Always Merry And Bright

Slightly disappointed mood.

The pseudo-Dylan movie "I'm Not There" seemed to fall between two stools. It didn't grab the non-Dylan fan in my house...so no conversions...and for someone like me it missed the point (about my personal vision of Dylan, at least) by acting so glum. Even the much-touted Cate Blanchett performance only managed world-weary punk existentialist - and utterly missed the wit, the venomous sarcasm, the furious energy and self-confidence - oh and the humanity and sensitivity. I'd recommend watching Don't Look Back (1967) if you want to see that period in something like a true light. And if (as this movie attempted) you want a phantasmagoric movie - capturing something of the atmosphere of some of Bob's songs, rather than mere 'reality' I'd go to Bob himself, and enjoy Masked and Anonymous (2003), or even the much-maligned Renaldo and Clara (1978). And for real fans, try Martin Scorcese's No Direction Home.

More vague disappointment

I came across John Fante in the library and happened to know that Charles Bukowski rated him highly.

I can see what he means in terms of vividness, painful honesty, etc – in fact if I didn’t know I would have thought Bukowski wrote it - but (just like with Bukowski) I eventually get tired of the unrelenting ugliness and grimness. And that isn’t because I haven’t lived in poverty (I have, more than once).

For instance – in Ask The Dust the Mexican girl is portrayed as smoking dope as though it’s heroin or cocaine (OK, written in 1939 by a self-tormenting ex-Catholic), they score in what sounds more like an opium den than anything Louis Armstrong, Carl Sagan or Bob Marley would have recognised. She then duly goes mad (as in Reefer Madness) and so on.

Very disappointing.

But, as I say, for all the vividness of the writing I always found Bukowski too glum and angry. I prefer the sheer reckless glee of Henry Miller. But then again, he escaped from the puritanism of the USA, unlike Fante the proud American, and expressed hatred for much of American Life, even though he retired there eventually.

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.
Henry Miller

Starving writers writing about writing and writers goes back a long way, from Knut Hamsun to Miller, from Fante, Bukowski and Kerouac, etc.

And now I plan to publish something that deserves more work, but represents what happens when you sit down to speed write a book – so I guess I should shut up.

Although, the Unwritten Books Project sounds fun.

A Reader's Guide to the Unwritten amused my, too - in a Guardian blog.

More upset than I can say

I hate to lose George Carlin before I got to see a live set.

I'll put more up on Only Maybe, but for those who don't understand the power of words over your sensibilities - don't even go there. Or his website...

I really thought Lenny Bruce had worked a lot harder than D.H. Lawrence to show people that words can never hurt them. Henry Miller did a lot - but once the hardline, radical feminists trashed his reputation (not seeming to see how he and Anais had worked to liberate the world from prudery) all his good work, all his wonderfully humorous, humane and liberating work has faded away. Shame. After all, Erica Jong seemed to think he had something to contribute (Henry, I mean).

And now the puritans and prudes will only remember George for his Seven Words you can't say on television (as they snigger and gasp away).

People come and people go, and most people still let Words upset them, even if their childhood rang to

Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me...

Bye, George! Rock on! (What a shame the UK never heard of you, and I never got to a live gig). I hope you and Bill Hicks and Lenny Bruce and Robert Anton Wilson, and Timothy Leary have a great time mind-melding in the bardos...

And forget the rude words (OK, OK, a couple of 'shits') - in this greedy Western world of object-fetishism, try five minutes of the comedy genius on:

A Place For My Stuff

Just write the damned book!

Last year a fellow student at MLA told me about writing a novella in a month...a small community project has grown to a gigantic web event, with thousands of participants, so this year I decided to kick in and start, at least...

To write 50,000 words in 30 days means 1,666.666666 words per day...

I have done a set for Day One (so far so good) and you can find me over at NaNoWriMo under my avatar name of BogusMagus.

