One Good Book

I started following - via Blogger, though I follow via Twitter too - Changeling, a Twitter and Blogger with a well-laced sarcastic style, that swings with cadence between insulting you and other in your face and dipping the tip of the [insert whatever you are thinking] in a swirl of whipped throughts of the heaviest nature. A delight to read, I must say. I found this delightful cyber phenomenon through yet another witty, fun twitter. Social networks, I tell you. Sometimes it like swinging Tarzan-style from one contact to the next.

Last week, I finished reading Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller, and I must say, it was one of those books that leave you in a daze. Certainly a book hard to describe, as I have said so time and again while I read it, and often almost engaged in a long courting of the pages, worshiping from far, reducing our encounters to hushed minutes in a secluded waiting area. Russian romanticism applied to a jaded, brute, seedy bum. However everything tied up amazingly. After the long courtship, I've realize that also a quick fuck is needed. Take the book, escape to some place where the two of you can be alone and deep into it, spread it like Miller had said to spread his whores, and slam head first between the many lips of the paper cunt. The impressions such should leave must be amazing.

There's no outspoken romanticism in the book, book which in itself has managed to steer away from telling a story without either falling into a philosophical essay. Fiction and reality fuse in this non-story bowl, where all shreds of romantic tones are bashed, smeared thick with shit and dirt. Unpleasant details plague the pages often as ice over a frozen river, where maybe a faint rushing can still be heard, maybe it isn't ice all the way to the riverbed, or maybe it is.

Food, sex, food, shelter. Hatred, self-hatred, envy translated into more hatred, into the need to despise, the need to destroy. Unability to decide what he really wants, unability to be happy with anything in the present, but constantly remembering how good it was back then, when this and that. The title eventually makes sense in so many levels, the sheer genius of it smack you dumb. It's the body, the heat, the sex, nakedness, focus on the lower levels, on the stench that sticks to your hair, the sweat that smears on your skin. The poverty, the turmoil.

It reveals much of the writer, the confusion about whe his wife is, Tania or Mona, not as if he wouldn't know, but knowing but mixing them up. Who he felt as his wife? Anaïs or June? It's not an editing mistake, it's his mind, a mind that fused them both into the one wife he needs. A woman less needy, less demanding, less complicated, stronger, more of a whore, less of a bitch.

June's disappointment is evident as well. She wanted to be an uplifted heroine, a beauty, Sarah Bernhardt, but all she was in the book was the cheating-cheated wife on and off his life, far less interesting than any of the whores that so thickly peppered the pages. A character that goes from longed person to a secondary thought, material enough for a brief wondering. It's not an ode to her, but an anthem to him and the life she hates but can't really escape herself.

A book that goes nowhere, a rat in a stinky trap to which it returns whenever he gets the chance to step just a little out of it. Hate it but can't live it. And even as hope shines, feeble like a candle in the storm, and he shelters it, helps it, makes it grow, strenghten, he lets it escape his hands. Twisted, sick, breaking down and pushing away the cure.

The settling at the end of the book rounds it up into a more novelistic type of story, where threads become more evident, and there's a stream that takes you from A to B, which you don't see in the rest of the book. It gives you a strange feeling, almost as if you were coming out of a thick, dark fog into a clearing. It then opens up, it's left half done and untied, in tone with the rest of the book, where it wouldn't mean the end of a story, because it flows constantly and splashes into something else, a few thoughts on the matter, a new quest for food and shelter and money to spend on toothless whores and all types of dirty, clap ridden women, who pretend to be high mantenance ladies while they spread for anyone with enough francs in the pocket to buy them a dinner.

So, now off the heat, bewildered by it still, I chose to soothe my mind with a double attack: The Brothers Bishop and Moll Flanders. New books are on the rack.

The Fog and The Shapes in It

Mathew has dragged behind himself a long, floating, vaporous trail, fluffed and dense, light and ubiquitous. And thus, after the promised rain and floods failed to be delievered, a veil of freezing rain beads delicately from swollen skies of luxuriant silver fox furs and the dense fog descends upon us, like over a bride who walks blindly, wrapped in blissful ignorance regarding the good the bad, the delightful and the rotten scattered around her. Taking pictures becomes a futile exercise, clicking away at the furls of white immaterial halo, a milky solution splashed across the air, much like the slow, frozen breath of a man peacefully sleeping in a cold hut.

