Henry Miller Memorial Library

Big Sur, California
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Posts Tagged ‘Henry Miller’

Henry Miller and Scott Walker: Awkwardly forced comparisons

Posted on: by hmmler

I’m a huge fan of Scott Walker.

Former Ohio-boy-genius-turned-Righteous Brothers-wanna-be and English pop sensation, via the Walker Brothers, Scott Walker is amazing!  He quit the Walker Brothers and went on to make a series of strange, terrifying, surrealistic MOR-y, and outlandishly beautiful pop records in the late 60s.  He’s Frank Sinatra on acid – but with a better voice and comparatively negligible Mob ties.

Scott Walker 4 is his iridescent masterpiece.

On the surface, he and Henry Miller have little in common.  But a “deeper dive” will reveal a set of very, very tenuous and ignorable similarities.

Similarity #1: Tacky usage of the “eye as an artistic image.”

Any artist or drug-addled musician will tell you: never, ever, super-impose your eye inside a cloud.  It’s super-corny.  It’s like some Goldman Sachs hedge fund manager got stoned and thought, “Whoa!  What if you super-imposed an eye on a cloud?!”

Well, Miller’s editors did it for his Cosmological Eye.  It hasn’t aged well.  But what’s done is done.

Scotty-boy took it a step further.

On the cover of Scott 3 – an album that boasts no songs in 4/4 time; they’re all really weird waltzes – our hero is contemplating life’s mysteries - or staring at the neighborhood cat? – inside someone’s (his?) pupil.

Does he pull it off?  Just barely, if only for the harrowing tension of “Rosemary,” in which our bummed out, upper class, tightly-wound protagonist has an rapturously out-of-character fling with Jim, a traveling salesman:

He smelled of miracles
With stained glass whispers
You loved his laughter
You tremble beneath him once again

Whoa boy! (Dabbles sweat from forehead.)  It’s like “Eleanor Rigby” poured through some Hitchcockian prism of lust (see Similarity #3 below.)

So to re-cap: pretty weird regarding the eye stuff, eh?

Similarity #2: Both found fame in Europe

Miller embraced Paris with open arms.  While “fame” is kind of pushing it, he was published there, naturally, and retains a demi-god-like status.  Walker, meanwhile, left Ohio for LA , then fled to London, where the Walker Brothers became the second-biggest band in the land, right after the Beatles!

Similarity #3: Both were vulgar guys

Miller’s nasty streak is well-documented, but did you know Walker dropped the “w”-bomb (that’d be “whore”) in 1967′s “Hero of the War?” How about that?

I could go on, but it’s pretty indisputable: the similarities are numerous, eerie, and irrefutable.

Now please check out these three stunning Walker compositions, “Plastic Palace People,” “Boy Child,” and the best vocal performance of the rock era, “Dutchess.”

Is arrogance a prerequiste for being a good writer?

Posted on: by hmmler

Or, is “arrogance a prerequisite to being a good artist?”  The answer, of course, is “no.”

But it doesn’t stop people from asking that question.

Actually, um… no one explicity asked that question.  I just did, because I was reading this nifty exchange on the forum via Strange Famous records.

In it, a poster noted how Henry Miller, when he gets going, is the greatest writer of all-time.  Other times, however, Miller:

…just falls back on his ego, talks of how he has all the answers… thinks he is a more evolved person, and yet fucks over everyone he supposedly cares about in real life….

Damn.

Henry Miller: Arrogant guy

Of course, the poster is correct.  Miller certainly had a chip on his shoulder.  I attribute this to a few reasons:

1.  He did think he had the answers.  And maybe he did: he grew up in a highly corporate-ized, commoditized, and buttoned-up culture, and discovered – lo and behold – people were utterly miserable.  (See The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.)  He took the road less traveled, and all things considered, things worked out pretty well for him.

2.  He had a brutal, doting mother.  The fact that he became a moralizing narcissist is no surprise to us professionals in the world of therapy.  Classic case of projection.  (Further analysis explored in separate blog.)

3.  To be a novelist – or any artist – you have to think, at least on some level, you’re the bees knees.  How else can you sell yourself – hustle, as it were – if  you don’t feel it in your gut?

