The Bukowski Forum Returns!

BukowskiForum.com rides again

This post has been updated at bottom with comment from the former owner of the Bukowski Forum.

If you’ve googled “Charles Bukowski” at any point in the past few decades or so, there’s a good chance you stumbled upon the site Bukowski.net. The fan site, run by writer and musician Hannah Phillips and launched in 1996, includes an impressive treasure trove of Bukowski’s manuscripts, including a database of where the works have appeared over the years, as well as a timeline of his life, his FBI file, a map of the places he lived and worked, images of some of his paintings, and other useful resources.

It also includes the long-running Charles Bukowski forum, which lives at BukowskiForum.com. It, too, is an impressively useful resource, one which I have linked to throughout the years when helping to answer fan questions or fact-check my work here. It is, in addition to our own rapidly growing Facebook group (closing in on 200,000 members as of this writing), one of the most popular places online to discuss the writer and his life.

The Day the Forum Died…

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”

~ Charles Bukowski pic.twitter.com/ks9p4BevFa

— Charles Bukowski Quotes (@bukowskiquoteus) May 22, 2021

So, it was with some very real disappointment that I learned the Bukowski Forum was closing down for good, back in October 2020. Phillips shared the announcement on her podcast, “This Is Not a Test,” in an episode aptly titled, “Adios Bukowski Forum.” (You can listen below—she begins talking about the forum around the four minute mark.)

Phillips said she wasn’t planning on deleting the forum altogether, at least not yet, instead leaving the archives up and simply closing the forum to new posts. That softened the blow, but it was still sad to see it go, even if I wasn’t an active participant. Not to mention, she worryingly said to go check out the forum “while it’s there, because it probably won’t be for long,” suggesting she might let it lapse into great 404 error message creating void.

As Phillips explained in the podcast, she made the decision for a number of reasons, including feeling like truth no longer mattered to people, making running a forum dedicated to spreading reliable information and shooting down misinformation feel a bit useless.

As someone who has been on the receiving end of their fair share of Bukowski fans insisting something they dredged up from Goodreads or A-Z Quotes is a legitimate Charles Bukowski utterance.

Random reminder pic.twitter.com/aCwAQ6wXRn

— Charles Bukowski Quotes (@bukowskiquoteus) May 2, 2022

(By the way, if you want to argue with me about “Find what you love and let it kill you,” allow me to refer you to this excellent Quote Investigator article on it in hopes you actually read it and consider the impossibility that you might be wrong.)

“There doesn’t seem to be any such thing as truth anymore, and it’s honestly exhausting to spend your time proving things only to have random people say they don’t believe the truth you lay down in front of them,” Phillips said, eliciting from me, on the other side of the country, an involuntary reply in the form of an extended sigh of sad agreement.

Phillips also noted running the forum, though not particularly difficult, was “time consuming, and money consuming,” and that she had been doing it for fifteen years and was burned out. But she did ease the fans’ minds by assuring that the main site, Bukowski.net, was staying put, as it “runs itself, more or less.” Tantalizingly, she also revealed she had “hundreds of manuscripts to add” to it, which is exciting, as I had, for some reason and apparently falsely, assumed that section of the site was a finished product.

The entire podcast episode in question is worth listening to, especially if you have been a fan of the site and/or forum over the years, for its insights into its history, as well as Phillips’ thoughts on running it all these years, through all the ups and downs that have come with it. A lot of what she expressed particularly hit home for me personally, but even if you don’t run a Bukowski site, or a site or forum of any kind, I think you might also find it worth your while. Much of the reflecting centers around the difficult relationship between humans, information, and technology, and who can’t related to that in this era we found ourselves strapped into.

The Bukowski Forum Is Resurrected

“I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you’re allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day.” ~ Bukowski

— Charles Bukowski Quotes (@bukowskiquoteus) February 21, 2012

(This ^, but replace drinking with “running a forum.”)

But you can’t hold a good person, nor a good forum, down, it would seem.

While poking around over at the forum recently, probably fact-checking something I was thinking of posting or looking for an answer to a fan’s question, I noticed something peculiar and exciting: A new post, from this month! But how could it be?!

I checked again, thinking perhaps I had misread the date, but sure enough, the site had been re-opened to new posts, of which there were several. Phillips had mentioned possibly giving the forum to someone else if someone expressed an interest, and it is unclear if that happened or if she is still running it herself. (Update: it has been handed over to someone else, see bottom of post for more).

A visit to Phillips’ podcast site showed there had been a handful of new episodes since the one announcing the end of the Bukowski Forum, but none made mention of its reopening. I went back to the October 2022 episode page, and sure enough, there in the comments was one from Phillips, dated March 7, 2022, announcing, without context: “It’s back.”

I have sent an email to Phillips inquiring about what prompted the return of the Bukowski Forum and will update this post if there’s a response I’m permitted to share. Either way, it’s just good to see it open up to new posts again. It is a vital place for fans to discuss Bukowski’s life and times, and it being open to new posts also gives encouragement that the archives will also be hanging around, hopefully for good. If those were ever to disappear it would constitute a real loss.

So, thank you, Hannah Phillips, for running Bukowski.net and the Bukowski Forum so well all these years! Your efforts, and dare I be so bold to say truth itself, still matter. At least to some of us.

Related: Bukowski Quotes updates and a collection of Bukowski shorts

Updated (6/7/22):

I reached out to Phillips for comment and received the following reply:

Thanks for asking. But I didn’t reopen the forum, I handed it over to someone who reopened it. 🙂

 

I never wanted the forum to close, but I had run it for 15 years and that was long enough. It was well-established, so it was time for me to step away. The problem was I couldn’t find anyone willing (or able) to take it on. The forum regulars were lovely, but none of them were in a position to take on the technical operation of the forum. That’s a big part of running it, managing the technical things. Along with paying for licenses, hosting, etc. It was a lot to ask of someone.

 

I didn’t want to hand it over to someone who would ruin it or let it fall apart. I wasn’t selling it, I was giving it away, so I could afford to be selective. I had to trust the person who took it over. I turned down a couple of offers that didn’t seem right. But after a year or so of the forum being closed, someone contacted me who was enthusiastic and qualified so I handed them the keys and they reopened it.

 

I continue to run bukowski.net. That will probably be around for as long as I’m around.

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