Things I had to look up: poetaster

Poetaster: an inferior poet:

Turner gives us an informative sketch for a bildungsromanabout how (Henry) Miller re-made himself as a writer, transforming himself from poetaster to master brute.

-- from a review by Todd Gitlin on tnr.com
of Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of 'Tropic of Cancer,' by Frederick Turner

Eugenides not pushing the envelope this time, maybe feels okay about it

Q: People are starting to notice that a generation of writers, which includes you and Jonathan Franzen, are wrestling with the question of how you create a novel after postmodernism.

Jeffrey Eugenides: Schoenberg said it's still possible to write music in C major, and that’s coming from Mister Experimental himself. That strikes a chord in me; I think with the novel, at a certain point you realize it's still possible to write in C major and have some kind of narrative content. And meaningful characters that readers can, you know it's an old-fashioned term, but people can fall in love with the characters and become caught up in their lives. If you don't have that, you cease to have the kind of novel that can be compelling.

--Interview with novelist Jeffrey Eugenides
in the L.A. Times

This is a real issue. I constantly struggle with the imperative to create new ways of seeing and story-telling, which is what the word "novel" implies, and this traditional approach. I've written before about how I love mid-century writers, and how Larry McMurtry's now obscure early novel "Moving On" was a model for me for many years. The roomy character-driven traditional narrative informed the writing of my first novel, "Make Nice." But in my current project I'm trying to get away from it.

It's a struggle, and not only because I love the mid-century novel (by which I mean the thoughtful character-driven novels of McMurtry, Heller, Highsmith, Roth, Mailer, Salter and others) but because this approach seems so natural to me. But I also love the mid-century departures from this model (Kerouac, Henry Miller) and post-modernists from DeLillo to Acker. (And DeLillo's accomplishment in the 1970s and 1980s is now awe-inspiring to me. He didn't have a model for what he was doing, he really was making up a new way of story-telling.) Not to mention the Latin Americans, including You Know Who.

Having never read a Jeffrey Eugenides novel, I can't say whether it's working for him. Maybe Eugenides is trying to fend off criticism in advance here. Maybe he feels a little bad for not pushing the envelope in his latest work. Without reading it and knowing his work, I can't say.

Mythologize your friends -- or just make them up

It's really a very simple strategy. You have a small group of friends and you declare them all to be geniuses and you laud all their work and ascribe to them sweet and stormy qualities worthy of the Greek gods. What you're selling is not just your writing but your personal legends.

That's Edmund White, writing in the Aug. 19, 2010 New York Review of Books, reviewing photographs of the Beat writers by Allen Ginsburg, talking about how Jack Kerouac turned his real-life friends into not just fictional characters but mythical ones.

And when I read that, I immediately thought: Yes, that's just what Bolaño did in The Savage Detectives, which for that reason among others has been compared to On the Road and the rest of Kerouac's work. And in a previous generation Henry Miller did something similar (though most of the weird characters and hangers-on in The Rosy Crucifixion didn't turn out to be famous writers or artists -- not including Anaïs Nin and her crowd who showed up later).

You may think to yourself, right, my friends are just as nutty and proto-famous as that collection of characters in New York in the 1920s/New York in the 1940s/Mexico City in the 1970s. The poet-barista you have a crush on -- surely she's the equal of June Miller. That pretty flash fiction author who reads at every open mike is just like Gregory Corso. The hairy, almost inarticulate author of chapbook verse who hangs out in the park every Sunday is another Ulises Lima.

Or not. Maybe you're singularly unimpressed with the talent around you. Maybe you just realized they do a lot more talking about their art than working on it. Maybe they're boring. Very well. Make up characters -- that's creative writing.

Who Twinka was

In my looking around the internet for references to Henry Miller, I ran across an interview with the painter Wayne Thiebaud, whose candy-colored paintings of California I have always liked. In the interview, Thiebaud mentions a daughter Twinka (b. 1945). The name rang a bell, and I thought of this famous photograph:

I knew the title of the photo was "Imogen and Twinka," and I thought, hell, there must be only one Twinka. Wow, I never knew the gorgeous woman in that famous photo was the daughter of a famous painter.

The photographer is Judy Dater, and another of her pictures of the famous painter's daughter can be seen here.

Anyway, according to the interview, Twinka Thiebaud "helped take care of Henry Miller in the end of his life. She was friends with his daughter" and also edited a book of Miller's miscellanea titled "Reflections." She is seen with Miller in the small image at the top of this blog post, which has links to this amusing anecdote by a newly minted mail carrier who met Miller and Twinka. And here is the uncropped image of the two of them.

technorati: Imogen Cunningham

Random links to Henry Miller

In writing my current book, I'm engrossing myself in the work of Henry Miller, digging through the Tropics and the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (I'm now almost finished with Plexus.) At the same time I'm reading a biography, The Happiest Man Alive. Miller is clearly of a piece with Jack Kerouac in that his novels consists mostly of fictionalized autobiography, and I was looking on the internet for something that would be the equivalent of this chart of Kerouac's characters in On the Road and their real-life equivalents.