From the floor where everything was seen, nothing was seen, Argus Panoptes lost his one hundred eyes under a cosmic bridal trail. Helios, God of Watchfulness and Wisdom turns inside, and as light blinds and blends outside, opens Argos Panoptes' one hundred eyes to the insides, where the Styx flows alive, and carries death and life alive in a stream of humanity and the specks of nephilimic nature mingled in every man and woman. And thus eyes that can't see outside, turn inside, to a darkness that's no darkness, but fleshful richness.

Darkness sets heavy darkness in hearts up North, where the cold winds that cooled Annabel Lee's cheeks threaten to shun away the sparkle of life in their eyes. Paper words, bit and byte words tell me so. But in here the Algea do not touch our hearts, do not come with the change of the skies, the plunge of mercury bars. After much to see, much to picture, a swap of blank that erases the world before our eyes, leaving us on the fringe of material reality, introspection is the new place to go. In here the inner thoughts find other voices to conference with, and as banned pages flop softly, the words once prohibited, now hightened, flood faster inside and the artist leans heavily on the table before you, and as the pages wane away, the book reaches the end, his hand stretches forward fisting into your sleeve, pulling you closer to his face, and his wine stinky breath breaks on your nose in waves, spit splashing on your cheeks as his emotions climb excitement, formalities never observed as the confessions slowly come to the inevitable conclusion, remarks and anecdotes add up, and the bits and pieces that stick out slowly drip into the same bowl.

No big mysteries to be uncovered. Hatred, desdain, mockery, seedy sneers, dirt. No race is worth, no woman is worth, no person is worth, no ideal is worth, no religion is worth, no man is worth, no art is worth. And peppered over it words that collide into the matter perfect quotes are lifted from. Deep disrespect towards everything, in perfect anti-Einsteinian absolutism. Absolute hatred in the middle of which the nest of thorns has been found where the fishy can live to his heart's content.

Argos Panoptes widens his many eyes in realisation of the well known fact: wisdom often doesn't have to come from satisfaction, simply from thinking.

In Thoughtful Arrest

Sometimes life brings you moments - long or short - packed up with many tasks and many errands and many, many places to run to, many matters to attend, and so you may find yourself at the end of the day stretched out in your bed, drained of all will and strenght, turning tired eyes to something you love, something you'd love to do or occupy yourself with, but can't even muster enough energy to conjure a move to slide closer to it. This is not an unusual happening in my life, and it happens on and off, and sometimes it's not a matter of enough organization or not in your life, it's a matter of being drained.

A few weeks ago I retook the reading of Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and once again, just as it happened the first time, I found myself, yet again taken away, kidnapped by my daily life and it's many tasks and matters and issues, big and small, and unable to rip a few minutes and a cup of energy to read. Miller keeps walking with me, safely tucked away in my bag, placed on my nightstand every night waiting for that cup of energy when the minutes muster to gather up or waiting for the minutes when the energy has been summoned.

And so I have plotted and strategized and awaited to the very last lunch hour again to escape into the emptied diner and set myself in a table and read my 45 minutes away. Have escaped to nearby diners and restaurants to avoid any coworker that might decide to feel "pity" for me and keep me company, effectively ruining my reading time with unrequested kindness and thoughtfulness.

Thus I have mastered to break a bit of my day, a slab of my energy for Miller, take him out of my bag, spread him open and have his crude ways flow around me.

Haven't finished reading him yet, but I am absolutely enraptured by him and his style. A thing one must understand about his book is that it isn't a story. There's no time linearity, no chronological order, no story or happenings to follow, but rather a journal of thoughts, thoughts happening with no particular array, with issues and topics dictated by the mood. The elongated chapters and the ongoing developping of the particular thought isn't for the modern reader that requires predigested, bites cut neatly into small pieces, that happen and conclude in less than 1,5 pages. Miller lets his thoughts run on the morals of Parisian whores on and on for pages and extracts from his swirling of the topic a magnificent, simple principle: whores should behave like whore. Don't pretend to be what you are not, and no matter what you do, love your freaking job.