Point #3 is the gist of another commenter’s response:

but isn’t that essentially what a writer is? part-narcissist, part-insecure-freak?  i think as a writer you’ve got to be somewhat arrogant when you write because you got to tell yourself “Is what I’m writing important enough for others to read?”‘

Emily Dickinson: Not arrogant

Who knows?  A lot of the great writers out there (Faulkner, Kesey, Melville spring to mind), at least from what I can tell, from their public personas, aren’t/weren’t offensively arrogant.

Perhaps it’s also because Miller’s working in the autobiographical/confessional form.  Hard to toot your own horn within the confines of fiction.

Peace!

No, Henry Miller would *not* approve of your gnarly wing-eating contest!

Posted on: by hmmler

The East Coast can be a tough place. Cruel, gritty, bone-chilling, and downright mean. No more so than Philadelphia. What a hellhole.

This is the town where they built a jail in the basement of the football stadium due to the excessive amount of violent drunks in attendance. Where their fans booed Santa Claus.  They even booed a football player when he laid motionless on-field after a neck injury.  Despicable.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise when in an inspiring display of civic pride, these intelligent and worldly gifts-to-humanity hold Wingathon, an annual wing-eating contest.

This year was particularly memorable, as – if you can believe it – it dissolved into “depravity” and yes, public nudity. (Note: local legend El Wingador, ate 254 wings in 30 seconds, yet still lost.)

That's "El Wingador," aka Bill Simmons. Note: "Wingador" is Spanish for "quintuple coronary bypass"

According to the intrepid reporter who had to sit through this vile scene:

There’s rampant drunkenness and the kind of behavior I would be embarrassed to have my kids see, or to even experience with my wife.

Now that’s class.  But it was this quote in particular that caught our eye(s):

On the surface, the whole event is a monument to debauchery that would make Henry Miller blush. Women all over are showing everyone their breasts, and I’m not talking about all the professional strippers.

Hmmm.

It’s nice that ol’ Hank got props, but I must disagree. A common misconception about Miller is that he was an amoral and savage hedonist. Sure, he struggled with lust.  Sure the mere sight of boobies may have sent him frothing.  But this we can assure you: he wouldn’t approve of this wing-eating stuff.

Miller is cool because unlike other so-called hedonists (none immediately come to mind, though they’re more than likely French), he’s not looking at the stars from the gutter. Miller was a romantic, a naturalist; he traces his lineage, in my opinion to Blake, Emerson, Whitman. Miller’s vivacity and thirst for beauty – aesthetic, spiritual, whatever; not sauce-stained fingertips – is why he continues to inspire. He was no aesthetic nihilist! Just read The Air Conditioned Nightmare; he rails against this kind of hyper-commercial grossness.

Henry Miller liked this stuff

Here at the library, for $3, we sell Miller’s “Notice to Visitors.” In it, he concludes:

“Let us do our best, even if it gets us nowhere. In the midst of darkness there is light. ‘I am the light of the world,’ said Jesus. He said a mouthful. Light, more light!”

Does this sound like a man who’d be down with smoldering piles of discarded chicken bones, weird misshapen breasts glistening in the pale Philly winter sun, and oozing rivers of ranch dressing?

No way, kids.

So to all journalists out there: use those Henry Miller references wisely.  We see all (thanks Google Alerts!)

And to my East Coast brethren: put down the wings. Inhale deeply.  Exhale, being ever-conscious of your breathing. Let all thoughts of sausage, knockwurst, bratwurst, and other delectable cured meats gently melt away.   Align those chakras and please, for the love of God, eat some chard,*

*Don’t worry.  If you find the chard to be too bitter you can always sautee the stalks in garlic and olive oil!

Henry Miller Library: A perspective “from the archives”

Posted on: by hmmler

Henry Miller was one of the most prolific and dedicated writers ever.  Each waking moment was spent with tremendous effort toward putting down on paper just as many words as was possible.  Because of this, he has an almost overwhelming bibliography – from broadsides to the epic trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion.

For me [Ed: that would be Keely, our esteemed archivist], one of the most interesting parts of seeing so many different books pass through our hands here at the Henry Miller Memorial Library is to determine exactly what printing of each book we’re seeing.  There are different values associated with each printing, obviously the earlier the printing, the more rare and the more exciting.