I found this blog entry by another Miller aficionado with a small graphic of such a chart that Miller himself kept, but not even the original graphic, much less a chart than anyone else compiled. Maybe I'll do it myself -- but not at the moment.

Meanwhile, here are a few interesting things I ran into on the way, thanks to Google and others' links:

• April 2007 SF Chronicle: Novelist Herbert Gold on his acquaintance with Miller. I was particularly amused by Gold's saying that in his later writing Miller "declared loudly and hotly, with dash, brio, careless grammar, repetitiveness and bawdy self-centeredness, that idleness, drunkenness and sexual complications were essential to a life of proper dignity." And also that "He was a Jack Kerouac who really liked sex."
• October 2007 Guardian: a short appreciation, but I liked the author's statement that without Miller leading the way "authors such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Kathy Acker, and Michel Houellebecq" would never have found the audiences they did.
• Style, June 1997: a scholarly article on "Henry Miller's bourgeois family Christmas in 'Nexus'"
• And finally, a big fan page of links to more Henry Miller-related stuff.

technorati: Henry Miller, writers

The only people that interest me are the mad ones

"... I certainly do envy you... The thing I'll always remember about this fellow" -- he looked from one to the other with a melting glow -- "is his inextinguishable gaiety. I don't think I've seen him depressed more than once or twice in all the time I've known him. As long as there's food and a place to flop... isn't that it?" He turned his gaze on me with unmingled affection. "Some of my friends -- you know the ones I mean -- ask me occasionally if you aren't just a bit touched. I always say, 'Certainly he is ... too bad we're not all touched in the same way.' And then they ask me how you support yourself--and your family. There I have to give up..."

We all began to laugh rather hysterically. Ulric laughed even more heartily than the rest of us. He laughed at himself -- for raising such silly issues. Mona, of course, had a different reason for laughing.*

"Sometimes I think I'm living with a madman," she blurted out, tears in her eyes.

"Yes?" said Ulric, drawing the word out.

"Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night and begins laughing. He's laughing about something that happened eight years ago. Something tragic usually."

"I'll be damned," said Ulric.

"Sometimes he laughs that way because things are so hopeless he doesn't know what to do. It worries me when he laughs that way."

"Shucks," I said, "it's only another way of weeping."

-- Henry Miller, Plexus

* Miller's wife June -- "Mona" in the book -- supported them by gold-digging.

technorati: Henry Miller,artists,iconoclasm

Lazy Saturday

In the photoblog links to the right, several new pictures of the garden and the cat. This is not the same cat who caused all the ruckus last week. This is the good guy whom the devil-cat got in a fight with.

Last night, I put in a full 8.5-hour shift at the l.n.c.b., the first time they've called me in in a month. I thought my favorite customer was going to be the guy who got a stack of poetry books, but then he tried to pay by check and his check was refused. He left saying he would return, but of course he didn't. So favorite customer honors went to the guy who bought Henry Miller's Sexus and two different books by Balzac.

The shift lasted from 4 p.m. to 12:30 in the morning. Man, that's a long time on your feet, even with an hour break in the middle. When I got home, I had to put two big pillows in the bed for my legs, so I could fall asleep with my legs elevated just to get the blood out of them. In the middle of the night, I woke up enough to kick the pillows off, then went back to sleep and slept until 9 a.m.

My good friend Marilyn, who has moved from explicit erotica into the more erotic-romance genre, now has a blog -- stop by, then go to Barnes and Noble and get one of her books. They publish some of her new stuff exclusively.

Imaginary festival of films depicting the lives of writers and artists

Henry and June -- about Henry Miller and Anais Nin
Naked Lunch -- about William S. Burroughs and friends
Pollock -- about Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner
The Fountainhead -- fictitious film about a larger-than-life architect
Next Stop, Greenwich Village -- fictitious film about New York bohemians in the 1950s
'Round Midnight -- fictitious film about jazz musicians in Paris
Artists and Models -- Martin and Lewis portray American artists in Paris
An American in Paris -- Gene Kelly, ditto
Chelsea Walls -- fictitious film about New York bohemians in the 1990s
The Razor's Edge (1941) -- fictitious film about Paris bohemians in the 1930s
Il Postino -- fictitious film in which Pablo Neruda is portrayed
Before Night Falls -- about Reinaldo Arenas
Jack London -- about Jack London
My Dear Secretary -- fictitious comedy about a novelist and his secretary
White Badge -- fictitious drama about a novelist suffering from war-related PTSD
The Front -- fictitious look at the blacklist of the 1950s
Hangover Square -- fictitious drama about a composer suffering from mental illness
Impromptu -- fictitious romance depicting George Sand and Frederic Chopin
Julia -- drama depicting fictionalized events in the lives of Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman
Night and Day -- biopic of Cole Porter
Rhapsody in Blue -- biopic of George Gershwin