For chapters then fehe details the matters of his daily life, his never ending hunger, his striking poverty, the leeching and depending on the charity of people he despises, whom he looks for, and whom he coaxes into giving him money, a place to stay and/or money. The thoughts here are rich, as he evidently, in the eyes of the outsider is a veritable parasite, always preying on friends and family for the things he needs without actually considering the possibility of working to support himself. Ungrateful, seeking only whom to use, whom to pester for money to spend on whores. Whose food to eat, whose booze to drink. And in his own words, without him making any remark on the matter, you come to the conclusion that he's an annoying person you don't want to cross paths with, a lazy begger of the worse kind, who not only sneaks up to you for food, money and shelter, but also expects you to then allow him all the liberties he wishes for. Support with no responsabilities acquired.

But then, from his unapologetic point of view, you realize the cicle in him. He hates his benefactors, despise them for expecting something in return - and these he accuses of making a slave of him, and can't wait to break from their chains -  or for expecting nothing. These later ones he despises for the charity they give to him, holding them basically for saint wannabes. And as he leads this life of leeching, of dependance from others to lead his own life, to have someone to bitch about, he's hit with a fundamental truth, an epiphany of life: Stop expecting a miracle to change your life, because that miracle may never come.

He decides here to go with the flow instead of bitching and constantly living in dissatisfaction, and accept what he has in front of him.

Whatever his decision, though, it was a thought I lifted up from the book, as there's so many people in the planet waiting idly for a miracle to happen in their lives to change their lives, to take them out of their misery and into a life of happiness. Some expect to win the lottery, others expect to get a handsome inheritance, and the most common of these expectancies, is that seen often among women, where they expect for the Prince Charming to come to their lives, marry them and change their lives to finally live happily ever after. What if the miracle happens and it is unpleasant? You don't win the lottery, but you get robbed, you don't get an inheritance but the IRS comes after you for tax evasion, your Prince Charming is a douchebag who likes to beat up women, cheats all around, gives them no money and lock them in the kitchen, pregnant and barefoot. Then what?

Reflecting on my former elementary school classmates, it isn't hard to realize that life, in the end, is the result of our decisions, the decisions we make in the present to which we have conducted ourselves through the decisions of our past. Do you wish to keep postponing big decisions, do sheer nothing or take shortsighted decisions while expecting an external force to change YOUR life?

The peaceful realization also came to me that, self-help and motivational books are not only a farse, but also a joke on intelligence, as the best thoughts and realizations don't come from such worn, partialized, tendentious pages, but from every book, if you are truly open to their inlaid philosophy and you can distinguish between what works and what doesn't do it for you.

This Last Week When I Was Out

It's been a week since I last wrote, and not few things happened in this week. First of all, there was the "building matter" and this time it wasn't another evacuation - though I would have really enjoyed that - but an article that appeared in the newspapers about the building and how Supercalifragilistic it is.  This, well, rose a lot of reactions, like some utterly stupid - there's no other word for it -  reader who wrote a comment at the electronic site of the paper saying that we "shouldn't be so lazy" and instead of waiting 45 minutes for the elevator, perhaps we "should climb the stairs". Yeah, why don't that s.o.b. come here and climb 16 flights in those stairs and see how he or she likes it? I mean, I would personally climb the stairs, and I was prepared to it, but I really, really need air, not to mention how unpleasant it is to work steated up. Dude, really, think before opening your trap.

To my surprise, I also found people IN the building upset about the article for an array of reasons. So said that such a note shouldn't have been published, that the problems we experience in the building are "absolutely normal" and proper of "a new building to which one has to get used to". Dude, the building was inspected before we moved in, tests were ran - so it was said - it took an extra month to receive it because it had to be corrected (the Fire Department requested for an external emergency exit, which hasn't been built yet, nor it looks like it would), and we get here and there's not a single day, since June 16th that something doesn't work? The freaking building is supposed to be smart! Or perhaps it is smart, but also spoiled and it's throwing a temper tantrum? (That, or the building is Smart. Yeah, Maxwell Smart.)

