Category Archives: Writing

Henry Miller’s Certitude in Black Spring

Posted on April 6, 2016 by Lee

(Page numbers refer to the edition of Henry Miller’s Black Spring published by Alma Classics in 2012) In the chapter of Black Spring called “The Angel is my Watermark”, we get to watch Henry Miller as he creates a work … Continue reading →

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Spiral Form in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer

Posted on March 28, 2016 by Lee

(Page numbers refer to Henry Miller and Narrative Form: Constructing the Self, Rejecting Modernity by James M Decker. Routledge, 2005) Henry Miller rejected linear narrative, creating instead something he called “spiral form”. (4) “I . . . have chosen to … Continue reading →

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Notes on James M Decker’s Concept of “Spiral Form”: An Essay Review

Posted on March 22, 2016 by Lee

Page numbers refer to “‘The agonizing gutter of my past’: Henry Miller, Conversion, and the Trauma of the Modern” by James M Decker, in Henry Miller: New Perspectives, ed. James M. Decker and Indrek Männiste (Bloomsbury, 2015) pp. 21-31 Abandoned … Continue reading →

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Henry Miller and Being in the Moment

Posted on March 15, 2016 by Lee

(Some notes on the text and related thoughts as I read Indrek Männiste’s Henry Miller: The Inhuman Artist Chapter 3. Where I write about Zen I’m recalling – however imperfectly – something from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki. … Continue reading →

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Notes on Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer Episode 2: “The Last Book”

Posted on March 14, 2016 by Lee

These madmen, Henry and Boris, want to write “The Last Book”. It will be the last because it will break everything apart. “Not one of us is intact, and yet we have in us all the continents and the seas … Continue reading →

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Essay review: “Henry Miller’s Inhuman Philosophy” by Indrek Männiste (in Henry Miller: New Perspectives, Bloomsbury 2015, pp. 9-20)

Posted on March 9, 2016 by Lee

Miller is a writer, not a philosopher. So he “has” a philosophy, he doesn’t “do” philosophy, says Indrek Männiste. A philosophy, in the sense that Miller has one, is something “intuitive” that affects how one lives one’s life “day to … Continue reading →

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Notes on Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer Episode 1: “Behind the Word is Chaos”

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Lee

Quotations are from Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (Harper, 2005) Misfortune Henry Miller is uncomfortable in Boris’s clean, orderly house. Even though the house is spotless, Boris manages to get lice. The cleanliness of the house can’t protect these … Continue reading →

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Henry Miller’s singing prose

Posted on February 29, 2016 by Lee

Ondřej Skovajsa writes: “In Miller’s attempt to write voice, the usage of parallelism is crucial. Marcel Jousse (1886-1961) interprets the general function of parallelism as mnemonic, connected with and involving the bilateral symmetry of human body and the rhythmical breath … Continue reading →

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