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Hey cool Digest subscribers!
It's us, the Henry Miller Library, just checking in with you, our dear supporters and friends, as January turns into February.
We are really jammin’ to Infinite Mixtapes, this site we found that plays, well, infinite mixtapes. (1) Our daytime choice for day bookselling operation purposes is “Memory Lane.”
Otherwise, things are chill. Big news is that Magnus and John seeded the lawn a few days ago. John was also just feeding Jack salsa. (2)
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Stay tuned as we’ll be providing updates on the lawn’s progress in the coming months! (3)
OK, let's down to business. Hold onto your ergonomic office chairs...it's Digest time!
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"The Naked and the Conflicted"(4), (5)
In a 2009 piece in the New York Times, Katie Roiphe looks at the complex legacy of a handful of 20th writers—Updike, Bellow, Roth, and Mailer—who wrote with the kind of frank and virile sexuality, mixed "with a dash of modern journalism," that Henry more or less invented in the 30s.
"These novelists were writing about the bedrooms of middle-class life with the thrill of the censors at their backs, with the 1960 obscenity trial over “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” fresh in their minds. They would bring their talent, their analytic insights, their keen writerly observation, to the most intimate, most unspeakable moments, and the exhilaration, the mischief, the crackling energy was in the prose."
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Anais Nin's Mt. Washington LegacyWriter and actress Kim Krizan has a new book, entitled Spy in the House of Anais Nin, exploring Nin's feminist legacy, her "real politics," and her life in LA's Mt. Washington neighborhood. (6)
Krizan recently sat down for a chat with the East Sider LA’s Jesus Sanchez. Read it here!
(The photo is of Anais and Rupert Pole, her partner of many years.)
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It's a veritable Insta(gram)buffet!
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It's our pals Alisa Fineman & Kimball Hurd!
Alisa and Kimball are dear friends of ours. (Back in the day, Alisa got acquainted with many residents, including Emil White, while writing her senior thesis entitled, Where Extremes Meet: Local Perspectives on Preservation Legislation.)
You can expect something similar to the video above...
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Ellis Paul returns to the Library.
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Ariel Pink pix from 2013!
That was when Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti played the Library. Holy Shit opened.
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Bye-bye see you next month!
- Magnus, Mike, John, and Jack (Kerouac)
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(1) Because who has the time to get up and flip over a mixtape?(2) "He only had three licks, though," John said.(3) "The Henry Miller Library: Watching the lawn grow since 1981.” Has a nice ring to it, doncha think? ;)(4) As opposed to "The Clothed and the Confused" (see below)
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(5) We have this still-gestating theory as to why modern critics don't worship Miller to the same extent that they do Roth, Updike, etc. The theory is this: Roth and Updike's characters were misanthropic middle-class men who paid the price for choosing their bourgeois middle-class existence. Henry Miller, however, emerged victorious.
Exhibit A: The protagonist of Roth's "American Pastoral," Seymour Irving Levov, saw his "perfect American life" decimated by his wife's infidelity, the fact that his daughter is a terrorist, and his own infidelity.
Exhibit B: In Updike's "Rabbit, Run," Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom (shockingly!) finds middle-class life unsatisfying, ditches his family, sleeps with a prostitute, reconciles with his wife, ditches his wife again, and goes back to the prostitute. Oh, and did I mention his wife accidentally drowns their newborn daughter? And that Harry knocks up the prostitute?
This is predictable and overused trope is catnip for Boomer critics who relish in suburban middle-class dudes clawing their way through a middle-class hellscape. That's because critics themselves are trapped, and the last thing they want is for someone else to break free. It's pure, unadulterated literary schadenfreude. (7) (8)
In short, the familiar narrative mandates, to paraphrase Shyloc in "Merchant of Venice," a "pound of flesh," except...Henry doesn't give it to them.
Exhibit C: The Henry Miller of "Tropic of Cancer" hangs with prostitutes, ditches his family, and gets lonely. But unlike Levov, Angstrom, and the rest, he emerges triumphant, restored, and, somehow, spiritually fulfilled.
"After everything had quietly sifted through my head a great peace came over me," he writes on the final page of "Cancer." This isn't supposed to happen! He's supposed to be chastised, ground to dust.
And this, dear digesteers, is why critics remain nonplussed about Miller: It's because he won. (9)
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6 - One time Mike slept in his van outside of Mt. Washington's Footsies.
7 - Cue Bob Dylan:
While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society's pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole that he's in
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8 - Nor does this trope dwell exclusively in the literary sphere. Consider the plight and fate of Lester in the Oscar-winning (and heavy-handed) "American Beauty."
9 - To repeat: This theory is "still-gestating."
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