World Idiocrination

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Walker
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Re: World Idiocrination

Post by Walker »

I remember the day he died (Miller).

*

That sounds like poor old Kerouac. He died a relatively young drunk.
Walker
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Re: World Idiocrination

Post by Walker »

davidm wrote: Fri Oct 13, 2017 3:10 amI love Henry Miller.
I'm a big fan, too.

"I began assiduously examining the style and technique of those whom I once admired and worshipped: Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Hamsun, even Thomas Mann, whom today I discard as being a skillful fabricator, a brick-maker, an inspired jackass or draught horse. I imitated every style in the hope of finding the clue to the gnawing secret of how to write. Finally I came to a dead end, to a despair and desperation which few men have known, because there was no divorce between myself as writer and myself as man: to fail as a writer meant to fail as a man. And I failed. I realized that I was nothing - less than nothing - a minus quantity. It was at this point, in the midst of the dead Sargasso Sea, so to speak, that I really began to write. I began from scratch, throwing everything overboard, even those whom I most loved. Immediately I heard my own voice I was enchanted: the fact that it was a separate, distinct, unique voice sustained me. It didn't matter to me if what I wrote should be considered bad. Good and bad dropped out of my vocabulary. I jumped with two feet into the realm of aesthetics, the nonmoral, nonethical, nonutalitarian realm of art. My life itself became a work of art. I had found a voice, I was whole again. The experience was very much like what we read of in connection with the lives of Zen initiates. My huge failure was like the recapitulation of the experience of the race: I had to grow foul with knowledge, realize the futility of everything; smash everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it were, in order to recover my authenticity. I had to arrive at the brink and then take a leap in the dark."

- Henry Miller
The Wisdom of the Heart
Walker
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Re: World Idiocrination

Post by Walker »

vegetariantaxidermy wrote: Fri Oct 13, 2017 3:24 am I was just going to say how interesting that passage was. I wonder what he thought when his vision became all too true and multiplied by a hundred (although he died before the worst of it).
I have many passages, but you'll have to ask for more, lest it be a bore.

“Each new infant begins with a bright, innocent expression, the strong purity of the race moistening the large, dark eyes. They stand like that for several years and then suddenly, around puberty often, the expression changes. Suddenly they get up on their hind legs and they walk the treadmill. The hair falls out, the teeth rot, the spine twists. Corns, bunions, calluses. The hand always sweating, the lips twitching. The head down, almost in the plate, and the food sucked in with big, swishing gulps. To think that they all started clean, with fresh diapers every day.”
- HM
davidm
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Re: World Idiocrination

Post by davidm »

Walker wrote: Fri Oct 13, 2017 4:15 am
I have many passages, but you'll have to ask for more, lest it be a bore.

“Each new infant begins with a bright, innocent expression, the strong purity of the race moistening the large, dark eyes. They stand like that for several years and then suddenly, around puberty often, the expression changes. Suddenly they get up on their hind legs and they walk the treadmill. The hair falls out, the teeth rot, the spine twists. Corns, bunions, calluses. The hand always sweating, the lips twitching. The head down, almost in the plate, and the food sucked in with big, swishing gulps. To think that they all started clean, with fresh diapers every day.”
- HM
Arthur Schopenhauer:
In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means. Nevertheless, every man desires to reach old age; in other words, a state of life of which it may be said: “It is bad to-day, and it will be worse to-morrow; and so on till the worst of all.”
Walker
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Re: World Idiocrination

Post by Walker »

davidm wrote: Fri Oct 13, 2017 4:41 am Arthur Schopenhauer:
In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means. Nevertheless, every man desires to reach old age; in other words, a state of life of which it may be said: “It is bad to-day, and it will be worse to-morrow; and so on till the worst of all.”
That's pretty damn smooth.
Walker
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Re: World Idiocrination

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I have to tell you up front, this is incomparable.


"In youth we were whole and the terror and pain of the world penetrated us through and through. There was no sharp separation between joy and sorrow: they fused into one, as our waking life fuses with dream and sleep. We rose one being in the morning and at night we went down into an ocean, drowned out completely, clutching the stars and the fever of the day.

