Tropic of Capricorn
orig_long red
Posts: 2,029
anyone ever read this before? holy moley, henry miller where have you been all my life?!
i picked it up accidently...i had meant to grab Tropic of Cancer...so far, nice surprise.
i picked it up accidently...i had meant to grab Tropic of Cancer...so far, nice surprise.
Jam out with your clam out.
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He was a genius.
I love when people read the classics.
You rock.
And I don't feel right when you're gone away
you're right! i do rock!
I am about to embark on A Farewell To Arms. I cannot believe I haven't read it as Hemingway is my favorite. A friend was going to read it so I decided I should.
Oh well.
We rock.
And I don't feel right when you're gone away
indeed. i've never read that either...i feel like i've skipped Hemingway, only read Old Man and the Sea. there are just too damn many good books out there. i need to lock myself away for 30 years or so, just to scratch the surface. Ever read Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole? another classic, but a far less known one.
And I don't feel right when you're gone away
its comic genius written by a suicidal nut case. fun all around!
My favourite book of all time.
Read 'Tropic of Cancer' next and then read 'Quiet days in Clichy', and then 'The Collossus of Marousi'.
The cogs of my mind shifted a gear when I read the first page of Capricorn. It was the voice I'd been looking for for years.
Henry Miller is my number one hero, and friend out of nowhere.
Check it out kids !!
hemingway is the best. i love him. though i'll admit i liked sun also rises and for whom the bell tolls.
and i thought of the seinfeld episode first too
i love that you consider henry miller classic. just brilliant.
metaphorically speaking of course.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
And I don't feel right when you're gone away
It is an awesome book. Miller is fascinating.
And I don't feel right when you're gone away
Born and bred sweetheart!
I help read 25K applications in the winter and that is enough for a whole year for me.
True. I'd say he's more fascinating as a human being than as a writer though. Although the nature of the line in between the two could be debated all day.
And I don't feel right when you're gone away
Albany 2006 Camden 2006 E. Rutherford 2, 2006 Inglewood 2006,
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Camden 2008 MSG 2008 MSG 2008 Hartford 2008.
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MSG 2022
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MSG 2024, MSG 2024
Philadelphia 2024
"I play good, hard-nosed basketball.
Things happen in the game. Nothing you
can do. I don't go and say,
"I'm gonna beat this guy up."
lol!
That was the first thing I thought of when I saw the thread title!
i hope you dont think i was having a go at you trixie. far from it. just brilliant means just that. i love that you hold miller in such high esteem.
the teachers ive dealt with so far would be hard pressed to even admit that henry miller exists let alone consider him a classic. i sit in class and my brain just turns itself inside out when we yet again study the brontes or someone else i dont much care for. if my teacher walked in and said righto today were gonna talk about henry miller, hubert selby or someone else who actually wrote during the 20th century i think i'd self combust. what they consider classic and and what i consider classic are two different things.
next semester i am studying american literature so it should be interesting to see what texts we do look at.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
think i am going to swing my barnes and noble this weekend! thanks for the request.
Still my favourite book of all time
Why?
How can there be a thread about the book without discussing its contents?
I've never read Tropic of Capricorn but since so many people are hip on it... why is it such a good book?
no spoilers plzzz!
I hope you get this message but your not home...I will be there in just a minute or so...
I want to go but I want to go with you.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime. -MT
I've had enough, said enough, felt enough. I'm fine, still in it.
It's a semi-autobiographical account of Henry Millers early days living in Brooklyn at the turn of the 20th Century before he managed to get himself over to Paris and begin writing. It's a first person narrative detailing one mans railings against the world, his eccentric people he knows, his sexual conquests, and his artistic longings.
Though that doesn't really do it justice. You'd be better off just reading it.
Here's a snippet:
I said I did not know a word of French then, and it is true, but I was just on the brink of making a great discovery, a discovery which would compensate for the emptiness of Myrtle Avenue and the whole American continent. I had almost reached the shore of that great French ocean which goes by the name of Elie Faure, an ocean which the French themselves had hardly navigated and which they had mistaken, it seems, for an inland sea. Reading him even in such a withered language as English has become, I could see that this man who had described the glory of the human race on his cuff was Father Zeus of Atlantis, whom I had been searching for. An ocean I called him, but he was also a world symphony. He was the first musician the French have produced; he was exalted and controlled, an anomaly, a Gallic Beethoven, a great physician of the soul, a giant lightning-rod. He was also a sunflower turning with the sun, always drinking in the light, always radiant and blazing with vitality. He was neither an optimist nor a pessimist, any more than one can say that the ocean is beneficient or malevolent. He was a believer in the human race. He added a cubit to the race, by giving it back its dignity, its strength, its need of creation. He saw everything as creation, as solar joy. He didn't record it in orderly fashion, he recorded it musically. He was indifferent to the fact that the French have a tin ear - he was orchestrating for the whole world simultaneously. What was my amazement then, when some years later I arrived in France, to find that there were no monuments erected to him, no streets named after him. Worse, during eight whole years I never once beard a Frenchman mention his name. He had to die in order to be put in the pantheon of French deities - and how sickly must they look, his deific contemporaries, in the presence of this radiant sun! If he had not been a physician, and thus permitted to earn a livelihood, what might not have happened to him! Perhaps another able hand for the garbage trucks! The man who made the Egyptian frescoes come alive in all their flaming colours, this man could just as well have starved to death for all the public cared. But he was an ocean and the critics drowned in this ocean, and the editors and the publishers and the public too. It will take aeons for him to dry up, to evaporate. It will take about as long as for the French to acquire a musical ear.
