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by J.J. Phillips
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| Brautigan’s Brains |
Brains blasted there
upon the page
gray matter gobbed
blood of the poet congealed
this grotesque palimpsest
last words concealed
beneath the blood
shattered neurons
glial cells unglued
glopped, splattered
A text of rage coagulated
there upon the page.
Axons impel thought to take
that fatal fiery leap
across synapse into act
fiction into fact.
Atoms smash against the skull
the neural net tattered warp and woof
the brain that strings the words extruded
globbed, fragmented, spattered
last words occluded by the final proof
The text of rage coagulated
there upon the page.
J.J. Phillips worked with the Brautigan papers at The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berleley. In a message about the poem, she added: "I know you know that Brautigan blew his brains out, literally blew his mind. What you might not be aware of is that he blew his brains out all over pages of his last manuscript... I handled them, archived them, ran my hands over his desiccated brain matter on numerous occasions, though at first I had no idea what I was touching because the Library said nothing and even denied what became all too apparent after I eliminated the other possibilities of what this strange stuff could be (I’m not unfamiliar with such things, and my eyes didn’t deceive me). The coroner’s report confirmed my suspicions. I see what’s on these pages as something of a completely different order than coffee stains, cigarette burns, the tomato seeds that Josephine Miles idly spat onto her mss., even drops of spittle, blood, semen, and the like. With Brautigan, these are the actual physical remnants of brain tissue, blood splatters, and cerebral fluid of the very brain that gave birth to the ideas he had and the words he wrote, now creating its own narrative on top of those words; and of course that act insured he’d never think or write another word. Those pages constitute both a palimpsest and something incomprehensibly more. The two ‘expressive’ mediums, the mingling of flesh and word-made-flesh, merge into one unbelievably complex and believably simple text of death.
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by Julian Semilian
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| DEVOTEES OF THE PRECIPITATE: A film by Julian Semilian |
DEVOTEES OF THE PRECIPITATE
Concerning selected ephemera of one Emuel Dnitsk, an aspirant to Man Ray's circle, also formerly known as EMmanUEL raDNITSKy. Foretelling Ray's derision, Dnitsk restricted the creation of his "moving paintings" (peintures fluides) to furtive yet copious notes. Devotees endeavors to resurrect Dnisk's vision from the precipice of reticence. Music by Laura Semilian (Cameo apparition by Bruno Schultz). 36 min.
THE DREAM LIFE OF CLEO DE MERODE
A surrealist inquiry into the notorious femme fatale's oneiric journeys.
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by Einar Moos
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| The Gratuitous Trashing of a Literary Giant |
Henry Miller, Pacific Palisades
In The New York Times of 29 January 2012, Jeanette Winterson published a review of Frederick Turner's Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" (Icons of America) . She opens her piece with -
| "What happens when the unreliable narrator turns out to be the cultural critic?" |
From reading the review, you guess: Not much.
Henry Miller was more than a narrator, he was an Author. Right, with a capital A. 'Schooled by Rabelais' in impertinence, he also gathered his mixed bag of popular philosophical thoughts from countless other writers. His travel books on Greece, e.g. "The Colossus of Maroussi"; on America, "The Air conditioned Nightmare" and "The Oranges of Big Sur", are in themselves outstanding works.
During his lifetime Henry Miller never wanted “Lovely Lesbians,” or “Moloch,” to be published. Nor did he write "Opus Pistorum", which (for whatever reasons, and possibly unscrupulous ones) erroneously credits him as the author. Plus, he never hated women; and he never bore any prejudice towards Jews.
“He had plenty of hatred, toward Jews, foreigners and especially America.”
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This is simply not true, Jeanette.
I knew Henry Miller during the last years of his life . Over long dinners in Pacific Palisades we discussed his life, his books, his love of music; we spoke of men and women who were dead or alive; of his many friends, some of whom had left an indelible memory. And let's not forget his mother. She was perhaps more important to him than he realized until the very last moment, when he fully accepted her, as she had been.
Above all he despised bores, and couldn't stand to be in their presence. He could hold conversations with muscle-building lesbians and intellectual homosexuals. But he never really cared about 'the world out there', America per se, with its wars and delusions of grandeur. He disliked people whose mentalities were shaped by a country and what they thought was its culture; and whose sole object was to make money, have children, and retire happily. That he found frightfully boring.