Also heard comments berating the publishing, saying that by venting this in the eye of the public, the image of the company would deteriorate. Hn. Let me see: the Government don't allow the company to do any investment, as th money is needed to pay the Governments trips and stunts. Add to it, a former employee of quite a high position is in a trial, where also a former President is charged with accounts of corruption in the Alcatel case. Some years ago the Director of Mobile Telecommunications of that time summoned a press conference to announce the opening of prepaid mobile services, when the service wasn't ready and the technical tests weren't positive, and said Director happily anounced the sale in three days. Three days later he was burried in his office or out of the country on the money of the company and let the technicians to explain why the service couldn't be offered. Then the most recent former CEO of the company, discharged this May, is being held on trial for fraud, as he used public funds for his personal use, as well as allowing his wife, who was not an employee of the company, to run it to her like and destroy the work of experienced employees, not to mention to use public funds for her own means. So no, I don't really think that this note on the building is the stain that would mar the company.

I do understand that things must be kept in the company and seek to solve them without pulling a Lohan or a Spears on the deal, but when the management is oblivious about the matters and the problems are issued with e-mails belittling the sitaution, things must be escalated.

This week also, I've got a new phone. ^_^ But please, don't think it's (yet another) compulsive purchase of mine. It was a real need. Really. My old phone, an adorable purple Sony Ericsson w380 broke. I bought it around two years ago (perhaps a week or two before I met Kari) and I loved it! Phone in Hungarian, preloaded with PannonGSM (now Telnor) stuff and all that, and lets be honest: I'm a sucker for technology in Hungarian. However my phone was reaching the 2 years, which makes it old - for me - so I was thinking in replacing it anyway. I definitively needed something with Internet, since I'm a Twitter and I'd love to tweet my way around like all my other Twitter friends, not to mention going bonkers tweeting during out #twittertours. Then, of course, there's also the matter of my PDA. After years of using my PDA it broke. Yes, I had a Palm Pilot m130 that worked adorably, but before I could replace it Palm Pilot closed the business and sould out to HP, and you know when will I buy HP: on neverday. (Have enough HP experience at the office with the HP laptops and printers and stuff, I really know what they are like and I'm not paying for them). Ever since the begining of this year I went back to basics, with a small agenda. Yep, paper agenda. You know, those that don't beep, that have only one way to be looked at, that require you to write up every single event of a given repetitive task, that don't expand when you need to accomodate more activities. Yeah, those. Well, a few ups, however: don't need batteries, don't disappear on you if you haven't charged them, let you stick stickers, draw, write in code, use colors... One thing for the other, right? 

So, the point is that I needed a new phone, and I was planning on getting it by the end of this year in Hungary. Well, after an improptu decision, I was going, so I might as well use the time to update my phone, right? Not to mention that it doesn't look swell to work on the telecommunications business and have some old phone on you.

Since I'm basically a Sony Ericsson-gal, I was checking their offer and was really thinking about an Xperia. When, how much and all those questions were faraway from me. Someday, some, somehow. The idea of an iPhone also fluttered around my brain. Then it happened. The Happening.

It was early Friday morning and, as usual, my phone rang to wake me up. Yes, only I left it charging and as I reached for it it fell on the floor and the joint between both sides of the clamshell broke. Oh hell. Clamshell phones are quite delicate, particularly this joint as it controls stuff like the answering of an incoming call and so on. The phone itself was still working, but when you opened it or closed it, it didn't have that claa that push it open or close, as it should. It was getting stuck. Well, I wasn't going to walk around with a broken phone, nor I was going to wait for it to finally die on me. Once at the office, I went down to the Lobby, to the Kölbi store and checked out the phones. I didn't really had any phone in mind, so I just saw a big banner of the Sony Ericsson Vivaz, which was a Sony Ericsson and had all I needed, and pointed at it.

"I want that, but I want it in a plan, with Internet."

The salesguy got me the phone, programmed it, printed out the contract, talked over the monthly fee ($80), told me I'd be paying it from next month on, and just like that, I had a new phone. It gave me a lot of trouble, truth to be told, as the new thing wasn't behaving like any other Sony Ericsson I have had so far, and I had have so far three of them!, but little by little we have been getting acquainted, and even though it hasn't behaved like any of my other SE, this one and I are getting along swell. Haven't named it yet, and I haven't named any phone lately, but I think this one deserves a Scandinav/Scandinavish name. Vesa? Eric?Sven? Sven-Eric, like the cop in Sunstorm? Solstorm? Still to be decided.

