Courtesy of a fav site around this way, Books, Inq., comes a delightful posting on Brain Pickings. A little something for those in the know and those not.
Cheers, Henry.
Click on image to expand 
mute cicada--
he, too, perfectly
at peace
Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue
best,
Don
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we should all revisit Henry Miller... frequently.
ReplyDelete"The life class meets every Monday, regardless."
"let us do our best, even if it gets us nowhere."
driving up Highway 1 which seems to me to also be 101 when I got to Big Sur I stopped in a store to get some food and at the cash register this guy taking my money tells me "that's Henry Miller over there."
he also wrote/said (what I have adopted as my motto/bell ringer): "draw how you like and die happy"
-. paint and write how you like and die happy.
"You can beat a horse underwater, but you can't make him think."
ReplyDeleteold friend Timo Juhanni Koskinen, Upper Peninsula, Michigan
At the feet of the master, the life class is always in session.
ReplyDeleteHenry.
o. p. ... wisdom from around the world, underwater, in the U.P. ... and, Henry, from beyond the grave.
ReplyDeleteCheers.
In October 1984, traveling north along Hwy. 1 with a poet friend, we stopped for an hour or so at the home of Emil White, longtime friend of Henry Miller. White had turned his home at Big Sur into the Henry Miller Memorial Library. He scraped by a bit of a living by selling used books (by mail, and now and then face to face to passing visitors). We talked a little, this and that, a fleeting hour from a week-long trip north along the coast that transformed my life in many ways.
ReplyDeleteI'd never read anything by Henry Miller. When I got back to Minneapolis the following week, the first thing I did was get a copy of Miller's book Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, his memoir more-or-less of his years living at Big Sur and the assortment of characters there who were his friends and neighbors. I spent a while moving liesurely through the book, breathing in the air of it.
Sometime after that I also read his book The Colossus of Maroussi, his account of traveling in Greece in the months just before the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe. Also really liked that one. I've read only a little of his other work, here and there, but those two have stayed with me. I go back to them from time to time.
My favorite Miller quote (from the Big Sur book): "Hunter, put down your gun! It is not the slain which accuse you, but the silence, the emptiness."
my trip (and it was SOME trip) up that way
ReplyDeletewas 10 years prior to yours...
a cpl of remembrances:
neat that you should mention Hunter Thompson... Jamie and I and Chip went up to Eugene where Angela Jung Palandri gave me my Chinese name and then we went a little out of Eugene too a party at that psychedelic bus and among others who were there was Hunter Thompson... seemed a bit of a showman-actor to me... a terrific writer as I later found out... then up to Portland where Wing K. Leong made my chop... then up to Duval, Washington and a stop-by-to-say hi to Bill Stafford ... then.... camping on the shore on Vancouver Island... then that Trans Canada train ride across...
wish I had kept my notebooks....
anyway
re: HM...
one of the very few books that I've ever made notes in : Miller's "Henry Miller on Writing" pieces/sections out of some of his various books.
try on for size, especially:
-Creation
-Reading the Face of the Worls
-Such Exquisite Torture
then inhale his The Cosmological Eye, his Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, his From Your Capricorn Friend (being Irv Stettner... check out his 'Stroker' magazine...
try to find a fun book..... Stroker Anthology 1974-1994
when I got back to The City (in 1974 or 75 I used to hang-out at a bar in t6he Village... where lots of poets also hung out and read... sure wish I'd use taken notes .... and pictures...
(OH ! The name of the bar is in the Anthology...
the Grassroots Bar on St. Mark's Place
near the book store.
Lyle:
ReplyDeleteGreat story, great journey. I was very much a 'latecomer' to Mr. Miller and find his non-fiction particularly entrancing.
Like DHL, he seems to be speaking directly to the reader, directly ... with power and intent.
& love.
Don
Ed:
ReplyDeleteSo much here to take in! Thanks, particularly, for pointing to things from Miller that hit you. You've always got me going in the right direction with HM and I'm in your debt.
And another fantastic trip ...
D
"Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction." (Anais Nin)
ReplyDeleteand
don't neglect to embrace/include
his drawings/paintings ...
HM 'had "it"
Al Huffstickler had "it"
I too, daily, write and/or paint....
so did/do lots of poets/writers....
if you can't get that image (of "her"/"it")
one way (with words)
you just might get "her/it"
t'other way via paints, pen or crayons....