Still, he was American to the core, in all its immigrant waspish sense (yes, that waspishness did come through from time to time); but freed at last of these hang-ups, he stood up for himself, just like Walt Whitman did. He never questioned Whitman's beliefs, and certainly not his sexuality. Those things didn't matter, as long as the individual in question was a good writer.
It is true that Miller found it difficult to understand a woman loving another woman or a man another man. The “most awful humiliation a man might suffer” is probably a genuine statement of his. Yet it needs to be viewed in the context of the age he was brought up in; a waspish environment, where no real choice was offered other than the male/female connection as the only ”normal” relationship. The same goes for calling male homosexuals names. Instead of facing the unknowable, it was easier to reject homosexuality as “unnatural".
Anaïs Nin posed a much greater threat to Henry's psyche than merely the “awful humiliation” he had to suffer from June. June knew how to humiliate him. She knew how to pull the emotional strings. She knew Val, as she called him, too well. She had proposed that he drop everything and start writing. He was not leeching. He was given the opportunity to write. The sex was part of their 'sex-ploration,' a deal openly discussed as an exploration of romance. It was an agreed affair, a menage à trois; but one Henry could simply not face when it actually happened. Further pain came when June slept with Anaïs. Henry cracked. When Anaïs finally stepped in to direct matters, she managed to get rid of June. But let us set the record straight here.
Anaïs was "living off" her husband Hugo, who was working in a Place Vendôme bank. Henry Miller gave her the needed stimulation to shape her writing. Anaïs co-edited his Tropic of Cancer from hundreds of pages down to what you now find in the book. She raised the money from her husband to pay for its publication, along with Lawrence Durrell's Black Book and her own House of Incest. Obelisk was just the “imprint” so the books could reach the shelves, or rather be sold under the counter like illegal merchandise.
At one point Henry Miller expressed a desire to marry Anaïs once he got a divorce from June. Anaïs thought this a bad idea, since it would mean no longer being able to count on Hugo's benevolence.
To say that America is “more mercenary than the meanest whore" is indeed not a nice way to describe the place, but it wasn't meant to be nice. It was that way and still is. “Whore” has acquired various shades of meaning at different times. I suppose that today you could replace it with Wall Street Bankers, for instance.
| "Miller’s hatred: the body politic of America will be worked over and revenged through the body of Woman.” |
Here you are totally out of context. Or shall we ask if you have still something relevant to talk about? Or how about this 'heroic styling' in NYT:
| “Heroic Henry, who has the courage to say [expletive] everything and write a great book.” |
Who is afraid of “*fucking* everything?” The New York Times, or you Ms. Winterson? To moot that Miller belongs to that -
| “frontiersman mythology, where the fast-talking huckster has a six-shooter mouth” |
Is that not what every writer would like to achieve? Was this not said of you? That -
| “Miller the renegade wanted his body slaves like any other capitalist — and as cheaply as possible. When he could not pay, Miller the man and Miller the fictional creation worked out how to cheat women with romance. What they could not buy they stole. No connection is made between woman as commodity and the 'slaughterhouse' of capitalism that Miller hates.” |
Is this slander or what? Since you didn't know Miller — never met him, never spoke with him (and, so it seems, never really read him!), don't you want to find out why you paint him as so ugly? So indecent? So 'sexist'? As either so immoral or amoral (it's hard to tell whether you know the difference)?
Henry Miller was old-fashioned. His writing was his creation and should be seen as fiction. His novels (e.g., the Tropics, the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, Black Spring) are entertainments and rarely meant to be take seriously. They became his personal fiction, removed from himself. His life, however, was orderly, quiet, occasionally pedantic, respectful; and yes, sometimes he was angry at the world for the direction it was heading in.
He surely did not want to be plunked into this or that arbitrary category. Women remained a mystery to the end of his life. All he ever sought was the one woman to replace his mother. He needed a woman to remind him what it was to be alive. Love was all that mattered. The rest is literature.
| “The overturning of obscenity laws in the United States and Britain and the defiant rise of the porn industry are part of the extraordinary 1960s zeitgeist, but also part of a new sex war. “Cancer” was published around the same time the pill was approved for use (1960) and Valium hit the market (1963)." |
Tropic of Cancer was not the only major literary work appearing coincidentally at the beginning of the sexual revolution.
