Bookery at the Fuckery

"He's losing his mind," says Jill.

"Wrong again," says Jabber. "I've just found my mind, only it's a different sort of mind than you imagined."

Henry Miller "Black Spring".

Sometimes on Fuckeries, I just like to muse about books. I like books because there are no distractions, unlike electronic forms of literature, in a book there is no where else to go but travel along the train of thought mapped out by the author.

Today I was thinking how similar Lawrence Durrell's "The Black Book" is to Henry Miller's "Black Spring", not only by title but by design. "The Black Book" was written in 1936 and published in 1938, and Miller's "Black Spring" contains stories written from 1936, in particular it is the story of Jabberwhorl Cronstadt that is almost written in the same style as Durrell in his Black Book, and highly likely influenced by as Lawrence had sent Henry Miller the manuscript of "The Black Book" in 1936 to read and then throw in the Seine.

"And Mowgli in the garden whistling for the rent, he's a poem too, a poem with big ears, a wambly bretzular poem with logamundiddy of the goo-goo. He has round, auricular daedali, round robin-breasted ruches that open up like an open barouche. He wambles in the wambhorst whilst the whelkin winkles ... he wabbles through the wendish wikes whirking his worstish wights ... Mowgli ... owgli ... whist and wurst"

"Black Spring" - Henry Miller.

See how "Spell Checker" likes that piece of writing from one of the most creative and prolific writing talents of our time, and then tell me we haven't been diluted by laziness into mediocre correctness and bland sensibility by modern fixtures.

Today I was sitting on the train platform feeling extremely anti-social, carving out some idea in my head, wanting space from people. The platform was entirely empty but to make sure I wasn't near the smattering of people on the opposite platform, I walked all the way down the other end. I found myself a seat, sat back, lit up a smoke, and gazing at some adjacent trees, allowed my mind to sink into thought.

Something distinctly blue and black out of the corner of my eye interrupted this reverie. An elderly woman was walking up the platform, she was half-way up it when she caught my attention, passing one seat, then another seat, getting closer. "Oh no" I thought, "This can't be", but it could and certainly would be. She kept on moving towards me, passing two more benches. Then with her large black sunglasses and blue jumper, she forced me to move my bag out of courtesy, and myself along the bench to make room for her. Then she sat facing away from me.

There was no one else on the platform and several benches on either side of us, but she had to sit next to me! My bag propped on one side, smoking a cigarette, the smoke wafting around the bench. It nearly ruined my day. When I got on the train I noticed she had walked even further up to the very first carriage just as the train pulled into the station.

The other day I made a few bulk purchases of books to stock up for the unexceptionally non-cold winter we are having.

Books such as "Last of the Dandies" by Nick Foulkes, a look at the life of Count d'Orsay who was friends with such notaries as Charles Dickens and William Thackery, he also was involved in what is presumed a bizarre love triangle with Lord and Lady Blessington.

Also on my book shopping list "The Erotomaniac - The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee" by Ian Gibson. Henry Ashbee was a Victorian gentleman who had a secret collection of erotica and pornography thousands of volumes strong. A veritable library of smut that was even larger, they say, of the massive collection housed by Richard Monckton Milnes 1st Baron Houghton.

I got some more Henry Miller too, "Max and the White Phagocytes" and "The World of Sex". Two titles in one book. I found a collection of short stories by the brilliant Portuguese writer, Machado De Assis, under the title of "The Psychiatrist and other stories", and finally a more contemporary read, "The Vesuvius Club" by Mark Gratiss (Praised by Stephen Fry, so I thought it possibly a good read).

I had paused my book buying for a while in order to catch up on collection on my shelf, of which I have now done, and feel very, very pleased about that.

Why do I read? I read primarily to write. I read because I am interested in the ideas of others, but more of what comes out of people's heads rather then their mouths. I think good writing is about what comes out of someone's head as if they wanted it to come out of their mouth. Not what comes out of someone's mouth backed only partially from what is in their head.

The former is the kind of book I enjoy to read, books where I can feel the author's mind panting from the processes of thought. Only someone like Winston Churchill or Oscar Wilde could claim to both be great minds as well as great mouths.

The last and lesser of these purchases was "Harris's List of Convent-Garden Ladies" which is a series of reviews, good primarily as a curiosity, of prostitutes in Georgian Britain, kind of like the Fun in Australia website which does the same thing but Online. Harris however compiled his book in order to try and make a buck selling it to those who enjoy dancing the beginning of the world under the red light.