And then comes a time when suddenly all seems to be reversed. We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets - we remember only. Like a monomaniac we relive the drama of youth. Like a spider that picks up the thread over and over and spews it out according to some obsessive, logarithmic pattern. If we are stirred by a fat bust it is the fat bust of a whore who bent over on a rainy night and showed us for the first time the wonder of the great milky globes; if we are stirred by the reflections on a wet pavement it is because at the age of seven we were suddenly speared by a premonition of the life to come as we stared unthinkingly into that bright, liquid mirror of the street. If the sight of a swinging door intrigues us it is the memory of a summer's evening when all the doors were swinging softly and where the light bent down to caress the shadow there were golden calves and lace and glittering parasols and through the chinks in the swinging door, like fine sand sifting through a bed of rubies, there drifted the music and the incense of gorgeous unknown bodies. Perhaps when that door parted to give us a choking glimpse of the world, perhaps then we had the first intimation of the great impact of sin, the first intimation that here over little round tables spinning in the light, our feet idly scraping the sawdust, our hands touching the cold stem of a glass, that here over these little round tables which later we are to look at with such yearning and reverence, that here, I say, we are to feel in the years to come the first iron of love, the first stains of rust, the first black, clawing hands of the pit, the bright circular pieces of tin in the streets, the gaunt soot colored chimneys, the bare elm tree that lashes out in the summer's lightning and screams and shrieks as the rain beats down, while out of the hot earth the snails scoot away miraculously and all the air turns blue and sulphurous. Here over these tables, at the first call, the first touch of a hand, there is to come the bitter, gnawing pain that gripes at the bowels; the wine turns sour in our bellies and a pain rises from the soles of the feet and the round tabletops whirl with the anguish and the fever in our bones at the soft, burning touch of a hand. Here there is buried legend after legend of youth and melancholy, of savage nights and mysterious bosoms dancing on the wet mirror of the pavement, of women chuckling softly as they scratch themselves, of wild sailors' shouts, of long queues standing in front of the lobby, of boats brushing each other in the fog and tugs snorting furiously against the rush of tide while up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him.
- Henry Miller, Black Spring"
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Greta
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Re: World Idiocrination

Post by Greta »

Walker, Henry Miller wrote for hardcopy print.

Online reading is not the same. So you need many more paragraph breaks or readers will experience eye fatigue and generally won't bother. As I didn't.
Walker
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Re: World Idiocrination

Post by Walker »

I considered that. However, I figured unintended typos were enough of an intrusion upon his genius. Also, the original formating reads more like an avalanche, and if one can't hang with it, one doesn't deserve it.

There's much more right after that, and before.

It's probably best that you didn't read it, 'specially with full attention.

It might have an effect.

:)

"Why are we so full of restraint? Why do we not give in all directions? Is it fear of losing ourselves? Until we do lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves."
- HM
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vegetariantaxidermy
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Re: World Idiocrination

Post by vegetariantaxidermy »

Walker wrote: Fri Oct 13, 2017 3:28 am I remember the day he died (Miller).

*

That sounds like poor old Kerouac. He died a relatively young drunk.
What is it with poets and alcohol?
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Seleucus
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Re: World Idiocrination

Post by Seleucus »

davidm wrote: Fri Oct 13, 2017 3:27 am Kerouac lets Miller's dinner get cold. :(

Miller, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti ... they don't make 'em that way anymore. Now we live in a nightmare of people thumbing their cellphones.
Except the latter I've read these guys at length. What a waste. Miller's writing is filthy, Kerouac was lionizing drugged out losers, and Ginsberg was a pederastic pedophile. If only they didn't make 'em that way anymore! Far from it, degenerate hipsters have become the norm, forever clicking on their iPhones.
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vegetariantaxidermy
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Re: World Idiocrination

Post by vegetariantaxidermy »

Seleucus wrote: Fri Oct 13, 2017 8:37 am
davidm wrote: Fri Oct 13, 2017 3:27 am Kerouac lets Miller's dinner get cold. :(

Miller, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti ... they don't make 'em that way anymore. Now we live in a nightmare of people thumbing their cellphones.
Except the latter I've read these guys at length. What a waste. Miller's writing is filthy, Kerouac was lionizing drugged out losers, and Ginsberg was a pederastic pedophile. If only they didn't make 'em that way anymore! Far from it, degenerate hipsters have become the norm, forever clicking on their iPhones.
It's their writing they are talking about, not their sex lives. And you have to remember that homosexuality was against the law in the US at that time, and swearing was considered 'gross indecency'.
Walker
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Re: World Idiocrination

Post by Walker »

Miller did some lively writing all right. Quite irreverent, you might say. His books were banned in the U.S. He was also the most read author by American soldiers during WWII.

