Author Archives: Lee

The Very Last Love in the World

Posted on August 8, 2016 by Lee

Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “The Backbone Flute” is a poem about desire, the mystery of where desires come from, and how they can fade and be forgotten. And it’s about the suffering of an artist, a poet, whose desires seem too wide … Continue reading →

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Hegel, Theodicy and Contradiction

Posted on August 2, 2016 by Lee

This is a paper I presented at the “Hegel’s Conception of Contradiction: Logic, Life and History” conference in Leuven on 17th May 2013. In retrospect, it seems strange to talk about theodicy without also discussing God and the problem of … Continue reading →

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When is it Life? Part 3. Final Part: “Life Presents Itself”

Posted on July 25, 2016 by Lee

Something is wrong with Henry Miller, as he wanders Broadway, lost, unable to write. This is what we’re really seeing when Miller gives us his picture of impersonal Broadway. Broadway reflects Miller himself: inhuman, sleepwalking, living dead, an abyss for … Continue reading →

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When is it Life? Part 2: Miller at Epidaurus

Posted on July 23, 2016 by Lee

A day for relaxation, spent reading The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller. I’m in a pleasant, empty bar where I can drink wheat beer as I sink into a comfortable chair, absorbed. “The road to Epidaurus is like the … Continue reading →

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When is it Life? Part 1: Henry Miller on Broadway

Posted on July 13, 2016 by Lee

Henry Miller is looking around at Broadway, all the people not themselves but one great mass “cackling with a thousand different human tongues, cursing, applauding, whistling, crooning, soliloquising, orating, gesticulating . . .” Each of these individual persons is alive, … Continue reading →

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Sunflowers in the Sunset

Posted on June 21, 2016 by Lee

“We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, we’re golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our own … Continue reading →

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That Dark and Silent Gap

Posted on June 10, 2016 by Lee

“Although, to restless and ardent minds, morning may be the fitting season for exertion and activity, it is not always at that time that hope is strongest or the spirit most sanguine and buoyant.” Reasons why I can’t write in … Continue reading →

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The Old Man on the Hill

Posted on June 3, 2016 by Lee

H. P. Lovecraft wrote of an old man with yellow eyes. He lives in a house in solitude among mysterious alien stones and whispers to jars he keeps in dark rooms. Three men are planning to rob him. We know … Continue reading →

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A Smokestack or a Button

Posted on May 26, 2016 by Lee

“What strikes me now as the most wonderful proof of my fitness, or unfitness, for the times is the fact that nothing people were writing or talking about had any real interest for me. Only the object haunted me, the … Continue reading →

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Note to Myself

Posted on May 20, 2016 by Lee

In letters to Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller writes about the struggle of the writer: “Expression seems such a natural, God-given thing – and yet it’s not either. It’s a lifelong struggle to find yourself.” (August 1936) Just writing the truth: … Continue reading →

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