Tag Archives: Henry Miller

San Francisco Trip and My Reading Conundrum

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I’ll be spending the next few days in San Francisco. My girlfriend has a conference there and I am tagging along for a brief vacation.

I had been to San Francisco once before about 7 years ago and found myself not particularly enjoying the visit. I chalk that up to the fact that my visit there was the last stop of a longer trip. I think that by the time I got to San Francisco, I was a bit traveled out and just wanted to get home. I’m looking forward to this trip to get a fresh look. It’s a short trip. We get in on a Tuesday afternoon and leave early Friday.

I was lucky enough to get direct flights in both directions. I mentioned before that I hoped to get quite a bit of reading done on the flights since I’m trying to keep up with my goal of reading 25 books this year. I’ve been keeping pace so far, in part, I think, because I’ve resisted my tendency to read multiple things at once. However, I’ve fallen off the wagon. I began the month reading House of Leaves and Self-Printed: The Sane Person’s Guide to Self-Publishing. Two books at a time seems manageable.

A couple of weeks ago, my girlfriend and I were taking the train to see my family. The Free Library of Philadelphia started a Virtual Library program in one of the main train stations in town. Being both book and technology nerds, we had to try to check-out books from the Virtual Library.

Virtual Library at Suburban Station

The library set-up large signs with a selection of books. You scan the QR code and get taken to the library’s interface. My phone wouldn’t scan the first code I tried and don’t know if that reflects more on the library’s sign or more on my phone’s QR reader. But I had no trouble with the second book I scanned, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. The process was pretty straightforward. You need to have a library card and need to access your library account. If you don’t have a reader on your device, you can read the book via your browser.

I think the process would be rather simple for someone who is already a user of the library’s ebooks. It took a few minutes for me to remember how to access my account and figure out which platform I was able to read the book on. For someone who is more familiar with all this, the process would be pretty seamless.

What’s nice is that I was able to later access my library account from my tablet and get access to the book I checked out and download the Overdrive reader app. I much prefer to read on my tablet than phone, so I was hoping it would be easy to associate my check-out with my tablet and it was.
Of course, that means I have another book to read. I could have just returned the book but since I’m trying to read more current books, I figured I’d take advantage of this happenstance, which brought me up to reading 3 books.

This was further complicated by the long flight. Although I am working on 2 books on my tablet, I like to have a physical book with me as well because there are times during the flight when you can’t use electronic devices. And there’s always battery life concerns. I was reluctant to bring House of Leaves with me because it’s quite the fat book. Wanting to pack something lighter, I turned to another reading project I started last year and decided on Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn. I decided I wanted to work my way through all his works again and got through Tropic of Cancer and Aller Retour New York last year.

So, my efforts to read no more than 2 books at a time this year lasted until April. In a way, it doesn’t really matter since I’ll end up finishing them all sooner or later, but it gives me a better sense of progress when I complete things in a more systematic way.

A Couple Interesting Henry Miller Finds

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I am a big Henry Miller fan, so I was happy last week when I came across a couple of things about him that I hadn’t seen before.

One is this lengthy interview that appeared in The Paris Review in 1962. In it, Miller talks a great deal about his writing process and other thoughts about creativity. A nice example is this response to a question regarding the conditioning a writer goes through:

After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I’d say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you’re walking or shaving or playing a game or whatever, or even talking to someone you’re not vitally interested in. You’re working, your mind is working, on this problem in the back of your head. So, when you get to the machine it’s a mere matter of transfer.

The second item is this video that was posted by Poets & Writers magazine:

2012: The Year in Reading

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2012 was a fair year, at best, for my reading ambitions. I’m a slow reader and was optimistically hoping to read 25 books during the year but fell well short.

I read:

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Reading Habits

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I spent some time last weekend getting my reading life in order. It’s not unusual for me to be reading more than one book at a time, but I just started another book with four partially read ones lying around.

Here’s how that happened:

At the end of 2011, I bought my first DSLR camera. Wanting to learn how to get the most out of my new hobby, I bought Ben Long’s Complete Digital Photography. I started reading that back in January, but it is, by design, a slow read, as I read a little and then try things out on the camera. Also, I have gone long stretches because I have been trying to master techniques as a move along.

Shortly after buying the camera, I also got a copy of Adobe Lightroom 4. I didn’t find that to be a particularly intuitive software, so I recently checked out a copy of Adobe Lightroom 4: The Complete Guide from the library where I work. Like Complete Digital Photography, I anticipate reading this book in fits and starts. I won’t finish either book anytime soon, although I’ll need to get to Adobe Lightroom 4 since it is a library book.

At the beginning of the year, I decided I wanted to revisit the works of Henry Miller, an author I have been really interested in in the past. Several years have passes since I’ve read much of his work, and I started thinking I wanted to methodically read through all his works in chronological order. This is my idea of fun. So far this year, I’ve read Tropic of Cancer and Aller Retour New York.

This time around, I’ve been reading with particular attention to things he has to say about America, much of which seems rather prescient. Considering the time he lived in Paris and Greece before being compelled to move back to the states, reading his thoughts about why he left the U.S. in the first place and why he took so easily to living in Paris is fascinating.