If there had been no music I would have gone to the madhouse like Nijinsky. (It was just about this time that they discovered that Nijinsky was mad.) He had been found giving his money away to the poor - always a bad sign! My mind was filled with wonderful treasures, my taste was sharp and exigent, my muscles were in excellent condition, my appetite was strong, my wind sound. I had nothing to do except to improve myself, and I was going crazy with the improvements I made every day. Even if there were a job for me to fill I couldn't accept it, because what I needed was not work but a life more abundant. I couldn't waste time being a teacher, a lawyer, a physician, a politician or anything else that society had to offer. It was easier to accept menial jobs because it left my mind free. After I was fired from the garbage trucks I remember taking up with an Evangelist who seemed to have great confidence in me. I was a sort of usher, collector and private secretary. He brought to my attention the whole world of Indian philosophy. Evenings when I was free I would meet with my friends at the home of Ed Bauries who lived in an aristocratic section of Brooklyn. Ed Bauries was an eccentric pianist who couldn't read a note. He had a bosom pal called George Neumiller with whom he often played duets. Of the dozen or so who congregated at Ed Bauries' home nearly every one of us could play the piano. We were all between twenty-one and twenty-five at the time; we never brought any women along and we hardly ever mentioned the subject of women during these sessions. We had plenty of beer to drink and a whole big house at our disposal, for it was in the Summer time, when his folks were away, that we held our gatherings. Though there were a dozen other homes like this which I could speak of, I mention Ed Bauries' place because it was typical of something I have never encountered elsewhere in the world. Neither Ed Bauries himself nor any of his friends suspected the sort of books I was reading nor the things which were occupying my mind. When I blew in I was greeted enthusiastically - as a clown. It was expected, of me to start things going. There were about four pianos scattered throughout the big house to say nothing of the celesta, the organ, guitars, mandolins, fiddles and what not. Ed Bauries was a nut, a very affable, sympathetic and generous one too. The sandwiches were always of the best, the beer plentiful, and if you wanted to stay the night he could fix you up on a divan just as pretty as you liked. Coming down the street - a big, wide street, somnolent, luxurious, a street altogether out of the world - I could hear the tinkle of the piano in the big parlour on the first floor. The windows were wide open and as I got into range I could see Al Burger or Connie Grimm sprawling in their big easy chairs, their feet on the window sill, and big beer mugs in their hands. Probably George Neumiller was at the piano, improvising, his shirt peeled off and a big cigar in his mouth. They were talking and laughing while George fooled around, searching for an opening. Soon as he hit a theme he would call for Ed and Ed would sit beside him, studying it out in his unprofessional way, then suddenly pouncing on the keys and giving tit for tat. Maybe when I'd walk in somebody would be trying to stand on his hands in the next room - there were three big rooms on the first floor which opened one on to the other and back of them was a garden, an enormous garden, with flowers, fruit trees, grape vines, statues, fountains an<f everything. Sometimes when it was too hot they brought the celesta or the little organ into the garden (and a keg of beer, naturally) and we'd sit around in the dark laughing and singing - until the neighbours forced us to stop. Sometimes the music was going on all through the house at once, on every floor. It was really crazy then, intoxicating, and if there had been women around it would have spoiled it. Sometimes it was like watching an endurance contest - Ed Bauries and George Neumiller at the grand piano, each trying to wear the other out, changing places without stopping, crossing hands, sometimes felling away to plain chopsticks, sometimes going like a Wurlitzer. And always something to laugh about all the time. Nobody asked what you did, what you thought about, and so forth. When you arrived at Ed Bauries' place you checked your identification marks. Nobody gave a fuck what size hat you wore or how much you paid for it. It was entertainment from the word go - and the sandwiches and the drinks were on the house. And when things got going, three or four pianos at once, the celesta, the organ, the mandolins, the guitars, beer running through the halls, the mantelpieces full of sandwiches and cigars, a breeze coming through from the garden, George Neumiller stripped to the waist and modulating like a fiend, it was better than any show I've ever seen put on and it didn't cost a cent. In fact, with the dressing and undressing that went on, I always came away with a little extra change and a pocketful of good cigars. I never saw any of them between time - only Monday nights throughout the Summer, when Ed held open house.