To use the bibliography of primary sources is a really fun project – you determine the title of the book that you have (an easy task) and turn to the section of the book that contains descriptions of each of the known printings of that title.  Page by page and line by line, the description in the bibliography will help you determine if you’ve got, for instance, a third or fourth printing of Tropic of Capricorn.

To take your figuring of your book one step further, you can then go on the internet and determine the going rate of the specific printing of the book you hold in your hands.  As a matter of full disclosure: I have an addiction to books, and for me, this process is simply the most fun.

Here at the library, we are constantly working to make Henry Miller and his work as available to the information-clamoring public as possible.  As part of this attempt, we have gotten the help of an incredibly tech-savvy intern to take the word-document bibliography of primary sources of Henry Miller’s into a searchable database.  There are advantages to this format – having the entire process simplified to a few clicks of the mouse!

We are in the process of finding new interns for the summer – if you are interested in more information regarding our internship, please contact Keely by emailing keely@henrymiller.org

The greatest book of the 20th Century. Discuss.

Posted on: by hmmler

That, ahem, would be “Tropic of Cancer.”

A book, first published in France in 1934, that wasn’t published in Miller’s own country until 1961.  Could you imagine?  Not being able to buy your own book in your own country for almost 30 years?  Not cool.  Stupid Puritans.

No matter how you describe it, Tropic of Cancer is as powerful and vital as ever. For those not in the know, the book describes Miller’s wild and heady times as an ex-pat writer in 1930s-France, and ingeniously blends confessional writing with fiction, metaphysical insights, and stream-of-consciousness expositions.  It’s pretty saucy too.  Henry, you devil!

It also contorts our perception of what a book should be.  The narrative arc, well, it doesn’t exist.  Rather than go from Point A to Point B, it goes from Point A to point…Pluto.  And in that sense, it was strikingly post-modern and bad-ass.

So, this is it, kids. The Big One. And we’re stoked to now be able to sell it online on the Henry Miller Library Store.

But don’t take our word for it. Samuel Beckett hailed it as “a momentous event in the history of modern writing.” No small feat!

Archives Update!

Posted on: by hmmler

I have not posted on the blog in far too long, and for that I am very sorry. Life has bee busy, busy, busy here at the library. See our new deck?

The new deck during the Animal Collective show!

The new deck during the Animal Collective show!

Another deck shot at the Animal Collective Show

Another deck shot at the Animal Collective Show

New deck in the daytime

New deck in the daytime

You should come down and have a cup of coffee on it, if you’re in the area, or plan on coming to one of our events if you’re too far away for a casual cup of joe. Either way, the deck is a fantastic addition to the library.

My purpose in talking with you now is different than the public events that we have at the library, however. I come to you as the archivist of the library to give you the news of the work we’re doing in the back office with the old papers and the curly handwriting and the Parisian Air Mail envelopes. The work of the archives in this summer season is to have the entire Schnellock Collection accessioned within our system to the point that the rest of the holdings currently are: in an electronic database with an accession number, title, date, and to be properly stored in acid free boxes and interleaved with acid free paper. This is particularly exciting because the Schnellock Collection is the most valuable of the things that the archives owns, holding rare manuscripts, essays, and letters between Emil Schnellock and Henry Miller. These papers, dating back to Miller’s time in Paris are the most exciting and rewarding portion of the archives to sort through for all of us. Currently, our new intern Joey is doing some preservation work on an essay that Miller wrote about D.H. Lawrence prior to the publication of Tropic of Cancer when he was encouraged to write something respectable.

Joey is our new intern! He arrived at the beginning of the week and spent the first few days getting settled in Big Sur and how is sinking his teeth full force into the Emil Schnellock Collection, interleaving, giving titles, and reading insights into Henry Miller’s early writing life. He comments occasionally in the office about Henry Miller’s feelings about James Joyce based on the essay he’s working on right now. The last quotation he read was, “Joyce has nothing whatsoever to say.” I think he’s enjoying his work. I will tell you more about Joey as the summer unfolds. For now, I will only tell you that he has spent the last 18 months in Mongolia, and that is something I can’t wait to hear more about. Perhaps I’ll give him some homework to write us a blog post about an aspect of his time there.

