Tropic of Capricorn (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Henry just grinned as our friend's hat passed around, and even people that had known him less than an hour tossed in a bit of green. It wasn't until we were leaving, weaving our own snake trail out the door, that my friend discovered that along with the money, Henry had also absconded with his hat. The only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past' George Orwell Thanks for your insights Mister Miller! It doesn't feel so bad anymore to think of yourself as kind of alienated and for wanting more out of life and for not fitting into boxes.

I don't get to hear his stories first hand anymore. I have to buy his books to find out what he has been up to. I miss Henry. He had me gaze upon the greener pastures on the other side of the fence, but he couldn't convince me to jump over and stay over. Every so often, despite his better financial circumstances, I still get a note from him with a plea for a few dollars for old time's sake. I, the dutiful enabling friend, always send him what I can spare. Henry Miller (ed. Antony Fine), Henry Miller: Stories, Essays, Travel Sketches, New York: MJF Books, 1992, p. 5. The guy who turned me down was a little runt who ran the switchboard. He seemed to take me for a college student, though it was clear enough from my application that I had long left school. I had even honored myself on the application with a Ph.D. degree from Columbia University. Apparently that passed unnoticed, or else was suspiciously regarded by this runt who had turned me down. I was furious, the more so because for once in my life I was in earnest. Not only that, but I had swallowed my pride, which in certain peculiar ways is rather large. My wife of course gave me the usual leer and sneer. I had done it as a gesture, she said. I went to bed thinking about it, still smarting, getting angrier and angrier as the night wore on. The fact that I had a wife and child to support didn’t bother me so much; people didn’t offer you jobs because you had a family to support, that much I understood only too well. No, what rankled was that they had rejected me, Henry V. Miller, a competent, superior individual who had asked for the lowest job in the world. That burned me up. I couldn’t get over it. In the morning I was up bright and early, shaved, put on my best clothes and hotfooted it to the subway. I went immediately to the main offices of the telegraph company . . . up to the twenty-fifth floor or wherever it was that the president and the vice-presidents had their cubicles. I asked to see the president. Of course the president was either out of town or too busy to see me, but wouldn’t I care to see the vice-president, or his secretary rather. I saw the vice-president’s secretary, an intelligent, considerate sort of chap, and I gave him an earful. I did it adroitly, without too much heat, but letting him understand all the while that I wasn’t to be put out of the way so easily.

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I read the first few chapters...it was boring....then I skipped chapters hoping he would get more interesting..he didn't....kept going...it was still boring...towards the end...he is pathetically sentimental, self-indulgent and boring... Pealkiri ütleb Simon Reeve´i reisimarsruudi kenasti ära, aga kordame siis üle: Namiibia rannikult läbi Aafrika lõunaosa (Botswana, LAV, Mosambiik), Madagaskarile, järgmine etapp Austraalias, sellest järgmine Lõuna-Ameerika (Tšiili, Argentina, Paraguay, Brasiilia). Kõrbed, Andid, Suur Korallrahu, Uluru jne, jne. Nagu ikka, nii püüab Reeve sellelgi reisil uurida iga piirkonna valupunkte, olgu selleks metsad, mida enam pole või Šveitsi juustuks kaevandatud maapind, halvasti koheldud Austraalia aborigeenid, vaesus ja slummid jne.

Miller recalls an episode from his childhood in which he and his cousin Gene killed a boy in a gang fight. Miller and Gene hurried home afterward, and Aunt Caroline, Gene’s mother, gave them rye bread with butter. Miller remembers this image as particularly potent. In that house, he was never scolded; the image conveys an angelic forgiveness, divine absolution. Henry Miller (1891-1980) is one of the most important American writers of the 20th century. His best-known novels include Tropic of Cancer (1934), Tropic of Capricorn (1939), and the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy ( Sexus, 1949, Plexus, 1953, and Nexus, 1959), all published in France and banned in the US and the UK until 1964. He is widely recognised as an irreverent, risk-taking writer who redefined the novel and made the link between the European avant-garde and the American Beat generation. Read more Details Bukowski ha ereditato il suo modo di scrivere ubriaco da Henry Miller, che ha inoltre ispirato molti della Beat Generation, che a loro volta ispireranno i post-modernistiIn Tropico del Capricorno ci sono anche citazioni ed omaggi indiretti: Miller è un'omicida come Hemingway, ma più incosciente, perché bambino e puro What does it take to become a writer? First of all a person must find one’s true self. And the process of searching can be very cynical. And true selves can be very different.

