tell you what...

Clearly, I am in a mood of negligence. This project is dying out. And that's okay! Let me tell you why, the final excuse:

I am still reading, but freely and happily non-academically (or at least, I don't feel I need to formulate an analysis for each book.) I am not in the same mood of desperate boredom as I was when I created this blog. Overall, I feel a lot better, and freer to chart my own course through whatever I choose to explore, rather than stay anchored in a self-imposed project. This is certainly the time in my life to read, and store up, and explore everything I can... I enjoy it very much, but the weightiness of writing self-consciously about it all has gotten to me. There's too much to write about, too much I'm overturning and getting into -- it's best to leave it inside my head for now, or better yet, to find some impossible cocktail party somewhere where I can impose it on others. I already managed to talk about Walter Pater at a dinner party (an experience that left me giddy, because the guy I found to talk to was a Harvard professor -- friend of my parents' -- and had never heard of Pater. He knew Oscar Wilde, though, indicated by a knowing roll of the eyes).

This will be the last post for a long time, so I may as well give an update. Since I last posted, I have read:

Denton Welch: The Making of a Writer -- Michael De-La-Noy (in preparation to reading his Journals... he was a fascinating man, very neurotic and helpless, but keenly attuned to everything around him. A woefully underrated writer.)

The Uncommon Reader -- Alan Bennett (an absolute pleasure, which I read in about an hour... it's an immaculately-worded English novella about The Queen Herself discovering the joys of reading, and how it unravels her position of power)

1984 -- George Orwell (this was my third time reading this. It's the best novel ever written. That title changes hands a lot, but this has continued to be my personal favorite... not for pure-enjoyment value, just because of it's perfect structure and widespread credibility -- everyone knows what Big Brother means, and there are so many fans of this novel. Punk rock bands, political science buffs, conspiracy-theorists, plus plenty of high-school kids.)

Gigi -- Colette (Sonny, if you're reading this, this was something I read when I was supposed to be working. As I said in the note, you really shouldn't pay me for those hours. I was also reading Henry Miller, in those small delicate-papered French editions we have. An anecdote about the book: when Colette was being carted around a hotel lobby in her wheel-chair, she spotted Audrey Hepburn moving through the crowd. She pointed to her and proclaimed, "That's her! That's my Gigi!" So you can imagine what kind of a delightful, silly, intruiging girl Gigi is. If Holly Golightly was a Parisian youth, and not yet escaped from home.)

Jonathan Livingston Seagull -- Richard Bach (it will change your life. I need to read it over a few more times before I can explain it... it's the best allegory for the pursuit of life that I've ever found or formulated. The truth that sets you free: there are no limits.)


I am still in the middle of Plexus, and have also taken up This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald (I have such a fondness for the man, I figured I should actually read more of his books. I've been saving The Great Gatsby for when it appears on my list... and for now, I'm sticking to the order.)

I will not be posting any more about my reading adventures for now, possibly ultimately into the future. I have classes that require involvement and reading now (in World Literature, we're set up to read Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, The Plague, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Doctor Zhivago.) Although, if Simon's Rock turns down my application (I will recieve their verdict by March 15th), I will be right back to where I started.

HAPPY SUPERBOWL DAY!
BON VOYAGE!
R.I.P. AND FOREVER LIVE J.D. SALINGER!
TIDINGS OF COMFORT AND JOY TO ALL
...AND THE HIPPOS WERE BOILED IN THEIR TANKS
O ALL THE SAD YOUNG MEN
OF MICE AND MEN, ON GOOD AND EVIL, FLAPPERS AND PHILSOPHERS
O SKINNY LEGIONS! RUN OUTSIDE! THE ETERNAL WAR IS HERE!
WISH ME LUCK AS YOU WAVE ME GOODBYE! CHEERIO, HERE I GO, ON MY WAY!

To get my last bit in, here's a final recommendation: Go read House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.
Thank you.

