Who is The Women from Tales of Ordinary Madness and what is their importance?

Bukowski portrays many nameless women throughout the collection who play a variety of roles, usually one of two archetypes: beautiful and untouchable or accessible but fatally flawed.

The beautiful, untouchable women both inspire and shame Bukowski. In "Goodbye Watson", a beautiful woman takes Bukowski home and they sleep together under an open window in the rain. When they wake up in the morning they are both blue, shivering, and thrilled with the sensation. They have no future together. Similarly, in "Great Poets Die in Steaming Pots of Shit", Bukowski cites a gorgeous woman climbing out of a car as the greatest work of art in the world. He never speaks to her, simply admires her legs from afar. In "My Stay in the Poet's Cottage", Bukowski fantasizes about a sensual maid who will not clean his house. These women fuel his desires and fantasies. However, in "A Rain of Women", Bukowski experiences shame when a beautiful woman who actually flirts with him intimidates him into inaction.

Conversely, most of the women that Bukowski considers to be accessible are also unattractive or irritating. In "Rape! Rape!", Bukowski returns to have sex with Vera's overweight, ugly neighbor. She does not refuse him, but she does not excite him either. In "Too Sensitive", and "One for Walter Lowenfels", Bukowski lives with a woman who cares more for literature than she does for the the man in her home or, indeed, reality in general. Another strange woman that Bukowski picks up at a bar has sex with Bukowski's friend Luke before she will have Bukowski.