I just watched a fascinating documentary called Obscene about the life of Barney Rosset, the one time operator of Grove Press which published the first U.S. editions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, and the Autobiography of Malcolm X. Rosset and Grove Press were involved in the legal fight against censorship for the first three of these titles.

I plan on writing more about Obscene in general over at Tombrarian because I am going to nominate it for the notable videos committee. But I want to dwell a bit here about something Rosset says about Henry Miller:

I didn’t think of Henry Miller being particularly involved with sex. He just had contempt for this country that I shared. I never even noticed the fact that it was supposed to be sexually explicit or anything else and I still don’t, but it is an insulting book to everybody.

I particularly like this quote for a couple of reasons. One is that it has always annoyed me that people focus so much on the sex in Miller’s books. I recently re-read Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn and I would be surprised if 10% of those books are about sex. There is so much else going on that I feel people are really missing the point if they look at them so narrowly.

The other reason is that Rosset points to Miller’s contempt for America. In re-reading the two Tropics, this aspect stood out to me more than ever. I think because a lot of what Miller critiques is still so much an issue. So much of the narrow-mindedness, anti-intellectualism, consumerism, puritanism, and lack of concern for the environment that he rails against in the 1930s are still issues today.

Another interesting point that Rosset raises briefly regards why he felt an initial connection to Tropic of Cancer. Rosset was taken my Miller’s description of his breakup with Mona and how Miller resolved, as Rosset says, that he “will exist without her.” At the time, Rosset was going through his own break up. I have long held that Mona (based on Miller’s wife June) leaving him is at the heart of Tropic of Cancer. There’s an essential sadness that is key to understanding why the character of Henry Miller behaves as he does and takes the philosophical journey that he does. All the sex in the book is intricatly tied to this event. The supposed sexual liberation of the book is tempered when viewed from this angle.

Re-reading the Tropics and being struck by Miller’s harsh critique of the U.S. led my back to Aller Retour New York, which is Miller’s long letter to his friend Alfred Perles which was published as a short book in Paris between the two Tropics and in the U.S. in 1945. The letter describes Miller’s visit to New York after he had been living in Paris. The letter is a long-reflection of many of the difficulties Miller has with the American way of life. One of his long-standing complaints is about how wasteful American’s are compared to the Europeans:

Everybody has a crease in his trousers and shoes highly polished. Nobody wears a last year’s hat, crisis or no crisis. Nobody is without a clean handkerchief softly laundered and wrapped in a seal packerchief. When you have your hair brushed by the barber he throws the brush away to be fumigated and wrapped in cellophane again. The cloth he puts around your neck is sent immediately to the laundry–by pneumatic tubes that deliver the following morning. Everything is a twenty-four-hour service, whether it is necessary or not. Your things come back so fast you don’t have time to earn the money to pay for this service you don’t need. If it rains you get your shoes shined just the same–because the polish is a protection against weather stains. You get trimmed coming and going. You are in the sausage machine and there is no way out–unless you take a boat and go somewhere else. Even then you can’t be sure because the whole fucking world is going a hundred percent America.

Feels awfully prescient for 1935.

I enjoy reading literary magazines and keeping up on new writing. There are so many out there that chosing ones to subscribe to is difficult. I prefer to read a variety of literary magazines, which is easy to do if you are submitting to writing contests. Often, the entry fee includes a year’s subscription. By submitting to a variety of contests, I have a nice flow of different reading materials coming to my door.

Of course, the upside for the publisher in including a year’s subscription is that people may opt to continue their subscriptions beyond the year. I usually fight the urge knowing if I subscribed to a lot of magazines, I would be overwhelmed. I already feel overwhelmed by all I want to read.

That said, I have been a long-time subscriber to Ploughshares. Despite having rotating editors, I find a consistent quality to what they publish. Recently, I have subscribed to Rattle: Poetry for the 21st Century. I like that they balance a variety of contemporary poetry, interviews, and a section with a particular theme. The issue I just finished included a section about Cowboy Poetry, which, being relatively new to the southwest, I found intriguing.