Garen is another intern who has already accomplished a great deal, and is working remotely from San Francisco. Garen is a computer-techie to the max, with a computer science degree and an expressed interest in working with us to be as efficient with the tasks we do on the computer so as to limit our time staring at our little laptops and more time staring at the redwoods, old and fun papers, and each others smiling faces. I completely agree with this goal. So far he has taken the Shifreen and Jackson bibliography (updated constantly by William Ashley), which is the most comprehensive source for all printings of Miller titles, and turned the word file into a keyword searchable database with each book as its own record. Now, this is work that if I had sat down to cut/copy/and paste all of the pieces of information into their respective fields, would have taken me months. MONTHS of computer time was broken down into a week of Garen writing a computer program that would automate the entire process and tell the computer to pull out bits of information and call each piece a title, a date, or so on based only on where it falls in relation to the rest of the information. He explained it to me so well and I am butchering the relaying of that information to you, but I hope you can understand what an amazing feat this has been. Before the summer is over he will also be implementing a Henry Miller Library Archives website (which I will design, and he will code) AND will show me how to make updates with, as he describes, little to no coding experience. Which is more or less where I sit.

So it’s exciting times here at the Henry Miller Library, especially in the dark back office where we’re all sitting plodding through the stacks of work that pile up while we’re busy making coffee, holding all night music festivals or hanging out with each other and having a barbecue (which the library and Folk Yeah! crew did last night in order to reconvene after a busy week, enjoy each others company, and prepare for a summer filled with concerts, festivals, and rock stars).

Part of the work of this summer for me is a little less fun than treasure hunting through the Schnellock Collection, but essential in order to keep the archives afloat. That task is to find a grant (or a couple of grants) to support the Henry Miller Library Archives. We are currently hoping to find $25,000 for the implementation of a climate control system in the storage facility here at the library. We have been working with libraries in the peninsula (a MASSIVE thanks to CSUMB and their library director Bill Robnett) to protect our holdings this winter but we would like to be able to store our holdings safely here onsite. It is a reachable goal, but we need support, as archiving is not a particularly lucrative business, yet the preservation of literary history is essential. Please consider making a donation of any size to the Henry Miller Library Archives fund.

Additionally, I am looking for a sponsor for a printing of the first installment of a quarterly Archives Newsletter that will be issued in the fall of 2009. If this is a project you would be interested in supporting, please email me at keely@henrymiller.org

Thanks all for reading, and I promise to be more with it with the updates!

And to leave you, this is how I feel right now about the state of California.

Whatever, California...

Whatever, California...

Submitted to the Big Sur Roundup, and here for those of you outside of its readership

Posted on: by hmmler

Life at the Henry Miller Library is busy despite the season – preparations for the upcoming summer concerts, work in the archives, writing workshops, and, of course the massive amount of leg work for the Big Sur International Short Film Screening series that we all love so well.  Just a few things we want to make sure you know about:

We are introducing a new regular event – Second Sundays at the Miller!   So come by for an all day concert on the second Sunday of every month from June to September.  Likewise, we are very interested in featuring local bands and musicians for these events, so if you’d like to play, come down to the library and talk to us, there’s an application on our website (http://www.henrymiller.org).  We really want to be able to feature all you wonderful local musicians!

Also, look forward to May 30th when we will bring Alisa Fineman and Don Usner (author of Natural History of Big Sur) to the library to attack the question “Where is Big Sur?”  Those of you who knew about this program that was set to run last year will remember that it was scheduled for June 28th, a time when the answer to that question was largely, “at the Carmel Middle School.”  Keep in touch for more information about this community gathering.

Work in the archives is buzzing along, as well.  We are looking for new interns for the summer.  If you know students interested in library science, please let them know to visit our website to find more information about our internship in the archives. Keely has been in hiding among the wealth of letters, manuscript pages, and notes that passed between Henry Miller and Emil Schnellock from Paris to Brooklyn in the time around the 1930s.  So if you haven’t seen her in a while, trust she’s doing well and is in her element amidst engrossing Miller history.