Consider these gems:

  • New York is cold, glittering, malign. The buildings dominate. There is sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit. A constant ferment, but it might just as well be going on in a test tube. Nobody knows what it’s all about. Nobody directs the energy. Stupendous. Bizarre. Baffling. A tremendous reactive urge, but absolutely uncoordinated. (Tropic of Cancer, 1934)
  • The young Hindu, of course, is optimistic. He has been to America and has been contaminated by the cheap idealism of the Americans, contaminated by the ubiquitous bathtub, the five-and-ten-cent store bric-a-brac, the bustle, the efficiency, the machinery, the high wages, the free libraries, etc., etc. He is not at all pleased with Gandhi’s retrogressive mania. Forward, he says, just like a YMCA man. (Tropic of Cancer, 1934)
  • That’s the first thing that strikes an American woman about Europe–that it’s unsanitary. Impossible for them to conceive of a paradise without modern plumbing. (Tropic of Cancer, 1934)
  • The machines are driving them screwy. Nothing is done by hand anymore. Even the doors open magically…And then there are the patent medicine. Exlax for constipation–everybody has constipation!–and Alka-Seltzer for hangovers. Everybody wakes up with a headache. For breakfast it’s a Bromo-Seltzer–with orange juice and toasted corn muffns, of course. To start the day right you must alkalize. It says so in all the subway trains. High-pressure talks, quick action, money down, mortgaged to the eyes, prosperity around the corner (it’s always around the corner!), don’t worry, keep smiling, believe it beloved, etc., etc. (Aller Retour New York, 1935)

During the first part of the year, I haven’t been reading Miller exclusively, just interspersing his books among the other things I am reading. I finished Aller Retour New York back in April and only recently picked up Black Spring; however, before starting Black Spring, I was partway through Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, a book I started when it first came out but got distracted from by some other book. As much as I’ve been enjoying it, I have to admit it is a bit of a dense, slow read. I was planning on slogging through, but the mood struck me one day to continue with my Miller project.

Black Spring is not particularly long and is a collection of shorter works, so picking it up for a bit and then setting it aside is easy. My thinking was to mainly be reading Anathem and taking the occasional Black Spring break.

Things got further complicated when my girlfriend and I were talking to our favorite bartender, who is an avid reader and our conversation at the bar often turns to books. He was asking us for suggestions as to what he should read next. In the course of our discussion, the fact that Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is one of my favorite books came up. He had started it once before but never finished. He had a vivid recollection of the infamous banana breakfast the opens the novel and realized that if he remembered that scene so well that he must be more taken with the book than he though, so we decided that the three of us should read Gravity’s Rainbow at the same time.

I ordered a couple of copies for us and spent some time this past weekend getting to good places to take a break from Miller and Stephenson. I finished the section of Black Spring and the chapter of Anathem I was in the middle of, so that I can devote myself to GR.

And that’s how juggling four books suddenly became five. I had been contemplating a return to Pynchon as well but was thinking of doing that after getting through Miller, but I am happy to re-read GR anytime. I’m estimating that this will be my fifth time reading GR, and it has been at least five years since the last time. I’m looking forward to reading it again after a significant break. When I moved from Vegas, I gave away my old copy that had a lot of underlining and notes, so, in a way, this will feel like a bit of a fresh start.

Barney Rosset and Henry Miller

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I just watched a fascinating documentary called Obscene about the life of Barney Rosset, the one time operator of Grove Press which published the first U.S. editions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, and the Autobiography of Malcolm X. Rosset and Grove Press were involved in the legal fight against censorship for the first three of these titles.

I plan on writing more about Obscene in general over at Tombrarian because I am going to nominate it for the notable videos committee. But I want to dwell a bit here about something Rosset says about Henry Miller:

I didn’t think of Henry Miller being particularly involved with sex. He just had contempt for this country that I shared. I never even noticed the fact that it was supposed to be sexually explicit or anything else and I still don’t, but it is an insulting book to everybody.

I particularly like this quote for a couple of reasons. One is that it has always annoyed me that people focus so much on the sex in Miller’s books. I recently re-read Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn and I would be surprised if 10% of those books are about sex. There is so much else going on that I feel people are really missing the point if they look at them so narrowly.

The other reason is that Rosset points to Miller’s contempt for America. In re-reading the two Tropics, this aspect stood out to me more than ever. I think because a lot of what Miller critiques is still so much an issue. So much of the narrow-mindedness, anti-intellectualism, consumerism, puritanism, and lack of concern for the environment that he rails against in the 1930s are still issues today.

Another interesting point that Rosset raises briefly regards why he felt an initial connection to Tropic of Cancer. Rosset was taken my Miller’s description of his breakup with Mona and how Miller resolved, as Rosset says, that he “will exist without her.” At the time, Rosset was going through his own break up. I have long held that Mona (based on Miller’s wife June) leaving him is at the heart of Tropic of Cancer. There’s an essential sadness that is key to understanding why the character of Henry Miller behaves as he does and takes the philosophical journey that he does. All the sex in the book is intricatly tied to this event. The supposed sexual liberation of the book is tempered when viewed from this angle.

Re-reading the Tropics and being struck by Miller’s harsh critique of the U.S. led my back to Aller Retour New York, which is Miller’s long letter to his friend Alfred Perles which was published as a short book in Paris between the two Tropics and in the U.S. in 1945. The letter describes Miller’s visit to New York after he had been living in Paris. The letter is a long-reflection of many of the difficulties Miller has with the American way of life. One of his long-standing complaints is about how wasteful American’s are compared to the Europeans:

Everybody has a crease in his trousers and shoes highly polished. Nobody wears a last year’s hat, crisis or no crisis. Nobody is without a clean handkerchief softly laundered and wrapped in a seal packerchief. When you have your hair brushed by the barber he throws the brush away to be fumigated and wrapped in cellophane again. The cloth he puts around your neck is sent immediately to the laundry–by pneumatic tubes that deliver the following morning. Everything is a twenty-four-hour service, whether it is necessary or not. Your things come back so fast you don’t have time to earn the money to pay for this service you don’t need. If it rains you get your shoes shined just the same–because the polish is a protection against weather stains. You get trimmed coming and going. You are in the sausage machine and there is no way out–unless you take a boat and go somewhere else. Even then you can’t be sure because the whole fucking world is going a hundred percent America.

Feels awfully prescient for 1935.