Krige tracks him down in order to give him money for publishing some of his work, but we're never shown that he's a great writer.

By contrast, Factotum has a plot that just kind of happens and feels natural. Events occur to move the action along, but there is no real journey or change for our hero, Chinaski. Instead, it's mainly about him trying to make money by working various odd jobs, gambling on horse races, and so forth. All the while, we glimpse him writing and drinking, and we're always hearing Bukowski's words, often spoken in voiceover by Matt Dillon, who wouldn't be my first choice for the role but actually does an admirable job of it.

Speaking of which, Mickey Rourke absolutely misses the mark in Barfly. His Bukowski is somewhere between a hunched over Russel Crowe and a less manic Rodney Dangerfield, a freak of nature more than an odd human being. Meanwhile, Faye Dunaway doesn't belong in this movie at all. She always sounds like she's just reading lines rather than inhabiting her character, and simply put, she's too pretty to seem believable. I never once for a second saw her character and not her. The other problem with Barfly is that it doesn't portray violence and alcoholism in a realistic way. The fights in the movie are bloody and meaningless because within minutes, the characters look fine. As for the drinking, it feels completely sanitized, and the characters drink like fishes while never once getting sick or looking worse for the wear.

Factotum, somehow, gets the two main characters right. Dillon's Bukowski is more patient and reserved, dignified even in his lowest moments. We see him in every aspect of his life, including a particularly funny and revealing scene where he must have his balls bandaged up so he can go to work. This time out, his main love interest is played by Lili Taylor, who you might know from Six Feet Under or High Fidelity. While she and Chinaski meet and re-meet during the course of the movie, you never get that sanitized 80s romance film feel that Barfly has because she seems real and, spoiler alert, Chinaski loses her in the end. I always saw her character and not "hey it's the crazy medicated ex-girlfriend from High Fidelity!!" Furthermore, the realism of the violence and drinking is far better in this movie. Though there are only one or two true moments of violence in it, they feel more "real" because of their awkwardness. As for the drinking, well, people who drink feel like shit and get sick, and Factotum has both.

In the end, there isn't much contest here. Barfly could be just about any movie by the time it's done, while Factotum is a much more fully realized adaptation. The fact that it ends with one of my favorite scenes from the novel, in which Chinaski and a bum are thrown out of a day labor agency for drinking, and follows it with a brilliant monologue while he drinks in a strip club, is all the sweeter.