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The great publisher Barney Rosset has passed away. Rosset bought Grove Press in the 1950s, championing the work of countless writers, including: Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Jack Kerouac, Malcolm X, Pablo Neruda, Kenzaburo Oe, Kathy Acker, and David Mamet.

In the 1960s, he launched the provocative magazine, Evergreen Review. In a highly recommended interview at The Paris Review, Rosset shared his first encounter with Miller’s work as a college freshman at Swarthmore:

I read Tropic of Cancer, which I bought at Steloff’s Gotham Book Mart on Forty-seventh Street. Who told me about it, I don’t know, but I liked it enormously and I wrote my freshman English paper about both it and The Air Conditioned Nightmare … After I read Tropic of Cancer, I left—decided to go to Mexico. Because the book had influenced me so much, I left in the middle of the term. But I ran out of money. I never got to Mexico; I got as far as Florida and I came back. Four weeks had gone by. They had reported me missing to the United States government. My family didn’t know where I was. I came back, sort of sadly.

(Via Sarah Weinman)

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luclatulippe:

Henry Miller had the same issues focussing on productivity in 1933 as we do today. Of course, he had the added advantage of living at a time without Facebook or Tumblr. 

I particularly like no. 7.: “…drink if you feel like it.” Oh wow! I do that!

(Thanks to my husband for finding this!)

Jeanette Winterson reviews a new book about Henry Miller's controversial novel "Tropic of Cancer."

The Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) celebrated Banned Books Week with a series of essays by YA authors called “Getting Banned.”

The authors in the Getting Banned essays have all had their work banned or challenged at some point. Follow these links to read essays by Ron Koertge, Ellen Hopkins, Susan Patron, Sonya Sones and Lauren Myracle. LARB‘s YA editor Cecil Castellucci explained: “YA authors are on the front lines of today’s censorship battle.”

The web publication will also publish a two-part essay by English professor Loren Glass about the 1960′s obscenity trials Grove Press faced for publishing William Burroughs‘ Naked Lunch and Henry Miller‘s The Tropic of Cancer. Nickel and Dimed author Barbara Ehrenreich will also publish a Banned Books Week essay on Saturday.

continued…

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Nobody has ever written about classical music like Henry Miller. If you have a Spotify account, enjoy this two-hour mix we made with inspiring writing music from Miller’s most famous books: Tropic of Cancer, Plexus, Nexus and Black Spring.

Here is Miller writing about Beethoven’s “String Quartet No. 15″ in Black Spring: “I hear again now the music of the A Minor Quartet, the agonized flurries of the strings. There’s a madman inside me and he’s hacking away, hacking and hacking until he strikes the final discord. Pure annihilation, as distinguished from lesser, muddier annihilations. Nothing to be mopped up afterwards. A wheel of light rolling up to the precipice–and over into the bottomless pit. I, Beethoven, I created it! I, Beethoven, I destroy it!”

Follow this link to get a Spotify invite for the free service. Once you have an account, check out our Henry Miller Spotify Playlist and our Haruki Murakami Spotify Playlist. We love making music mixes, so we will create more playlists for writers. If you have more ideas for a particular playlist, you can always add your suggestions in the comments section–we will update our mix.

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“I used to want to be like June Miller when I was a teenager, because she sounded so beautiful and so seductive and so dangerous… It’s interesting I didn’t want to be like Henry or Anaïs instead — the writers. I wanted to be like someone who never wrote anything.”

