It’s hard to find info on this recording - what is the true runtime? Is what is uploaded here the entire recording? The tracklist implies a longer interview but I’m not totally sure, and feel like if it were longer-I’d have heard the rest already somewhere else
If you enjoy this and Miller, you MUST GO READ Nikos Kazantzakis. “I shall never forget the day I met Nikos Kazantzakis. I did not meet him as one meets ordinary mortals - I met him as one meets a god.” Henry Miller from “The Colossus of Maroussi”
Henry Miller is a human treasure. He was a genius who encompassed and transcended this mortal coil. He was courageous and exemplary as an artist and generous to a fault. He lived and set the high watermark to be human. Sadly in today's reactionary and woke fascism, Henry's voice has been sidelined by Tweets and a degraded homoginous culture. His voice will rise again!
BIG JOHN & TOM JOHNSON hung electric lines like wet clothes lines for 15 weeks. “I sure could go for 3 well-lubricated prostitutes after working in this dry desert heat,” Tom said. “That sounds good to me!” Big John exclaimed loudly while his huge cock swung like six diseased chimpanzees at a pancake breakfast for 5 retiring cops. IT WAS SO COLD ON THE NIGHT THAT SHEILA & ROBERT FIRST HAD MEXICAN SEXUAL INTERCOURSE TOGETHER WITH EACH OTHER THAT 14 EXTRA-LONG PHONE POLES HAD TO BE STUFFED INTO THEIR STEEL WOOD-BURNING STOVE OR THEIR SEXUAL PARTS WOULD HAVE FROZEN! “Pass the unused Lubriderm,” Sheila said with a sassy smile on her bone-thin face. “Here you go lover,” Robert replied a second before 12 monkeys fell through the rotten ceiling. “Are those the monkeys that escaped from the new zoo yesterday?” Sheila asked in a totally weird voice that shocked Robert so much that he ran from the huge cabin without hesitation all the way to eastern Michigan or Canada.
THE FINAL LLAMA-FLIGHT OF BIG WHIP-DINGER GILROY Sherlock & Watson are on the trail of Whip-Dinger Gilroy who's at a local Arab llama-leasing booth to lease 1 (a llama) to flee London before he is eaten by retarded Negro Pygmy savages. “There he is!” Doctor John Watson screams in a modest bathing suit. “Grab him!” Sherlock screams back in a genuinely-masculine tone. “I dare not!” Watson painfully re-screams desperately. “Why on God's flat Earth not?!” Manly Sherlock asks absolutely perplexed. “Because Whip's got hold of my dinger!” Later they'd giggle for 15 weeks like 2 pre- teens because Watson's dinger was unhurt, only stretched a wee bit.
When I first read Tropic of Capricorn when I was 19 (I'm 63 now), I felt as though this man had pulled up a chair alongside me and simply started to speak to me as though I were his confidant, a rare and very remarkable experience, that. I've been a fan ever since, even taking the pilgrimage to his cabin in Big Sur many years ago, and I also visited his wife's bar (with one of Henry's paintings hanging above the toilet) when I lived in Japan; he is an absolute treasure.
Same - 11 for me, Miller is so important to me.. I wish I could have lived during his existence to write to him.. luckily, Yale sent me a ton of his original drafts / letters etc, I bought his first prints all around Paris and Canada, I have so much to go through of his - but still, it’s a shame we don’t seem to have many recordings.. Thankfully though; a ton of written work. And this gem interview, a return to it like a sacred doctrine.
At 6:00 MIller begins talking about men and women socializing together. What he says reminds me of something Kenneth Clark said; he said that he found that the level of civility in a room or at a gathering goes down when the men and women separate from each other and only communicate among themselves. I think this is true. In a civilized society like Europe in general or France in specific, the men and women feel relaxed in each other's company, free to talk with respect for the other.
Miller has meant more to me than any other writer. He straight up stole Celine's lick; he was casting about...and rewrote Cancer after reading Celine (in French!), or more likely learned Celine through his famous conversations. But Miller is the lover, Celine the excoriator without mitigation, of mankind.
These interviews really put his writing into a much better perspective for me. He is deeply philosophical in a way that re-frames how you think about your own life - in a way that is actually meaningful, accurate, contemporary and lasting. It's strange because I could listen to this forever - and I find his writing addicting. I love and relate to what he is saying. Yet, I actually don't have the feeling that I would want to spend time with him in real life. I want to appreciate him from afar. I sort of want to love him, but not like him. I don't know, but what a contributor to our collective experience.
Interesting, I would love to chat and this highly increases that feeling However- I panned my headphones to the right, and am listening to my wall, as if I am eavesdropping to take this relisten in better... from afar is also the notion of wtvr tf I’m doing here.
I stopped believing in God after watching films on the holocaust. If God existed why would he let this happen? If ever a time to intervene, that was the time. God does not exist.
I found him to be the first genuine and honest voice of a "friend" who understood. I felt the loneliness he describes in the 1956 interview posted in you tube., concerning the artists and poets of the 19 century face to face to the new materialistic progress and rationalism of that period when it all began. I felt the isolation within my puerto rican culture and within the american culture and the marginalization of minorities during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the struggle of the counter culture vs war and materialism, so Henry Miller was a welcomed voice from an elder who we could trust back then. I perhaps followed his example in a both, tragic and fruitful ways. When I discovered his paintings in a college library, his narration, the colors, his attitude gave me the courage to return to painting full time seven years later, his self imposed exile in Paris, was the tragic side for me but at the end it was good as well. I quit my permanent easy super well payed job in Brooklyn, New york in 1984, to embarked for France where I eventuatlly remained ten years as well. Ten years later I returned to New York and I got my easy job as an interpreter back , and continued working for 30 years, rounding up a period of 40 years back to back since that adventure began. I am now retired and ready for my promise land...