I suspect my lack of invention, and the fact that I have found my life stranger than fiction means that I probably will end up writing a roman a clef (a thinly disguised set of autobiographical events, and real people) but that may come as no surprise if you realise how much I enjoyed Henry Miller when younger. He, rather than (say) the mournful and forlorn Kerouac, gave me the courage to cheerfully plunge into poverty and insecurity in pursuit of a creative life. Miller didn't have a mum to go home to (like Kerouac) or a small allowance arriving every month (like Burroughs) but had to scrounge, beg, borrow, hustle and steal to get by. Actually, he probably exaggerated his lowlife credentials, in fictionalising his life, but there remains the ring of truth (even if Feminists destroyed interest in his work in the 70s, by putting him down as a male chauvinist). Actually, (apart from mistaking the character for the man), they seem to have missed his role in getting rid of censorship, which began the process of truly debating in real language about people's needs, and made honest writing possible. But hey, I don't want to start all that here.

Don't think of it as too late to start, or plan ahead for next year. Why not register anyway, to get access to the support, advice, forums, etc? I intend to give it a try, at least - and with no judges, no cost, etc - what's to lose?

As I always thought of this as my own notebook - that I can write in from anywhere, and pick up from anywhere else - I haven't considered the fact that there is a sort of 'audience' out there. If I start writing it with someone in mind then I will freeze up. The whole point seemed to me to be to have a place to jot everything down, and I have no desire for a 'what I had for breakfast' kind of diary.

Still, I have decided that this is lacking entertainment value. I am going to carry a floppy disk around again, for my own research stuff (which, as you can tell, was notes towards the money piece I never completed for the ecology centre - something like Henry Miller's 'Money, and how it gets that way' covering alternative currencies, my extremely limited grasp of financial tools from gambling odds to insurance schemes, from pyramid selling to pension plans, with sidetracks into wealth distribution, real wealth and illth, etc.)

It's all got too personal now, so I am pulling the notes down until I can compile them. There's a quote from Henry here

The material here is just undigested stuff which doesn't fit into my website anywhere, yet. I am just trying to slowly get away from living in a room full of fire-hazard paper; papers that have been lugged from place to place, buried, dug up again, shuffled, pruned and copied. (Oh, and occasionally put in a pile and burned). Anyway - I found this Intro to one of Henry Miller's shorter pieces. Sorry if you think he is a sexist, sadly his portrait and his reputation got re-written in the 70s by people who never (apparently) read any of his stuff. Or just read the porn that he and feminist Nin wrote for cash. Hey ho. So here's the natural mystic.

STAND STILL LIKE THE HUMMINGBIRD Henry Miller (1962)
"No, things have not changed a whit since Tropic of Cancer days, unless for the worse. La vie en rose is definitely not for the artist. The artist - I employ the term only for the genuine ones- is still suspect, still regarded as a menace to society. Those who conform, who play the game, are petted and pampered. Nowhere else in the world, unless it be in Soviet Russia, do these conformists receive such huge rewards, such wide recognition for their efforts.

So much for the dominant note. As for the subdominant, the thought is don't wait for things to change, the hour of man is now and, whether you are working at the bottom of the pile or on top, if you are a creative individual you will go on producing, come hell or high water. And this is the most you can hope to do. One has to go on believing in himself, whether recognised or not, whether heeded or not. The world may seem like hell on wheels - and we are doing our best, are we not, to make it so? but there is always room, if only in one's soul, to create a spot of Paradise, crazy though it may sound.

When you find you can go neither backward nor forward, when you discover that you are no longer able to stand, sit or lie down, when your children have died of malnutrition and your aged parents have been sent to the poorhouse or the gas chamber, when you realize that you can neither write nor not write, when you are convinced that all the exits are blocked, either you take to believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird. The miracle is that the honey is always there, right under your nose, only you were too busy searching elsewhere to realize it. The worst is not death but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous."

The other night I brought home the film "Henry and June" - about Henry Miller, Anäis Nin and Henry's wife June. I have long been a fan of Miller's (even though that wasn't terribly popular with several friends who had him down as a misogynist and pornographer, etc).

Somewhere in the 70s, some people ran The Village Bookshop in Piccadilly, with the express intent of publishing EVERYTHING by their favourite authors, of which Miller was one. I got to read some of the treasures, and obscurities.