In other words, he appeals to the minds fully engaged with reality.

It's quite understandable that one with their head up their own ass would have a restricted view.

What's most curious, in almost any situation, is the uncontrollable urge of folks to say no.

It's sort of like poor people wanting rich people to have less, when having less by the rich is of no benefit to the poor people.

"When shit becomes valuable, the poor will be born without assholes."
Henry Miller
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Seleucus
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Re: World Idiocrination

Post by Seleucus »

I think Eckhart Tolle in his utter simplicity had it right, modern art is pathological. Leave it alone. There's a lot nicer places to focus one's attention.
davidm
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Re: World Idiocrination

Post by davidm »

Walker wrote: Fri Oct 13, 2017 5:05 am I have to tell you up front, this is incomparable.


"In youth we were whole and the terror and pain of the world penetrated us through and through. There was no sharp separation between joy and sorrow: they fused into one, as our waking life fuses with dream and sleep. We rose one being in the morning and at night we went down into an ocean, drowned out completely, clutching the stars and the fever of the day.

And then comes a time when suddenly all seems to be reversed. We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets - we remember only. Like a monomaniac we relive the drama of youth. Like a spider that picks up the thread over and over and spews it out according to some obsessive, logarithmic pattern. If we are stirred by a fat bust it is the fat bust of a whore who bent over on a rainy night and showed us for the first time the wonder of the great milky globes; if we are stirred by the reflections on a wet pavement it is because at the age of seven we were suddenly speared by a premonition of the life to come as we stared unthinkingly into that bright, liquid mirror of the street. If the sight of a swinging door intrigues us it is the memory of a summer's evening when all the doors were swinging softly and where the light bent down to caress the shadow there were golden calves and lace and glittering parasols and through the chinks in the swinging door, like fine sand sifting through a bed of rubies, there drifted the music and the incense of gorgeous unknown bodies. Perhaps when that door parted to give us a choking glimpse of the world, perhaps then we had the first intimation of the great impact of sin, the first intimation that here over little round tables spinning in the light, our feet idly scraping the sawdust, our hands touching the cold stem of a glass, that here over these little round tables which later we are to look at with such yearning and reverence, that here, I say, we are to feel in the years to come the first iron of love, the first stains of rust, the first black, clawing hands of the pit, the bright circular pieces of tin in the streets, the gaunt soot colored chimneys, the bare elm tree that lashes out in the summer's lightning and screams and shrieks as the rain beats down, while out of the hot earth the snails scoot away miraculously and all the air turns blue and sulphurous. Here over these tables, at the first call, the first touch of a hand, there is to come the bitter, gnawing pain that gripes at the bowels; the wine turns sour in our bellies and a pain rises from the soles of the feet and the round tabletops whirl with the anguish and the fever in our bones at the soft, burning touch of a hand. Here there is buried legend after legend of youth and melancholy, of savage nights and mysterious bosoms dancing on the wet mirror of the pavement, of women chuckling softly as they scratch themselves, of wild sailors' shouts, of long queues standing in front of the lobby, of boats brushing each other in the fog and tugs snorting furiously against the rush of tide while up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him.
- Henry Miller, Black Spring"
Isn't that passage something? I remember it well from Black Spring. I'm inclined to think Black Spring was his greatest work, though the Tropics books typically draw more attention. This is the sort of stuff that anticipated Kerouac and the Beats, whom Miller loved.
davidm
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Re: World Idiocrination

Post by davidm »

Seleucus wrote: Fri Oct 13, 2017 8:37 am
davidm wrote: Fri Oct 13, 2017 3:27 am Kerouac lets Miller's dinner get cold. :(

Miller, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti ... they don't make 'em that way anymore. Now we live in a nightmare of people thumbing their cellphones.
Except the latter I've read these guys at length. What a waste. Miller's writing is filthy, Kerouac was lionizing drugged out losers, and Ginsberg was a pederastic pedophile. If only they didn't make 'em that way anymore! Far from it, degenerate hipsters have become the norm, forever clicking on their iPhones.
lol

What else can one say?
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