Then this same week I had this rich, wrapping messaging with a new penpal of mine, with whom I've took off and flew across the pink and purple skies of the soul. The long, almost daily messages written in such a fashion I felt as Henry Miller penpaling with Anais Nin (me reading Tropic of Cancer may have something to do with the feeling, but may not also), were topped with a delicious letter from her in my P.O.Box on Saturday. Oh the delight! Her letters telling ne as much as her words, the scent of the paper wrapping warm arms around be, from a new friend greeting me as an old one.

This past week felt as heaven!

Well, not to mention that I've worked on fixing the last chapter of the thesis and I've got an SMS from the tutor sayin that "we should unify the document for lecture and defense". We are one step ahead of you, Sir!

To finish it up, I've come up with an idea for a book. After reading a half-assed article in Harper's Bazaar, I've decided I'll compose a book on how to pack for a travel, based on my experience in the matter. Kinda like a "how to do" book with some frappy title like "How to pack and don't kill yourself or the suitcase in the process". How about that?

Happy new Week!

Muse

This time a matter common to creative, artistic people comes to my mind: the Question of the Muse. The ideas rolling around in the world about Muses are often too romantic and unrealistic. They are imagined as some sort of perfect, beautiful creatures treasured for the loving inspiration they are capable of evoquing. Through the ages a lot of people had aspired to become a Muse, but they hardly really understand what being a Muse entails.

A Muse is not necessarily a person, but it can be an object, a place, and era, and it's not necessarily perfect or beautiful. A muse doesn't need to inspire love or be admired, only to sparkle up an idea for a story, a painting, a sculpture, a musical composition... The misinterpretation comes often from the popular literature filled with romantic "thought" and propaganda. Artists in love, or even artists eager to please someone, who worked around the apraising of the Muse, in an attempt to heighten their image, making it often into something the very Muse is not. A Muse can be the sparkle, like a plateau from which the thoughts, the ideas of the artist take off, can be the mid flight, requiring the artist to make the begining of the idea and the end, or can be the end result. Can be a simple component in a much bigger scheme, or a particle. the Muse might not be the whole person, the whole place, the whole time, but just a fraction of it.

It is little known, but the Muse can be negative. Something or someone that ignites hate, sadness, indignation. A writer writing about some despicable person has a despicable Muse, but this is an idea many often don't get, because the idea of the Muse is the idea of perfection to acquire.

Realizing this sheds a different light to June Miller and her relationship with Anais Nin and Henry Miller. She did became their muse, just like she wanted to, but for Henry Miller, she became a negative Muse, a flesh can full of disgusting features, ill manners, ill behavior. In his novel, Tropic of Cancer, he depicted her as a hateful creature that lived to leech, to spread her disease on those around her. Nutting attitude, never ending lies and poisoned fooling around for money.

Anais on the other hand, infatuated, desperate to burry herself in the world of beauty and ethereal moves, elevated her far high into the depths of surrealistic castles, offering her a few paragraphs in her House of Incest. There the Muse took the form of a rocking, loving child, paying tribute to the hips of her beautiful Muse.

None of them satisfied June, who believed that being a Muse meant her lies to become a book that would make them true. And yet she was a muse, a fine muse for wonderful pieces of XXth century literature.

Introduction by a Snob, Ignorant Sycophant

You may think anyway you want, and I'm sure you do, but there has been no worse decision made by an editorial house than to let Mr. Karl Shapiro write the introduction of Henry Miller's «Tropic of Cancer». Through Anais Nin's diaries, I have come acquinted with Henry Miller and his rather interesting, "naturalist" approach to life. I wouldn't say that then I loved him and I thought all his words were made of gold, but I stared at him and watched him from a safe distance, as through Anais' sometimes affected, sometimes shaded, sometimes rebelious and open words reflected this hard eyed, German descendant, who would barely write but devoted a great deal of his time to take tons of notes taht would rest in heaps all around him, would be irresponsible with money, speding in whores as if they were a basic necessity of importance only surpassed by breathing, whines about his relationship to June and then simply stares and let people do his life. From love to hate to disappointment, to soft love and a fading sense of friendship soon replaced by other characters, you get to know a given Henry Miller that raises yous curiosity. So you wonder:

"Okay, who the hell must he be?"

