Notes on Henry Miller

• I bought Tropic of Capricorn in an airport bookstore because I had drastically underestimated how much reading material to bring for my two-legged journey. I did it half as a joke because in the first Final Destination, you can see Ali Larter carrying and reading Tropic of Cancer through airport security before it arbitrarily becomes a book about plane crashes when the teens are waiting at the gate. If Cancer preceded contrived fatalism would Capricorn counter it?

• I decided to read Henry Miller because I wanted to see what the fuss about him and sex was about. Why not check out a bit of lit smut? The copy of Tropic of Capricorn I have has five blurbs on the back and two explicitly are about enjoying reading the sex passages, and the synopsis starts with the book being banned “because explicit sexual content.”

• Once again we find a situation where the sex is really the least of our concerns in terms of adult and provocative material, showing that the US will ban for thirty years descriptions of fucking but doesn't flinch at things like his occasional violent daydreams of mass murder, frank acknowledgment of abortions, casual of-the-times racism and misogyny (the sort where he’ll still hang with and befriend the people he just sees as being inherently different in certain, at times inferior, ways), loud criticisms of various thematics we hold dear,… the yoozh, really, of explicit material morality police never manage to react to so quickly as the mere fact he uses the word “cunt” and describes entering one. US morality is so inherently corrupt it begs for the occasional Miller to come along and poke it in the eye. I really can’t stand pearl-clutching over sex.

• Provocative being the key word here. This is provocateur art, the point is to get a rise out of you, it’s worth it because his writing is smoothe as butter and musical as jazz, he’s willing to address parts of the self and human condition that most people are too scared to look at, and he hits occasional notes of warmth and understanding for this crowded concept of human existence on earth.

• Which is to say, what drives me to write these notes on his work is his writing answers a question I had, about where a certain type of digital writing comes from, a genre of almost exclusively male self-proclaimed “degenerate” and “base” writers basically pack as much provocation and sacred cow slaughter per word as possible in usually low punctuation run-on sentences. “Sacred cows” often not turning out to be so sacred, a cliche of this genre are corporate boardroom meetings devolving to turgid orgies of either obscene sex acts or insanity-laced violence, both of which lead to vomiting and body horror. See, ‘cuz corporate culture bad. Now I know that these works derive, either knowingly or unaware, from Miller.

• Which is a poor inheritance, none of those writers are any good. That genre of degenerate writing was interesting the first time I saw it for novelty, it’s abjectly boring thereafter. A key distinction here is that Miller’s crowdedness is not packed with content but a brain full of thoughts, but also because Miller is being truthful and honest about himself. Those losers write to hide the fact they don’t have much self to offer anyone. Miller at least has a personality.

• One of the blurbs on the back is from William Gass, and now I understand The Tunnel more. It’s Gass’s attempt to write like Miller.

• The first time I read The Tunnel I loved it. The second time, I hated it. Unlike Miller, it uses his provacateur poetics to create a character study. The difference between loving and hating The Tunnel is merely that I met and actually worked with that character, and now that a character much like him runs the United States, I don’t want anything more to do with him. He’s no longer interesting in his narcissistic rage that his privileges make him neither special nor loved, and belief that society withheld him from greatness personally.

• The Tunnel has had a recent surge of renewed interest and Discourse on Substack Notes, and I was wondering how that happened until I learned it had been recently republished. Perhaps it’s time for a Miller retrospective.

• I wonder what my feelings would have been like had I read Miller sooner. I briefly dated an American flight attendant when I lived in the United Arab Emirates who loved Miller, what would I had thought if I took the recommendation then? Also funny to imagine reading this book in the UAE, but that never would have been in public anyway, there aren’t, or at least weren’t, reading third spaces there.

• The first time I had ever heard of Miller was in high school, largely hanging out with goths. It would make sense that angsty teenagers of various countercultures would take an interest in Miller the same as the Beats, Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, the Anarchist Cookbook. Too bad those kids hadn’t heard of Pynchon or Patchen’s The Journal of Albion Moonlight!

• More specifically, amongst the goth forums (yes, goth subculture message boards on the pre-social media “world wide web”) and punk house parties, Miller discourse was largely around a debate of, “Is he a good writer?” which generally involved a few people of the brusque and final opinion that his work is terrible and should be thrown in the trash, and others seeking ways of explaining that they really do think there’s some value to it. I remember wanting to read Miller just to have an opinion on this debate, and simply not getting around to it.

• No doubt Miller is a good writer. It’s their ability to sit in the discomfort of the content that determines whether the reader considers the writing calcified cyst or pearl.

• I think there are a certain type of writer craftspeople, or worse, critics, who would see Miller's logorrheic technique much like Truman Capote’s famous response to Kerouac: “That’s not writing, it’s merely typing.”

• In that sense I’m actually having more fun trying to figure out how Miller “merely typed” this. How could he start or stop, pick up the threads he started before, complete them to his satisfaction, know where they lead to the next thought and why they are connected? How did he decide what fit? and the mind boggles at considering what he may have decided didn't. What was erased or edited? How did he know when to end?

• With complex works of this sort I am increasingly of the habit of breaking down the book into mental sections of short stories. Now this section / short story is about how he and a cousin accidentally killed a kid in a rock fight. This next one is about getting lost in the rain without carfare in Far Rockaway. This next story involves the suicide of his biracial colleague with whom he had an affair. All these and more pasted together in run-on paragraphs. It becomes pretty easy to see the start and stopping points when you know where to look for them.

• Some of these “short stories” I genuinely believe should be taught in high school, as long as you find one that wouldn’t send the PTA into conniptions. The writing really is that good and should inspire kids to write themselves.

• As for inspiration, I’m not sure my own writing is really going to become Millerfied from exposure to his style. I don’t yet feel the need to write this way, structurally or thematically. It’s just a fun read.

• In that regard I’m not currently feeling like I will want to reread Tropic of Capricorn, though I do have the interest in reading more of his work.

• I plan to leave this book in a Little Free Library near my childhood home. I like to imagine a teenager me finding it there and deciding to read it due to its stupid sex-obsessed blurbs. Or perhaps an adult will take umbridge and throw it away. Still worth the petty provocation.