I first heard of Henry Miller, perhaps fittingly, when I lived with two guys in East Vancouver. One of the guys had a friend who was a postman, the other guy was having an affair with the postman’s wife. There were a few awkward moments when he snuck her in for a night or an afternoon quickie, but, all in all, things went well and I saw a book which the postman had lent to his buddy, my housemate. It was a compilation of the letters between Henry and Lawrence Durrell.
I became interested and then obsessed with Miller’s writing, read everything of his I could get my hands on.
I still have a worn copy of Tropic of Cancer by my bedside along with Flann O’Brien’s, The Poor Mouth. For some reason which I don’t want to analyze, both books are places of refuge for me when I just want to relax and enjoy the language. At times like that I don’t think as much about the content of what I’m reading as much as how the words are strung together.
Finding Henry’s writing was like the moment when Shakespeare made sense to me in high school: a light bulb shone.
In all my travels after that I kept a sharp eye open when books by Henry were displayed. Krishnamurti, Durrell, Arthur Rimbaud, Anais Nin and others were introduced to me by Henry’s writing and their books were ones I watched for too. Of course, I was watching for cheap versions of their works.
When my friend, Robin, arrived to visit me in Crete he brought a copy of The Colossus of Maroussi, written when Henry visited Lawrence Durrell and his wife in Corfu.
Surviving in a tiny room in Paris on croque monsieurs, cheese, baguettes and red wine, I planned a novel using the Paris metro map as structure. Needless to say, the novel became as confusing and mixed up as my understanding of the Paris subway system and was abandoned.
I made a pilgrimage to the street where Anais Nin lived when she and Henry were having their affair. Their conviction that analysis was necessary and their visits to Otto Rank, a student of Freud, revealed the notion that psychoses are the products of frustrated or blocked creativity. Frustrated writers can take comfort in the idea that writing is at least healthy if not profitable.
By the time I was there, the bars mentioned in his books were too expensive for me to patronise but I lingered outside the Coupole and the Dome.
I walked endlessly around Paris, imagined what it was like then, wondered why Henry was never mentioned in the list of writers who lived in the city in the 30's. There was irony in the thought of him existing from meal to meal as he worked on Tropic in the arts capital of the Western world, poor, reviled and rejected.
I didn’t know then that he and Anais Nin wrote pornography for the money of their rich patrons but I knew there had been an overwhelming rejection of him in the States and that he was involved in the debate about pornography and obscenity.
It looks like the descendants of those moral Americans who banned his books for so long have, seventy or eighty years later, taken over the government of the USA.
He described his trip across the states in The Air Conditioned Nightmare. The title pretty well demonstrated Henry’s attitude toward the system.
It gave me hope.
Here was a man with great curiosity about the world and other people and sex who ignored all the warnings and temptations which were placed before him and followed a singular path of his own. It led him to another continent, through years of poverty and piles of rejection slips. But he kept going and kept laughing.
“Always cheery and bright” was his motto and the most depressing situations could be changed for the better just by reading his books.
I know that a generation who thinks the 60's is ancient history has a hard time understanding his relevance now, but then he was like a beacon. He personified the rebelliousness and questioning which was rumbling underground.
I often wonder what he would have made of this internet, instant world. I like to think he’d re

Last week I left you with a ship hanging precariously over the edge of the known world.  On board were the mavericks Herman Melville and Helen Keller.  Joining them is the American writer and iconoclast, Henry Miller:

“One’s destination is never a place but a new way of seeing things.”

Now he tells us! 

With Miller is a relative newcomer to the world of crazy wisdom, Rick Lewis.  Mr. Lewis signed on to this journey of discovery in order to support the evolution of the species.  While acknowledging that he’s not the first to send e-postcards from the edge, he wanted to see for himself what’s out there.  Here’s part of his dispatch:

“From an evolutionary perspective, whether or not something has happened or not before, whether it has ever been done before, is not the issue.  The issue is whether we ourselves are risking, experimenting, leaning forward into “our own unknown”.

As long as I’ve known Lewis he’s been leaning, juggling, tight-rope-walking, inventing and generally horrifying people by making them ecstatically uncomfortable.  What I did not know before now is that his risk-taking has been in the service of “the greater cause of invention and ingenuity”, as he puts it.  But I’m damn glad to hear it because it presents us with the possibility of… that’s right, folks… MEANING.

Lewis is one of the few people out there talking about an individual life having meaning for the species as a whole.  Or for universal evolution generally.  Here he is again:

“When anybody tries something without knowing if it will work—in their own experience—they’re…liberating atoms of courage into the atmosphere for the rest of us to inhale.”

In other words, courage is infectious.  Expressed another way, courage is a vibration, and one that we may begin to resound with.  Is it possible that other organisms draw benefit from those same sympathetic vibrations?  Some mystics say so. 

Speaking of whom, can you see Miller at the rail of the ship?  He’s gazing over that horrifying scene as if he were standing on the very edge of the miraculous.  He’s saying something to Lewis:

“The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate.  It is for us to harmonize with this order.”

I’d love to be the fly on mainsail if Henry and Rick are going to start arguing about “meaning”.  

Flavorpill has collected the doodles of famous authors, including Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace, Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Allen Ginsberg, Mark Twain, Henry Miller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jorge Luis Borges.

The drawings ranged from insect portraits to nightmare images. Wallace drew one of the funnier pieces, doodling glasses and fangs on a photo of Cormac McCarthy.

Vonnegut (pictured with his artwork, via) incorporated many of his drawings into his books. He even had his own art gallery exhibitions. What author should illustrate their next book?

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RC from Canada has created a blog (or two) that focuses on Henry Miller. Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company: A Henry Miller Blog has everything you have ever needed to know about Henry Miller, author of Tropic of Cancer. A work in progress is the Henry Miller Alphabet.

Tropic of Cancer was first published in Paris in 1934. It was banned initially in America as obscene. A historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards permitted its publication. Read about its banning in The File Room.

RC does not claim to be an expert on Henry Miller but describes himself as a long-time enthusiast.

We received a great tip this week from Crooked Timber about The Martians of Science: Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century by István Hargittai. Apparently, Charlie Munger, recommended it at the Wesco Annual Meeting. Hargittai’s book tells the story of five brilliant men born at the turn of the twentieth century in Budapest: Theodore von Kármán, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and Edward Teller. Below is an excerpt from the introduction to the book.

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