From Portland: a Henry Miller moment
My friend B, a professor of literature at a respectable California university, says he cannot teach Henry Miller to his MFA students, that in this #metoo moment he would probably lose his job if he did so.
I mentioned this to Thomas Fuller, who knows the professor by name but not as well as I know him. Fuller was not happy to hear the news.
"Henry Miller wrote a book America needs now more than ever," Fuller said--The Air Conditioned Nightmare. "Ok, so he was a busybody, a card carrying misogynist, a profiteer who milked changing sexual mores..."
I thought I'd have to tranquilize Fuller, make him a morning martini or tempt him with the new vape pen I'd purchased at the cannabis factory on Burnside, the kind that plugs into an Apple MacBook Pro when the battery's diminished.
Fuller babbled on: the fluorocarbons released from Miller's book were just as important as the fluorocarbons released from Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring; that Miller's journalism was sacrosanct, goddammit; yes, the novels were flawed, having been condemmned by no less a poet than Wallace Stevens as being "prolix", but the vision in Miller's journalism was lacerating and remains so...
Fuller's little rant caused me to consider re-reading The Air Conditioned Nightmare, a book I'd first read in the early 1970's, even with the caveat I'd created from myself that I only read classics from this point forward. Portland's a good book town; I suppose I could pick the book up at Powell's or, even better at Mother Foucault's Bookshop, 523 SE Morrison St.