Perhaps it was Hymie, “the dirty little kike,” who was responsible for the high percentage of Jews on the messenger force. Perhaps Hymie was really the one who was doing the hiring at the employment office–at Sunset Place, they called it. It was an excellent opportunity, I gathered, for Mr. Clancy, the general manager, to take down a certain Mr. Burns who, he informed me, had been the employment manager for some thirty years now and who was evidently getting lazy on the job. Mr. Clancy, the manager, tells Miller he wants to make him “the boss of the works.” Before that can happen, he asks Miller to serve an apprenticeship as a special messenger, paid the salary of employment manager, with the duty of spying on the various branches of the company and reporting on the conditions to his superiors. In a few months, he has a post at the employment office, replacing the former employment manager, Mr. Burns, and is “hiring and firing like a demon” without batting an eye. He describes the company as a farce, a waste of humans and work. The ousted Mr. Burns dies “of a broken heart,” and Miller dives into his work – physically, that is, not emotionally. Men come and go in a rush, dozens hired in one day, fired the next, “holes” plugged on an hourly basis. Miller finds himself responsible for hundreds of men and their livelihoods, reviewing their applications, judging them suitable or unsuitable, luring them in and ushering them out the door in a single swoop. “I never saw such an aggregation of misery in my life,” Miller writes. The journey toward self-discovery continues, with Miller stumbling through the Southwest lost, alone, and in need of Hamilton (who has continued seeking his father). Miller thinks of his own father, a heavy drinker who routinely goes on the wagon, falls ill, and then throws himself headfirst into Christianity. After the minister who originally inspired his conversion leaves for a position in New Rochelle, Miller’s father falls into disillusionment and depression. Miller describes him as a man betrayed, before turning to the example of Grover Watrous, a neighbor who also found God, and remained the most “joyful” person Miller has ever known. The thing of it is, despite his best efforts, Henry Miller became a useful member of society. He published books describing a life so unencumbered that even those of us perfectly satisfied with our soft lives, eking out a possession laden life of soulless corporate kowtowing, have doubts that we have chosen our lives wisely. The BBC series of the same name, consisting of four episodes, was on television and as I had a copy of the book in my shelf, I thought I would read the relevant chapters after seeing each episode.Tropic of Capricorn opens with a passage of philosophical musings, in which Henry Miller compares himself to the people around him and contemplates the futility of life. Everyone around him seems to be a failure; those who aren’t technically failures strike him as all the more ridiculous. In other words, Miller immediately posits a clear disconnect from societal norms of “success” and “progress.” The work ethic holds no appeal for him, nor does the ideal of ambition and upward mobility: “there was nothing I wished to do which I could just as well not do.” The conference lasted several hours. Before it was terminated Mr. Clancy took me aside and informed me that he was going to make me the boss of the works. Before putting me into office, however, he was going to ask me as a special favor, and also as a sort of apprenticeship which would stand me in good stead, to work as a special messenger. I would receive the salary of employment manager, but it would be paid me out of a separate account. In short I was to float from office to office and observe the way affairs were conducted by all and sundry. I was to make a little report from time to time as to how things were going. And once in a while, so he suggested, I was to visit him at his home on the q.t. and have a little chat about the conditions in the hundred and one branches of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company in New York City. In other words I was to be a spy for a few months and after that I was to have the run of the joint. Maybe they’d make me a general manager too one day, or a vice-president. It was a tempting offer, even if it was wrapped up in a lot of horseshit. I said Yes.

In Tropic of Capricorn, Henry Miller appears in a hallucinated monologue of a type on the fringes, of an outsider, a magnificent loser, rebellious, flayed alive, of a saturnal personality (O Verlaine!).

I could take it or leave it. For one thing, it's too damned wordy. Another, I hate the "c" word for female genitalia and Miller peppers this book with it. Section III: “Life drifting by the show window” to “It gave me the feeling of the stupidity of the blood tie and of the love which is not spiritually imbued.” The narration comes as a rave of a cynical lunatic… And this madman abides in the hallucinatory world of his own making. A cult modern classic, Tropic of Capricorn is as daring, frank and influential as Henry Miller first novel, Tropic of Cancer Tropic of Capricorn, a semi-autobiographical prequel to Tropic of Cancer (set in 1930s Paris), though published a few years after, is set mostly in Manhattan of the 1920s. It's not chronological; rather, it skips around to revisit Miller's hetero-development and sexual high jinks in the Big Apple, including his sexual relationship with his 30-year-old piano teacher when he was 15, and a blunt description of nearly every other first encounter with a very diverse legion of women.