[Interlude]: The Renaissance

In my application to Simon's Rock, I gave the web address to this blog... and now that all the paperwork is actually being processed and my writing under scrutiny, I've been hesitant to write much of anything on here. Also, I've veered quite a ways from my reading course lately. Quickly, a litany of excuses: I had my finals, I was getting my college application together, I had to have my application interview, and all of this has made me kind-of scattered. I hang onto little things and big projects become much more daunting. Now, I am engaged on a perpetual see-saw of disposition (this makes the euphoria incredible and liberating, and the misery like that 4th circle of hell where the sullen are drowned under icy sludge). But, of course, still finding time to read. Today and yesterday, it's been The Renaissance by Walter Pater.

Walter Pater was Oscar Wilde's mentor at Oxford College, and some would say the generator of the Aestheticism awareness that came about at the end of the 19th century. I suppose it was an artistic movement... more of a stylistic movement. The doctrine (taken up by dandies and their admirers) was basically this: Art for art's sake, it is the only thing in life that makes sense. Beauty is the quality to hold above all others. Live in reckless pursuit of the beautiful. Conduct yourself with grace, charm, and exquisite performance -- make your life your art. All art is quite useless.

So Walter Pater wrote this series of essays on The Renaissance (14th-17th centuries, respectively) based around its historical significance, with particular focus on its prime figures and products. Naturally, there's going to be quite a bit of Aesthetic theory thrown in to bring us around to his perspective. It is much more than the dry historical account that the gold-gilded cover and title would have you assume -- written in a joyfully descriptive style, with acutely-phrased analysis and infectious intellectual verve. The only reason I sought out this book was because of Oscar Wilde -- it was the most formative and personally important book in his life. When he was imprisoned, and finally allowed to have books sent to him, this was the first that he requested. This skews certain passages to make them a bit heartbreaking -- rhapsodies about the flourishing spirit, or the pursuit of beauty above all else (which is in a sense what got Wilde imprisoned in the first place, reckless beauty-mongering)... even just the passage from an old French story about a girl who escapes from her bedroom tower and runs across the dewy lawn on white feet (there are more descriptions, but I'll spare you non-aesthetes) to wander the night streets and find the one she loves. I don't think I would've been able to take the horrible irony of reading this book in a rank, ramshackled prison cell.

One of the essays is on the poetry of Michelangelo, much of which was fueled by lovesickness for a woman named Vittoria Colonna. Here is one of his sonnets not about Vittoria:

"On the Painting of the Sistine Chapel"
by Michelangelo (translated by J.A. Symonds)

I've grown a goitre by dwelling in this den --
as cats from stagnant streams in Lombardy,
or in what other land they hap to be --
which drives the belly close beneath the chin:

my beard turns up to heaven; my nape falls in,
fixed on my spine: my breast-bone visibly
grows like a harp: a rich embroidery
bedews my face from brush-drops thick and thin.

My loins into my paunch like levers grind:
my buttock like a crupper bears my weight;
my feet unguided wander to and fro;

in front my skin grows loose and long; behind,
by bending it becomes more taut and strait;
crosswise I strain me like a Syrian bow:
whence false and quaint, I know,
must be the fruit of squinting brain and eye;
for ill can aim the gun that bends awry.
Come then, Giovanni, try
to succour my dead pictures and my fame;
since foul I fare and painting is my shame.

I finished Henry Miller's Sexus, by the way -- volume one of The Rosy Crucifixtion trilogy (which is my actual topic at hand, being jostled quite frequently to the side by all these side-project interlude books). I'll make my encompassing conclusions about it once I finish the rest (Plexus and Nexus)... in short, I loved it. I'm almost not ashamed of it, too.

BOOK 8: Sexus

"'Rebecca,' I said, proceeding slowly and deliberately, 'if I really knew what I was capable of I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you. I feel sometimes as though I am going to burst. I really don't give a damn about the misery of the world. I take it for granted. What I want is to open up. I want to know what's inside me. I want everybody to open up. I'm like an imbecile with a can-opener in his hand, wondering where to begin -- to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I'm sure of it. I know it because I feel so marvelous myself most of the time. And when I feel that way everybody seems marvelous... everybody and everything... even pebbles and pieces of cardboard... a match stick lying in the gutter... anything... a goat's beard, if you like. That's what I want to write about -- but I don't know how... I don't know where to begin.'"

-- Henry Miller

Sidetrack.