Standing in the garden listening to the din I could scarcely believe that it was the same city. And if I had ever opened my trap and exposed my guts it would have been all over. Not one of these bozos amounted to anything, as the world reckons. They were just good eggs, children, fellows who liked music and who liked a good time. They liked it so much that sometimes we had to call the ambulance. Like the night Al Burger twisted his knee while showing us one of his stunts. Everybody so happy, so full of music, so lit up, that it took him an hour to persuade us he was really hurt. We try to carry him to a hospital but it's too far away and besides, it's such a good joke, that we drop him now and then and that makes him yell like a maniac. So finally we telephone for help from a police box, and the ambulance comes and the patrol wagon too. They take Al to the hospital and the rest of us to the hoose-gow. And on the way we sing at the top of our lungs. And after we're bailed out we're still feeling good and the cops are feeling good too, and so we all adjourn to the basement where there's a cracked piano and we go on singing and playing. All this is like some period B.C. in history which ends not because there's a war but because even a joint like Ed Bauries' is not immune to the poison seeping in from the periphery. Because every street is becoming Myrtle Avenue, because emptiness is filling the whole continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Because, after a certain time, you can't enter a single house throughout the length and breadth of the land and find a man standing on his hands singing. It just ain't done any more. And there ain't two pianos going at once anywhere, nor are there two men anywhere willing to play all night just for the fun of it. Two men who can play like Ed Bauries and George Neumiller are hired by the radio or the movies and only a thimbleful of their talent is used and the rest is thrown into the garbage can. Nobody knows, judging from public spectacles, what talent is disposable in the great American continent. Later on, and that's why I used to sit around on doorsteps in Tin Pan Alley, I would while away the afternoons listening to the professionals mugging it out. That was good too, but it was different. There was no fun in it, it was a perpetual rehearsal to bring in dollars and cents. Any man in America who had an ounce of humour in him was saving it up to put himself across. There were some wonderful nuts among them too, men I'll never forget, men who left no name behind them, and they were the best we produced. I remember an anonymous performer on the Keith circuit who was probably the craziest man in America, and perhaps he got fifty dollars a week for it. Three times a day, every day in the week, he came out and held the audience spell-bound. He didn't have an act - he just improvised. He never repeated his jokes or his stunts. He gave himself prodigally, and I don't think he was a hot fiend either. He was one of those guys who are born in the corncrakes and the energy and the joy in him was so fierce that nothing could contain it. He could play any instrument and dance any step and he could invent a story on the spot and string it out till the bell rang. He was not only satisfied to do his own act but he would help the others out. He would stand in the wings and wait for the right moment to break into the other guy's act. He was the whole show and it was a show that contained more therapy than the whole arsenal of modem science. They ought to have paid a man like this the wages which the President of the United States receives. They ought to sack the President of the United States and the whole Supreme Court and set up a man like this as ruler. This man could cure any disease on the calendar. He was the kind of guy, moreover, as would do it for nothing, if you asked him to. This is the type of man which empties the insane asylums. He doesn't propose a cure - he makes everybody crazy. Between this solution and a perpetual state of war, which is civilization, there is only one other way out - and that is the road we will all take eventually because everything else is doomed to failure. The type that represents this one and only way bears a head with six faces and eight eyes, the head is a revolving lighthouse, and instead of a triple crown at the top, as there might well be, there is a hole which ventilates what few brains there are. There is very little brain, as I say, because there is very little baggage to carry about, because living in full consciousness, the grey matter passes off into light. This is the only type of man one can place above the comedian; he neither laughs nor weeps, he is beyond suffering. We don't recognize him yet because he is too dose to us, right under the skin, as a matter of fact. When the comedian catches us in the guts this man, whose name might be God, I suppose, if he had to use a name, speaks up. When the whole human race is rocking with laughter, laughing so hard that it hurts, I mean, everybody then has his foot on the path. In that moment everybody can just as well be God as anything else. In that moment you have the annihilation of dual, triple, quadruple and multiple consciousness, which is what makes the grey matter coil up in dead folds at the top of the skull. At that moment you can really feel the hole in the top of the head; you know that you once had an eye there and that this eye was capable of taking in everything at once. The eye is gone now, but when you laugh until the tears flow and your belly aches, you are really opening the skylight andventilating the brains. Nobody can persuade you at that moment to take a gun and kill your enemy; neither can anybody persuade you to open a fat tome containing the metaphysical truths of the world and read it. If you know what freedom means, absolute freedom and not a relative freedom, then you must recognize that this is the nearest to it you will ever get. If I am against the condition of the world it is not because I am a moralist - it is because I want to laugh more. I don't say that God is one grand laugh: I say that you've got to laugh hard before you can get anywhere near God. My whole aim in life is to get near to God, that is, to get nearer to myself. That's why it doesn't matter to me what road I take. But music is very important. Music is a tonic for the pineal gland. Music isn't Bach or Beethoven; music is the can-opener of the soul. It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes you aware that there's a roof to your being.