Tropic of Cancer is Henry Miller's seminal work and has potential for students to seriously explore the making of an American writer for generations to come.
| “There is beauty as well as hatred in 'Cancer' and it deserves its place on the shelf.” |
We certainly hope so; but who knows how long Tropic of Cancer will stay there if it's up to people like you? Or if you read the book again, might you read it differently? The myth-making comes not from ignoring an issue, but instead from talking about it too much – 'as if'. As if it were like that. When in fact it isn't.
| “The question is: Why do men revel in the degradation of women?” |
They don't, my dear Jeanette. But neither do they revel in the distortion of truth for personal publicity; or the trashing of a literary giant, as you have done.
Henry Miller never used a woman abusively. He wasn't into "abuse". In his personal conversations he never employed the language of his books; never used “fucking” in the way that it has become ubiquitous and accepted...to punctuate anything and everything from corn flakes to sex. And yet it is stricken – censored!!! - from your New York Times review - in a quote.
It is irrational, even foolish, to expect any man, or any woman, to be perfect.
Henry would probably say, "I piss on it all from a considerable height," citing Rabelais. Soit.
© 2012 by Einar Moos
you can leave comments at the site where this was first posted:
http://www.parisiana.com/content/gratuitous-trashing-literary-giant
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by Dave Morice
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ACTUALISM RETURNS!
AFTER HAVING NEVER GONE AWAY!
READ ALL ABOUT IT! | Lucy In the Sky With Darrell
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Table of Contents
Click on heading below to go to ACTUAL chapter!
Part 1: Actualism in the Seventies The story of a counter-culture poetry movement that began in 1970 in Iowa City.
Lucy In The Sky Interruption for COMIX
Andrei Codrescu, Darrell Gray & James Dickey, Ron Bayes & Steve Levine & Steve Abbott & Lyn Lifshin, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, T. S. Eliot, Stephen Crane, Steve Toth , Funky Pussies, Mary du Passage, Tom Dish , Top Shelf Art, The Odyssey & Hustler & Penthouse & Playboy
Part 2: A Prose History of Poetry City A memoir of the 10th poetry marathon--Poem Wrapping a City Block in 1975. Part 3: Poetry Comics Letters from readers to Poetry Comics that were printed in “The Muse’s Mailbag,” the letters-to-the editor column.
Part 4: Anthology of Collaborations 200 Actualist collaboration poems written in Iowa City and signed by the authors.
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by Dave Morice
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Lucy In the Sky With Darrell
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The Story of Actualism In Iowa City
Actualism in the Seventies
| ~ 1. The Writers Workshop | In 1969, I was accepted into the Iowa Writers Workshop. Although I’d been writing poetry since I was six years old, I felt as if I was finally and irrevocably an official poet. In two or three years, I would have a diploma to hang on my wall. The Scarecrow couldn’t’ve done better in Oz. I took a greyhound bus to Iowa City. After a lazy 8-hour ride, I wound up at the downtown depot. One of the people who worked there asked me why I was coming to town. “I’m in the Poetry Workshop,” I said. “How about you?” “I’m in the Fiction Workshop. I’m busy right now. How about getting together after I get off work. Let’s meet at the Mill Restaurant on Burlington.” At 9:00 we were sitting at the Mill, drinking beer, and talking about our writing. His name was Joe Ribar. He offered to rent a room to me in his 2nd floor apartment at 214 E. Court Street. It was a small room, but it was a perfect writer’s lair. Joe and I shared the living room, the kitchen, and the bathroom, which made it a very big living space. At the first meeting of the Poetry Workshop, each of the four teachers--Marvin Bell, Kathy Frasier, Anselm Hollo, and Jack Marshall--took turns introducing themselves and reading one of their poems. I had no previous experience with them, no knowledge of their writing. After the reading, the students were asked to write the names of three of the teachers in order of preference that they would like to take their first poetry-writing class with. I wrote my three: Anselm, Jack , and Kathy Frasier. With that information, someone in the workshop would decide whose class each student would be in. The next day I found out that I’d be in Marvin’s class. I was surprised at the decision. Why would I be put in the class taught by the teacher I hadn’t put in my list of choices? It might’ve been because of the manuscript, Fiddling with a Clock, that I’d submitted with my application to the workshop. |
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