There are two books that I am in the middle of at the moment, along with Sexus. I had said I wouldn't do this, dual-reading or juggling books, but somehow it's not at all surprising. I have sustained interest in all of them so far, so I figure it's still in the spirit of the thing.

1. The Journal of Albion Moonlight by Kenneth Patchen

This is my third time (at least) reading this. I ordered a glossy new copy that arrived on the doorstep just days ago, because my battered used one finally cracked down the spine and spit out its front pages. I found it last summer, during a vacation in Cape Cod last summer -- this eccentric little New Directions paperback wedged into the slap-dash-brick-laden-style bookshelves. I knew nothing about Kenneth Patchen except that he was a soft-spoken angry genius who knew Allen Ginsberg somehow, and made gloppy surreal watercolors with poetic messages. I didn't know what his writing was like -- but the name Albion Moonlight was so enticingly old-English and strange. So, I bought it and read it -- mystified, delighted, and astonished that a book like this could exist and not be celebrated at all.

It is the only book I have ever started to read again immediately after finishing it the first time. I carried it with me in my backpack for months when I got back to school. I completely understand it, accept it, and adore it, but still find it impossible to describe. The back cover calls it an "allegorical journey", but I don't really believe that. It incorporates everything in literature -- written truly like a journal, with plenty of poetics, sinister imagery, sympathetic addresses to the reader, tirades, and meandering (and situations so IMAGINATIVE they'll ravage your senses). It is impossible to describe! but it's incredible. I could live in this book. It has also been billed as "surrealist", and I guess I would buy that. Kenneth Patchen tended to avoid labels of any kind (he was a little bit of a radical, very individualist and pacifist), though he was kin to much of the writing from the Beat and the Surrealist movements. I wonder if quoting something from it would help what I'm trying to say.... well, this isn't much of a representation, but it's a nice quote anyway:

"What a lonely thing it is, to write -- and to spend the whole night writing (which is the plan in me) is a form of torture. My eyes will have burnt skin on them tomorrow; my hand will shake; my stomach will refuse to empty. Dogs with broken legs are shot; men with broken souls write through the night."

And then, to juxtapose, there are the passages like this:

"GOD! LET ME THROW MY LOVE OUT OVER THE WORLD LIKE A NET TO CATCH EVERYBODY IN IT FOR MY PURITY IS BUILDING FIRES THAT WILL NEVER GO DEAD UNDER THE WATER WHERE EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL LIES AND I WILL TEAR AND KILL LIKE A BEAST KNOCK ALL THEIR SOLDIERS DOWN BECAUSE I GIVE NO QUARTER I BURST INTO FLAMES I SHED MY CLOTHES I OPEN MY HEAD AND LET THE PUS OUT I BLEED I EAT MY OWN FLESH AND DRINK MY OWN BLOOD LET ME TAKE ALL THE TROUBLE ON MY BACK I AM STRONG WATCH I TALK WITH GOD I WRAP YOUR WOUNDS WITH THE CLOTHES OF MY LOVE I WILL NOT BE TURNED ASIDE I WILL ENTER THE TEMPLE AT LAST AND ALL THE LIGHT AND SINGING AND DESIRE AND PEACE WILL REST ON MY TONGUE I WILL DANCE ALL THE GRAVES OPEN AND SCATTER LIVING MEN OVER THE FIELDS I WILL TRIM THE GRASS THAT MUSIC GROWS IN I WILL FEED THE CREATURE THAT HAS NEVER LAUGHED IN ANY OF THEIR HOUSES I WILL BUILD A ROAD THAT THE SUN CAN WALK ALONG I WILL HEAL THE CHILD WHICH THE DEVOURING NIGHT-HORROR HAS FED ON I WILL SMASH THE BLOOD-SOAKED IMAGE WHICH STOPS THE LAMB'S HEART I CREEP AND BURN AND TAKE THE LICE OUT OF SLEEP'S WOMB BECAUSE IT IS TIME TO OPEN THE DOOR LOOK I SAY THE RAIN IS BEGINNING TO FALL THE BIRDS FOLD THEIR WINGS IT IS WINTER IT IS ESSENTIAL THAT WE CRADLE THE POOR BLACK WORLD IN OUR HANDS I LICK MY CHOPS SEEING YOU LIE THERE SO WHITE AND HELPLESS YOU CANNOT THROW ME OUT WITH THE LEFT-OVERS OF YOUR CANNIBAL DINNER I WILL MAKE YOU WATCH ME AS I OPEN MY MOUTH AND SWALLOW MYSELF I WILL NOT LET YOU ESCAPE THE STENCH AS I CRAWL ROTTING IN YOUR STREETS I WILL FLY INTO YOUR BELLY AND WALLOW IN YOUR DIRT I WILL NOT TURN ASIDE WHEN YOU SING ME TO SLEEP WITH THE LULLABY OF THE LEPROUS WHORES I WILL PERSUADE THE TENDER MADNESS TO TAKE YOU I WAIT HERE IN THE DARKNESS WITH A REVOLVER MADE OF TIGER FUR HELD TIGHTLY BETWEEN MY TEETH.