Anais' diary is, after all, a diary plagued with the most subjective observations of the world, and after all, what is a diary or a journal but the very concentration and intensification of the subjective view of an individual? Perhaps the question of the diaries, or journals always tends to divert me towards this story I was writing a while ago, a fanfic, a Snockhart that broke the boundaries of NC-17, truth to be told, and where there's mention of three journals kept by a character, three that were kept with different purposes, but weren't even those subjective? So, from Anais' words to Miller's, I thought it was about time I found out the Miller in Miller, so I checked upon two of his books, which I ended buying. The question was indeed fascinating, as you have been watching him from Anais' eyes and you imagine vividly a true procrastinator, who gives so much to a way of organization, the building of a work environment that applies to his European roots, so fond of orderliness and structure, which he yet can't comply with as he's immersed in his Americanism, prone to temper tantrums, and chaos and lack of discipline by claiming "freedom" and the destruction of structures that "enslave the human" and so on, and with which the final result is the nothing: a lot of blah and no result.

But so he wrote a book, pushed and pulled by two women: Anais and June, though... was it so? Did June's endless lies did feed the story so he would write it, and did Anais' motherly persistence allowed him to finally materialize the book. Was it so? Was Anais' hand in the letters, guiding him to put together a decent book and not only a pile of notes? It was time to turn to Miller and see what does he has to say for himself in the book that was supposed to be the portrait of June, a counterpart of «House of Incest», where June was protrayed through the eyes of her female lover. Orderly, as I try to be, I started on the first page of the book, Miller's book, and read my way through the Introduction. >_< Pfwaaaaaaaaaa!!!! You do better skipping it! Put together by Karl Shapiro, the words of an ignorant sycophant rain over you profuse of lists of authors and books and turns and turns around flourish that say nothing, anchoring in profuse quotations of the author himself, is a clear attempt to imitate Miller. Disgusting.

Why do we need to know the list of books Miller or Shapiro have read or the artists that lived or accounted Miller among his friends, or have snippets of Miller's passion for the phenomenon of Rimbauld and then ADD the list of poets and artists that lived in the time of Rimbauld? I stare in the book into the words of an ignorant, no better than the people who surround me on daily basis, who pretend to know by puking long threads of memorized snippets of great names with big words and self-important attitudes. Through thirty-too-many pages this ass-sucking dickwad vomits gouts after gouts of showy phrases that hardly connect to a point, but try unsuccessfully to encompass Miller, his work and present his love for Rimbauld's work and life as an "amazing parallelism" that do not exist if not in Miller's aspirations and half intended desire to imitate. Yep, I see Miller giving up women to fuck men in the ass and pretend an adolescence way up in his 30's and sit down to write poetry. Admiration is not reincarnation.

Shapiro misses all the signs and in the swirl of it, he misses also Miller and his work, spinning words and attempts to show his own "intellectuality" failing so miserably that ends up giving the book a sour, regurritating taste of bile. Anai's prologue smothers it somehow with delicated words and soft praise of her friend, with a shy apologetic smile on her lips, lowering her head and seeking to fit him in the frame of her dream world, imagining the crowd composed by an endless number of clones of herself that would not understand raw words if there's not a prior love for the writer. She might be looking back at her diary and guiltily thinking: "I wrote it was ugly... I tried to make it right, but the truth in me is that I hate it because it is so unaesthetical."

I'm amused. I snort carelessly, frown and face him:

"C'mon dude. Do your worse."

Tropic of Cancer

07:24 hours. I came to the office, put my things down, washed my "Arte Venezolano del Siglo XX" mug and started started the primal programs in my computer. Microsoft Outlook, Windows Media (to listen to some online radio), Internet and opened my work as well. Sophie West keeps sending me invitations to participate in a "Dark Fibre" convention, to which I evidently won't go because a) what the fuck do I have to do with fibre, and b) because my superiors are so wrapped in the concept of "trip" they don't care about the content or importance of the seminar, only the fact that it is "outside the country" and so they rather go themselves. Sad but true. Have no idea who this Sophie person is, or where did she get my address and thinks that I'd be interested in fibre, so I keep erasing her e-mails. Kinda sad, I guess, that there's people trying to "fish" interested parties to events such as this, and in this way. It's kind of like throwing a party and screaming in the street: "someone please come to my birthday party!". Wonder if they have me listed for the time I was researching on mobile data globally, or when I was doing the Roaming research.