Being a clown, at the time, I love "The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder"; there was "Stand Still Like the Hummingbird"; his amazing piece on Rimbaud; essays like "Money, and how it gets that way" - just so many wonders which he had a hard time publishing in his life, and which have fallen back out of print, since. So that all you find in our library are the Tropics, and bits of porn. At least, out in the stacks, I found his letters to Anäis Nin, and a biography of her, too - although I am ambivalent about her myself (she may have been his Muse, but she is not mine). He introduced me to Knut Hamsun and Blaise Cendrars, too. If you are curious, check out the Memorial Library @ Big Sur

What I have in common with Miller is the opiniated enthusiasm (I can talk forever on any subject which enthuses me, but am totally dismissive or completely silent, about things I do not consider important or interesting). Arrogance and self-absorption?

He was one of the writers who told me I should "go for it" whatever "it" was - so I did. He warned me I might often be hungry and desperate, that I might have to swallow my pride, accept humiliation and disappointment - that there would be times when I was the only one with any faith in myself. (He was right!)

He also reminded me that that was the only way I was going to have real ecstatic highs (he was right about that, too!)

When I stayed in Paris in 1970, I lived near the Villa Seurat (same metro station, Alésia, in the 14th Arrondisement), and occupied a squatted artist's studio for several months, earning money on the street (selling jewellery) and generally feeling daring and romantic. It was Nelly Gareau who got me there, and gave me the courage, and we travelled for a couple of years after, but I haven't heard from her since. In a Google search the only person of that name/age group I can see is in Kentucky. Could that be her? Ah, it's so hard to tell. I don't pursue old friends any more than I dig back through ancestors. If they emerge again from the world, fine, but I always preferred the serendipitious meeting to the appointment.

And I write in this blog, as he wrote letters to all his friends, because people can only take so much babbling conversation. Does it take away the head of steam that would allow one to write a book? Or is it a necessary preparation and priming of the pump? At least it makes me write a minimum of a few hundred words almost every day....

"The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth ever invented."

I am sad to say our library isn't well stocked in some of my favourite writers - but then again - they were (still are) fairly dangerous. I have thrown in a few quotes from Henry Miller because so few people realise what a joyous and liberating writer he can be - it's a shame that this library only has a bit of 'porn' churned out to be able to eat - and not even the books which defend and explain that phase of his life. His enthusiasm, mysticism, literary criticism, etc are mostly unrepresented. And my own collection got trashed - or rather hijacked - (along with the rest of my library) back in 1994. Hey ho.

For completely different reasons I love William Burroughs - and (again) he isn't well represented here. Try this interview with J.G.Ballard about Burroughs.

"I am just having a good time.

And, I think this is a very important part of life–that people learn how to play, and that they make life a game, rather than a struggle for goals,

don't you know."


--Henry Miller

Why then do we not give ourselves -- recklessly, abundantly, completely?
If we realized we were part of an endless process, that we had neither to lose or to gain, but only to live it out, would we behave as we do?

--Henry Miller

Always Merry and Bright

And if you have managed to get past thinking Mr Miller was just a pornographer (or whatever your misapprehension) why not support the memorial library people and all the artists they encourage. Look here...

"What we all hope in reaching for a book, is to meet a man of our own heart, to experience tragedies and delights which we ourselves lack the courage to invite, to dream dreams which will render life more hallucinating, perhaps also to discover a philosophy of life which will make us more adequate in meeting the trials and ordeals which beset us. To merely add to our store of knowledge or improve our culture, whatever that may mean, seems worthless to me".
--Henry Miller

It's not easy to keep your spirits up when you're out on the street (or living without credit), but it can be done.

My role model was Henry Miller, dropped out in Paris and determined to be a writer even if he starved, or had to lose face and scrounge his meals. He starts Tropic of Cancer (a record of that period of his life) with this jaunty, cheeky, nonchalant phrase:

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.

Feeling fractionally better today, after missing yet another holiday period. Read a few books, though. I've read a couple of Carl Hiasen's in the last few days. Strange mixture - satiric comedy thrillers, or something. I first of all read "Lucky You", and then "Stormy Weather". There are some grim moments, and a lot of comedy, a bit like a Tarantino movie...

And this quote popped out of Stormy Weather, pointing back to Henry Miller [Tropic of Cancer], one of my favourite writers in my youth (no, not for the rude bits but for the anarcho-mysticism):

"Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity - I belong to the earth! I say that lying on my pillow and I can feel the horns sprouting from my temples."