You are looking into the smoking eyes of an idiot...

I wipe my body clean with the bright milk of stars.

I remove my heart and plant it in the ground.

Crosses... the mask is on fire!

I confide in you because roots put their implacable lips through the flesh of our cities. You will never stand among the trees which grow in this sky. You will not hear when the white angel screams in these branches. I have on my shoulders the lashing tracks of a monster. I am alone in the forests of death."

It's not pretentious, really. I'm trying to imagine if this is a certain-person's type of thing, or whether this book is just woefully unknown because of some marketing fluke. The Journal of Albion Moonlight is wholly honest, and mind-exploring/excavating. I'm glad I found it in its obscurity, anyway... on a somewhat related note, Henry Miller is just as enthusiastic about it as I am (the only difference is that he gets to blurb his opinion on the back cover).

2. William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible by Barry Miles

William S. Burroughs... starting from a (predictably, since he's a writer) lonely childhood, where he developed a love for hard-boiled crime novels and became inwardly tortured by the knowledge of his sexual identity... to a period of stagnancy, heavy addiction, nullification in oblivion... and then he is urged to write by Ginsberg and Kerouac (two young Columbia college-kids at the time, who thought Burroughs was just a wonderful enigmatic teacher), and begins to have the time of his life.

Well, that's all a very bland, simple way of putting it. He was neurotic and difficult for all his life, though writing did seem to release something. He wanted to be RID of his writing, because it became like constant need (two phrases from him: "the algebra of need" and "word virus"). His yearning for new forms led him to heavy experimentation -- seeing where the boundaries were in the reality of his medium. His images and characters and scenes were written out to their full-blown potential, with nothing held back. If it became ludicrous, he went right along with it, played it up and made an incredible black-tempered farce of it. Writing was his greatest, possibly only, liberation. In Naked Lunch ("the frozen moment when everyone realizes exactly what is on the end of every fork"), he developed his format of "scenes" composing into a novel. They all exist in the same kind of non-dimension, a plane of dementia... but there is obviously no need for a linear storyline. Junky and Queer (his first two novels) were autobiographical, but from there he largely created his own world.

I like gathering up the straight facts on people, to know them better. Out of the three Beat figureheads, Burroughs has always been the odd, slightly creepy one I didn't know quite so much about. I think I am beginning to understand his mindset now -- it's grim, but confidently so, and willing to take you on the most refreshingly ridiculous excursions into the surreal world. Burroughs loved guns, loved French writers and read them when he was miserable in prep school, went to Harvard, was married for a while but ended up killing her in a drunken game of William Tell, garnered a small following of bratty fanboys in the '60s, became a recovering misogynist in the '70s when he was friends with Patti Smith, and continues to influence anyone with a counter-cultural bent to them.

BOOK 8: Sexus

I'm in my attic room, hiding away from a pile of responsibilities. Midnight is closing in. My tasks are as heady as homework and college application, but here I am trying to promote something I can barely describe, or grasp, or reconcile with -- Henry Miller.

I've found one small black-and-white cluster of pixels on Google Images to show who Mona was (she is THE woman of The Rosy Crucifixtion trilogy, one of many but always THE woman -- as Irene Adler was to Sherlock Holmes). It won't let me link it in to show you, but she is incredibly beautiful. Thin ironic eyebrows, mysterious dusky sooted eyes, long delicate neck, features like china, and looking politely out of her mind (if that makes sense).