Oh well, I poured myself a mug-full of coke and started with my daily "fill up". E-mails, newspapers... CNN's headlines talk about a new tribe discovered in the Amazonas (great! May we offer them 3G mobile services with great coverage and e-mail accounts, websites so they can sell their work to the outside world online?). What may be life like cutted out from this world? Deep in the jungle, not knowing about gas and gas prices, young men and women aimlessly diying in a war staged for the profit of a few, AIDS eating away continents, thousands of people dying for natural phenomenons, and all sprinkles over with "Sex and the City", the movie. My Haiko Pet, Locky, got a bowler hat from a friend... and they I, for some unknown reason, checked on Amazon. Once there, I was caught by a recommendation of "Tropic of Capricorn" by Henry Miller, whom I've started to like due to what I read of him in Anais Nin's journal. I decided to check out the other too, "Tropic of Cancer" and ading them into my cart (which is already $100 heavy). I went to check out the comments, and was kinda surprised to see one star ratings. What the fuck, I decided to read some of those comments. When it's a gay book, or some modern book, I pay close attention to these ratings because there you know what can you hate from the book, and so decide whether it worths to buy it or not. (I must admit, sometimes those one-star comments have sold me the book. when I'm seeking for fluff and sexy, someone commenting to some book with a title like "Horny Boys Get it Going" that "it's just sex, sex, sex and no plot at all. Disgusting sex, extremely graphic and long. I wanted to read a story, not a compiling of the cut out scenes of the gay Kama Sutra"... need I say more?)

Henry Miller is a classic of the XX century, so who could think little of him? Well, not everybody likes him. The main thing going on about this book was that it was an egotrip of a jerk, a chovinist pig, who uses his book to go on a misogynistic rampage, talking only about himself, dosing graphic sex freely and thinking he's much like Rimbauld. Now, as far as I understand, both "Tropic of Cancer" and "Tropic of Capricorn" are "portraits if June Edith Miller, Henry Miller's second wife. he was having a very unpretty moment in his marriage when he was writing both those books, so yeah, it might have come out cutting. These books show th mind of the author and I believe it is brave of him to expose even his unpretty side, things that might be criticized by others (like it has happened). So he hates women. So what? I dislike a lot of people based on prejudices, but hey! that's me. The right of living is not deceded upon what I think or not. Misogynism do not disappear by not mentioning it, just like antisemitism do not go away by banning its public expression. Actually, things outspoken, placed in the open are easier to fight, because it becomes easier to target the problem and maybe even find the root of it. Work it, do not repres it. Then again, the man is dead, what are you gonna do about that?

I believe that book, just like Anais Nin's "House of Incest" is meant to me read seeing it as an expression of someone's mind, inner self and inner world. This is what goes inside people. I know you want us all to be pure and righteous, and pretty, and proper, delicate and polite and gentle, gathered, composed and all that crap, but even if the surface is so, the core is murky, dark and free, ugly and human. Unleashed and infested. This is a glimpse to who some are inside. Learn not to judge because that's your disgusting, maggot infested wound.

There was, however, one one-star comment that left me perplexed. The person was warning everybody that the book wasn't a GEOGRAPHY book and that it had nothing to do with the actual Tropic of Cancer. He has no idea who his fella is (Henry Miller), but better be warned: NO GEOGRAPHY! Please, try not to laught. My eyes are wide as I press my lips together to keep from bursting so loud the building would tremble. I only have one question: "who buys a book withouth reading at least the back cover?" On Internet yo can read what the publisher has to say. Didn't that give ya a tip? Perhaps we should warn this reader that "White Fang" by this fella, Jack London, isn't about orthodoncy. You know, just in case he finds the story of wolves slightly disturbing. Oh, and "Crime and Punishment" isn't a book of Law. Maybe we should also tell him that "The Capital" is not a guide to invest either... though you might be able to make some money with the practices depicted there somewhere where slavery ain't that "ilegal" or controlled.