What I also like about Rattle is that they offer a lot of their poetry online through their site and their blog. Interesting how putting up content for free is part of what enticed me to subscribe to the print. But that’s a whole other line of thought.

Also, by having their poetry online, Rattle gives me the opportunity to link to some of my favorite poems from the Winter 2008 issue (see, too overwhelmed to keep up):

• Scarlet, by Sherman Alexie
• Considering the Trebonites, by Dick Allen
• On the Poverty of My Imagination, by Tiffany Beechy
• Dear Internal Revenue Service, by John Brehm
• Nameless Boy, by Douglas Goetsch

I finished Against the Day about 5 days after Inherent Vice came out. I wasn’t going to rush out and buy Inherent Vice considering the pile of books I have at home waiting for my attention, but a large chain bookstore of whom I’m a member, sent me a 40% off coupon, so there you have it.

I began Against the Day right before our trip to Yosemite, so it took me almost two-and-a-half months to read, with a break for Revolutionary Road. Overall, I liked Against the Day, but it certainly is a lot longer than it needs to be. The book is overly ambitious, not surprising coming from Pynchon.

A lot of critics criticize Pynchon on the grounds that his characters often lack substance, that they often stand in for an idea, which, in some instances is true. But Pynchon is quite capable of creating fully realized and emotionally engaging characters. I found the main plot line of Against the Day about the Traverse family and their quest for revenge full of interesting characters and, for the most part, that plot line is quite engaging and often exciting. As with most of Pynchon’s big novels, any sense of a main plot is obfuscated by multiple tangent plots and hundreds of other characters. And it is with some of these subplots that Against the Day drags. I found myself thinking that there was a really great novel about the Traverse family lost in all the other chaos.

At the same time, however, it’s not easy to dismiss these tangents because many of them are important to the bigger ideas of the novel. The stories of Against the Day take place from the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 to the years following the end of World War I. The novel traces some historical events and some imaginary events that lead to the War to End All Wars. Part of what I found so engaging about Against the Day is how Pynchon uses this history to foreshadow the violence, corporate malfeasance, and social upheaval that pervades the rest of that century and the first decade of the 21st. Although the events of the book take place in the early part of the 20th century, it is very much a reaction to the G.W. Bush administration. But it is not only a criticism of that administration, but it is also a criticism of how we painted ourselves into that particular corner. Then again, as Pynchon himself supposedly said in a blurb about Against the Day:  “With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.”

Speaking of Inherent Vice, Penguin Press has released a trailer for the novel narrated by Thomas Pynchon: Read more »

I am about 650 pages into Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, just a mere 445 more to go. I have deemed this the summer of fat books and am starting with Against the Day.

I had purchased this book when it first came out toward the end of 2006. I began reading it and was enjoying it more or less but was not overly impressed. I got about halfway through when the reality of moving to Las Vegas hit, and I got very busy with making plans and packing. Because I was not overly thrilled with the novel, it got packed up and stayed in the box until recently.

When I heard Inherent Vice is coming out in August, I decided I wanted to give Against the Day another try and attempt to read the entire thing before the new book comes out.

I’m not sure what I missed the first time I tried reading it, but I am absolutely loving Against the Day on the second try. I think part of my issue might be that I really enjoyed the Chums of Chance section that opens the novel, but this story line is not a main plot line. I should know better with Pynchon, but I think I may have focused too much of my initial reading on hoping for more C of C and was not fully appreciating the other sections.

This time around, I went in knowing that the Traverse family is the main focus and have found that story to be rather interesting, exciting, and moving. I also am finding it interesting because this story line starts out much like a Western, but one that takes place at the very end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Centuries. Modernity is creeping into this way of life. It reminds me in some way of The Wild Bunch, which, if I recall correctly, takes place during a similar time and is likewise about how modernity changed the face of the western United States.

So my summer of reading fat novels is off to a good start. I was hoping to finish Against the Day before taking a trip later this week, but I don’t think I will be able to. As much as I am enjoying the book, I am not looking forward to lugging it on the plane.