Here: http://www.hipgallery.com/photopost2/data/500/june_miller.jpg

A lot has happened since I've started to enjoy Henry Miller, last week sometime when I got through the first significant chunk of the book. His reputation cannot be saved, it's true -- but if you're willing to go a little deeper than the titillation and just keep reading into the vast volume of his output, you discover an incredible mechanism of a human mind. It is full of hatred, coldness, desire, compassion, resolution, despair, uncare. In setting to write out everything inside of him, to fill his own life with the work of books, he needs to tell everything. He holds onto love with the very last of his reason... and under the circumstance, this is a noble feat.

I have found some proof that we have our modern-day share of Neal Cassadys in the world... I searched "henry miller" on YouTube, and found this video.

Men like this are why writers exist -- we need to capture them, as they move along by their own willful direction, not knowing how pictureque they are. It is the job of a writer to just be there for everything, to absorb and observe and empathize with every explosion in their eye the fact that they're creating something out of life just by their talk. I have NO idea where this video was taken, or who this guy is... all I know is that it's sunny, smoky and loud, guitars are playing over speakers somewhere, and he's got the most lucid green eyes I've ever seen.



good night, I wish you fantastic journeys.

The Day-Glo Beautiful People: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Experience

So in comes Tom Wolfe, surging with manic poetic energy to describe in regular journalistic terms the experience of LSD culture in the sixties – Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Neal Cassady swinging a sledgehammer, Hell’s Angels parties on country hilltops at dawn, The Beatles and the many-tentacled monster of teenage girls that rippled after them, wild cross-country careening in a bus painted all the fluorescent colors of hellfire. All these details become ours, artifacts and anecdotes in the whole cosmic movie of The Experience. Tom Wolfe was there for it all – invisible and very minor-character in his own prose, but he was there – and is now trying to set it all down in plain English, full of the facts his job requires, honest-toned and just as wildly mashed together as the crazed perception of a generation of Day-Glo beautiful people under the influence of holiness, sensory brilliance, and good old amphetamines.

Tom Wolfe has a crystalline-fine steel-trap mind for detail and acute observation (crucial to writing a good chunk of journalism, which is what the book is). His sentences careen on and on, building up into litanies of syllablistic fever, multiplying out over the pages in a quasi-coherent mash of his own personal vernacular. Tom Wolfe has quite a thing for words – a penchant, to be academic about it; it’s really quite an absolute passion. He wields an arsenal of medical terms, hip-talk slang, culture-references, catch-phrases and slogans (used like repeated riffs throughout the book), college vocabulary, sound-effects – it all gets thrown in. He may be formidable in his field as a writer, but he is up against an absolutely insane task, trying to bring this indescribable scene about into a book called The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, published in 1968.

What the acid test is is this: : : : well, actually, it comes from… it all started with a moment on… well, there’s a bus, anyway. The magic bus. Ken Kesey elected himself the prophet of acid for America, set out to turn everyone onto this mind-blowing, soul-opening, all-out-there experience. He formed a band of Merry Pranksters, dedicated to The Life, The Experience, The Freak-out Kick of LSD. They were out to change the world with spontaneous and total confidence – because they already knew they could change their own worlds, with this new visionary thing – and also wanted to make a big, bawdy, giggly, heartfelt and happy joke of it. For those who were not in on this (because you’re either on the bus, or off the bus), hate came naturally. It was unthinkably strange to watch as these people racketed all over the country with their noise of mantras and chants and loudspeakers, their strange Oriental flute music, their sheer apparatus overflowing from the bus that was carrying them on a wave of fumes past town after town of soft-faced, quietly-confused middle-class mystified America.

They were out to promote, to "propogate their lust for life", to make it their own movie, pull off a huge performance of joyful combustion to enlighten America out of its complacency once and for all. They all became characters, ordinary American kids turned into the fabulous entities of Mountain Girl, Babbs, Doris Delay, Sensous X, Gretchen Fetchin the Slime Queen, Black Maria, Zonker, and all the rest. They organized massive parties (be-ins, love-ins, impromptu mayhemic bonanzas) to release their love and drugs into the square-but-curious public. At the first of these gatherings, the centerpiece to the whole mess of lights and paint and bodies and dirt was an empty trashcan filled with LSD-laden Kool-Aid, which was passed around in innocent plastic cups. Everyone there had some, and individually lost themselves from there (in Wolfe’s phrase: to become “zonked” out of one’s “gourd”). The acid opens you up, opens and dissolves all fear and knowledge and only the self remains… your perception straddles deliriously the edge of all its angles, all sensation blows straight to your core and sends your mind into an ongoing spasm of rapidfire realization. It’s a view into the absolute unadulterated stuff of the senses.