The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again ... no, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one's pocket for another meal. You are in a city that you never expect to be in again and you have only to pass the night in your hotel room, but it takes all the courage and pluck you possess to stay in that room. There must be a good reason why certain cities, certain places, inspire such loathing and dread. There must be some kind of perpetual murder going on in these places. The people are of the same race as you, they go about their business as people do anywhere, they build the same sort of house, no better, no worse, they have the same system of education, the same currency, the same newspapers - and yet they are absolutely different from the other people you know, and the whole atmosphere is different, and the rhythm is different and the tension is different. It's almost like looking at yourself in another incarnation. You know, with a most disturbing certitude, that what governs life is not money, not politics, not religion, not training, not race, not language, not customs, but something else, something you're trying to throtde all the time and which is really throttling you, because otherwise you wouldn't be terrified all of a sudden and wonder how you were going to escape. Some cities you don't even have to pass a night in - just an hour or two is enough to unnerve you. I think of Bayonne that way. I came on it in the night with a few addresses that had been given me. I had a briefcase under my arm with a prospectus of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I was supposed to go under cover of dark and sell the bloody encyclopaedia to some poor devils who wanted to improve themselves. If I had been dropped off at Helsingfors I couldn't have felt more ill at ease than walking the streets of Bayonne. It wasn't an American city to me. It wasn't a city at all, but a huge octopus wriggling in the dark. The first door I came to looked so forbidding I didn't even bother to knock; I went like that to several addresses before I could summon the courage to knock. The first face I took a look at frightened the shit out of me. I don't mean timidity or embarrassment - I mean fear. It was the face of a hod-carrier, an ignorant mick who would as lief fell you with an axe as spit in your eye. I pretended I had the wrong name and hurried on to the next address. Each time the door opened I saw another monster. And then I came at last to a poor simp who really wanted to improve himself and that broke me down. I felt truly ashamed of myself, of my country, my race, my epoch. I had a devil of a time persuading him not to buy the damned encyclopaedia. He asked me innocently what then had brought me to his home - and without a minute's hesitation I told him an astounding lie, a lie which was later to prove a great truth. I told him I was only pretending to sell the encyclopaedia in order to meet people and write about them. That interested him enormously, even more than the encyclopaedia. He wanted to know what I would write about him, if I could say. It's taken me twenty years to answer that question, but here it is. If you would still like to know, John Doe of the City of Bayonne, this is it... I owe you a great deal because after that lie I told you I left your house and I tore up the prospectus furnished me by the Encyclopaedia Britannica and I threw it in the gutter. I said to myself I will never again go to people under false pretences even if it is to give them the Holy Bible. I will never again sell anything, even if I have to starve. I am going home now and I will sit down and really write about people. And if anybody knocks at my door to sell me something I will invite him in and say "why are you doing this?" And if he says it is because he has to make a living I will give him what money I have and beg him once again to think what he is doing. I want to prevent as many men as possible from pretending that they have to do this or that because they must earn a living. It is not true. One can starve to death - it is much better. Every man who voluntarily starves to death throws another cog into the automatic process. I would rather see a man take a gun and kill his neighbour, in order to get the food he needs, than keep up the automatic process by pretending that he has to carry on living. That's what I want to say, Mr. John Doe.
I hope you get this message but your not home...I will be there in just a minute or so...
I want to go but I want to go with you.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime. -MT
I've had enough, said enough, felt enough. I'm fine, still in it.
2005: Kitchener/Hamilton/Toronto
2006: Toronto 1 & 2
2008: Hartford/EV Toronto 1 & 2
2009: Toronto/Philadelphia 3 & 4
2010: Buffalo
2011: Montreal/Toronto 1 & 2/Hamilton
2013: London/Buffalo/Vancouver/Seattle
2016: Toronto 1 & 2
2022: Hamilton/Toronto
2023: EV Seattle 1&2
True. This was pretty much all I could find online.