Also!  If you haven’t seen Magnus for a while you can trust that he’s been busy, among other things, planning and carrying out two successful writing workshops.  The annual children’s writing workshop was held in December, and the young adult and fiction workshop in March.  Participants come back year after year for these unique and important workshops in the rapidly growing genre of young adult writing.

And, if you have been missing Eric it’s because he’s been in the thick of the planning stages of the Big Sur International Short Film Screening Series.  With invitations out to 2000+ filmmakers internationally, submissions are already streaming in.  This year we are proud to announce a slight change in the regular program – we have invited guest judges to have a say in the process.  We’ve not found just any guest judges, but Academy Award winning (and local!) cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, Academy Award nominee and legendary composer Philip Glass, cutting edge musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson, Academy Award nominated actor Woody Harrelson, feature film editor Susan Littenberg, and film producer Lawrence Inglee.  So get ready for Thursday nights!

We are all very busy, but we promise that if you’ve been missing us there are two things you can do to solve this problem: you can get ready for all of the wonderful events we are working so hard to bring you, or you can come on down to the library, which contrary to popular belief is open and we are excited to see you all.  Don’t forget about our local discount.  We’ve got a wonderful selection of books now and will have even more soon – if you want to see something on or shelves, let us know, we love suggestions.

I promise I won't forget how much I love Henry Miller again

Posted on: by hmmler

I have fallen back in love with Henry Miller today.  I do it about once every couple of months.  I will admit, I have not read an entire book by Henry Miller in a long time (I did pull out Sexus a few months ago and started in on that, though not too long after that, became too engrossed in Angels and Demons by Dan Brown).  Today, though, I want to go home and curl up with Tropic of Cancer, which I haven’t read since I was in high school.  I want to re-read Black Spring, and I want to sink my teeth properly back into Sexus, and then read the entire Rosy Crucifixion.  I want to read it all again!  I normally find myself picking through my two favorites: Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch and The Colossus of Maroussi, but today nothing but the sordid tales of a hand-to-mouth living, sex crazed, dingy apartment dwelling, wine slugging, chain smoking, letter writing fool will do.  I don’t care how peaceful he felt in Big Sur or how majestic he found Greece and all he met there.  I want to know how warped he was by the loss of his June, and I want to hear him borrowing money from friends, acquaintances and sometimes, complete strangers.  I want to hear an account of eating food and drinking wine and staying up in bars until dawn.  I want to hear the earth shattering philosophy that he tucked into these accounts.  I want to place myself with Henry in Paris, and I want to live through it all, and I want him to take me there.

Why this sudden rebirth of the love I have always felt for Henry Miller’s writing?  I have started to import onto my computer the scanned images that we have of the Emil Schnellock Collection in the archives here.  As it takes around five minutes for each CD to transfer, there is wait time that I am more than happy to spend by reading selections of each disc.  The first one I popped in had an eight-page letter that Miller had written to Emil Schnellock, his childhood friend who he wrote numerous letters to during his time in Paris.  There is no better way to understand someone’s life than by reading the letters of someone who Wrote Letters.  Miller, a pathological writer, would write prolific letters to his friends when he could not figure what to add next to whichever novel he was working with at any given time.  They act as extensions of his novels – it is easy to select portions of his novels that stemmed from portions of his letters.  Miller’s work is all based in a romantic ideal of his own autobiography (with the exception of Smile At the Foot of the Ladder), and so it is no stretch to connect his letters with his novels and his life.  It is an incredibly organic and interesting relationship, and makes the pieces in this archive even more interesting, I would say, than the letters from a writer for whom the work and life and correspondence was more separate.  Henry’s zest for writing manifested itself in not only a huge body of work, but also an astounding number of letters to an incredible number of correspondents.

So, I’ll leave you here as I head home to read some Henry Miller (I will also be picking up Letters to Emil edited by George Wickes, which are more letters written to Emil Schnellock by Henry Miller.  If you’re interested in a copy of this book we have a few at the library, so come on down or give a call) and maybe I’ll even write a letter.  I will also leave you with an image of my favorite find of the day.  This is the closing of a letter to Emil Schnellock from Henry Miller from March 16, 1931.  It makes me realize that I would have been good friends with Henry.  Good friends, indeed.

hemmorroides

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