To those who were in on it, part of the Experience, ON the bus and turned ONto acid… this was the purest reality in the world. It needs no justification or explanation; you just need to try it. Tom Wolfe, being on the scene but still shielded with his professional-observer guise of a reporter (albeit a pretty crafty, virtuosic one), tries his hand at forming conclusions to the whole mess to record it in its essence, and ends up with an Experience of his own. The story of The Merry Pranksters told as narrative is evidence enough of the whole thing (was it a movement? A revolution? A piece of performance or just one big joke?). It was wild, unprecedented, brave, no-holds-barred, revelatory, incomprehensible, culture-forming, path-forging, destructive, absurd, gloriously impetuous, too perfect to describe, and ABSOLUTELY not something to miss for the world.

[Interlude]: Why Sinatra Matters

Why Frank Sinatra matters... well, he just does. It's obvious. He's an image in American mythology! Crisp and rakish in an overcoat and fedora, moving slow and cool and lonely through the night with a cigarette... It's perfect! It's irresistable! He is the patron saint of New York City!

I love Frank Sinatra, and this little svelte volume goes well with my sentimental view of him I've garnered over the past week (a very unprecedented infatuation). He matters because he brought companionship and understanding to strangers who needed it, through the caring craft of his songs. They're songs about life, love, loss of love, promise of love... all sustained behind the glowing sight of cities. Emotions are built to towering heights from small details (like a smile, a bird, anything moving by). It's an honest, half-dreary worldview, clinging to nothing and always susceptible to confusion; and I love it for that. When the music roars up into a blam-and-blast swing number, it comes charging on with the emotion of rejuvenation.

The songs are dated and easily disheveled by those out to find fault in the lyrics, but the sentiments are perfectly intact. It can be incredibly refreshing to hear music that is not trying to go against anything. They're just beautiful, fun, moony songs to get people feeling together (in all those endless nowhere nightclubs).

The author personally knew Sinatra, and writes with a fine-tuned poetic instinct for details and reminisce. The opening scene is in one of the typical smoky, low-lit, lonely bars that Sinatra typefied so well... the conversation around the table veers into literature, with the question in air being: Fitzgerald or Hemingway? Sinatra goes for Fitzgerald -- he likes The Great Gatsby, and any artist who can do fine work over and over again. Now that I know this, it makes absolute sense. Frank Sinatra would identify with a disillusioned (or illusionless) self-destroying dapper young man of the twenties -- absolutely. Also, I love it that he read. He dropped out of high-school, but that's because he had something to DO. He read, he performed, he drew, he abused and adored women, he cried at his daughter's wedding, he offended and charmed everybody, he had everything and hated to be alone, he understood being alone and sang out against it.

Maybe I'm just a sucker, or a swooner... but I love Frank Sinatra uninhibitedly, in spite of everything. This book was a comfort to find. I read it in under 24 hours.

"I'm for whatever gets you through the night -- be it prayer, tranquilizers, or a bottle of Jack Daniels." -- F. S.

BOOK 8: Sexus (an apology)

Yesterday, in a cold & cavernous used bookshop I finally found The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I need to read it in a week for a school project (while also managing to write a report on it, without annoying my teacher with run-ons, or other forms of excessive enthusiasm). So this is to say that I have an official, viable excuse for leaving Henry Miller to stew by himself for a while. He is now currently face-down under a chair in my room, hot-red cover cracked down the spine.

I promise I will post my report for The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test here, once it is finished. So far, it is just as ecstatic and kinetic as the essays in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, and I think I want to be Tom Wolfe when I grow up. Actually, I'd just like it to be the '60s again... the closest I can get now is through the documents they left behind.

