Henry Miller
“I’ve also been feeling rather unhinged lately. It’s a combination of dissatisfaction/inertia/struggling within the spaces of work, home, personal life, artistic life… and on and on.
Interestingly, Henry Miller has been wonderful to read. He’s helped to both unhinge me further, and clarify my ideas and ambitions, etc. I have finished Sexus and am now reading Plexus, the second book in the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy. He wrote a great piece in Plexus which struck me profoundly in terms of my own writing. He’s better than I’ll ever be. But he confessed to being hopeless at narrative, yet able to plot and balance and counter-balance characters, thoughts, and events and philosophies. To map out a novel according to ideas. And that’s absolutely the pleasure of reading him. He has no real narrative (other than things more or less jerking forwards in time, with the odd glimpse from the future, and the odd nostalgic exploration of times past). It’s a sprawling mass of ideas – that’s where his writing plays out, at a meta level. Not in the real physical world, but where life really takes place – inside our heads, where memories and thoughts and opinions collide. He maps these out so that a book never has a great narrative trajectory (not in any overly conclusive sense), but in which the linkages between concepts matters most.
Clearly, he excites me. And he’s the closest to what I’d like to write like that I’ve ever read; of all the authors I’ve admired. I’m total shit at narrative too. But I love ideas. I love the conceptual links between things, moreso than the actual, physical links of and-then-and-then-and-then…
Anyway. This is why I’ve been delayed in replying. I’ve been a mess. But a happy (?) mess. And a nervous mess. And a wonderfully distracted mess.”