BOOK 8: Sexus

First post of 2010! First off, quickly, I'll set down a resolution to get into college next year. I spent a few hours today writing an essay for an application form, explaining how boring and lonely it can get, reading all the time and building your own research projects (this one is my most momentous, but there have been others) for lack of anything stimulating in high-school. I'm also going to put a link to this blog in with my application, as proof of how desperately I'm reaching for new things while trapped here.

I also spent time today reading.

Henry Miller is not a man to hold anything back.

He's perfect in the genre of plotless novels that explore situations in the unashamedly confused tempo of reality. It's the characters the story is concerned with -- so much of the action is based in conversation, or internal-monologue, observation. It's stacked full of soap-boxes. I love books like this -- it feels like the most honest, genuine writing a person can do, and still house it within the confines of a novel, a story.

I can't tell much about the book yet -- I only just stumbled over a fantastic passage (too long to type out here, especially after midnight) today, around page 160. It's a tirade-speech from one of Miller's dinner-companions on one night out, talking about art (brilliantly! ferociously! maybe I should type it out...). This is the first passage from which I can believe that Henry Miller really is a genuis (as I've heard). It's not bad, reading the rest, it's just that he includes everything. There's incredibly coarse, sour-mouthed, misogynist outpourings juxtaposed with insightful and appreciative declarations for modern life. He's mentioned a few times that his favorite poet is Walt Whitman -- a man who was in love with everything in his path. I've never read Henry Miller before this and though I concede he is an excellent writer, he certainly has a reputation for a reason.

In the story so far, the fuel for all his actions comes down to basic lovesickness (I'm still talking about Miller, not a character, because he is writing this as autobiography). With this romantic obsession comes plenty of emotional trysts and tirades of description... this is expected, and appreciated, because Miller is quite a show-off with descriptions, and I like that. I like to see how long sentences can be stretched with the right amount of adjectives, and rainbow-layering of metaphor and striking detail. Miller favors the style of onslaught & hyperbole perfected originally by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, with his ellipses and outrageous inspired rants. It keeps the most mundane of circumstances interesting, and churns sentences along so fast there's pleasure in the momentum to keep up. Maybe this style is a result of the motivation behind The Rosy Crucifixtion trilogy -- to tell everything there is, to get everything out, projectile-vomit-style. Miller does heartily believe in honesty... and automatic writing produces the unadulterated stuff of the senses, honest and uncut.

Henry Miller seems, so far, like a ramped-up version of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was an incredible writer, an acute journalist, and an academic that willingly lost himself into a social scene (to make a vivid historical record of his times? for the sheer fun of it?). Henry Miller focuses his story in a social circle (eccentrics abound), and is obsessed with the romance of it. These New York characters we get down to the last detail in Miller's writing.

Must sleep. Sorry to be brief. Love to all the invisible millions that may be reading this (whoever you are, thanks a billion).

P.S., A Sidenote: I am also reading Man Ray's Montparnasse. Thought you'd like to know.

This is Kiki (Parisienne), modeling in the Surrealist spirit for Man Ray -- a gregarious American photographer who came to Paris to help the Dadaists destroy the world, meet beautiful women to model for him, and talk about art to people who cared. Other migrants to Paris around this time include James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Tristan Tzara (a crazy Romanian, very important to Dadaism), and Peggy Guggenheim.

Mad Tom o' Bedlam

Give me a platform. Or, I guess, a plane. Any free space... and I will put whatever I want to see to fill it. Blogging is the most exalted form of narcissism we have to work with today, and I'm having as much fun with it as I can.

So, with complete disregard to the topic at hand, here is one of my favorite poems.

It's an anonymous poem from Shakespeare's England (16th century), called "The Ballad o' Bedlam". It can also be called "Poor Mad Tom", "Tom o' Bedlam", "Mad Tom's Song", among others. I can't remember how I found it (I'm sure it was pure chance), but it's really captivating.

Here you go: a dramatic reading in haunting dulcet tones, by some eccentric from YouTube.

The only misrepresentation in this is that he cuts the chorus that should be following each stanza ("While I do sing, any food, any feeding..") It is a ballad, after all, the chanted chorus frames it all off very nicely.



It's an absolute mystery, isn't it? But I love it.