Anti-Job Quote Of The Week 4
Even if I could begin again it would be no use, because fundamentally I have no desire to work and no desire to become a useful member of society. I sit there staring at the house across the way. It seems not only ugly and senseless, like all the other houses on the street, but from staring at it so intently, it has suddenly become absurd. The idea of constructing a place of shelter in that particular way strikes me as absolutely insane. The city itself strikes me as a piece of the highest insanity, everything about it, sewers, elevated lines, slot machines, newspapers, telephones, cops, doorknobs, flophouses, screens, toilet paper, everything.
--Henry Miller, Tropic Of Capricorn
--Henry Miller, Tropic Of Capricorn
posted by Jack Saturday at
8:34 AM
5 Comments:
How about this quote:
"Baboons can talk but they won't do it in front of white men for fear you will put them to work!" - Tom Robbins
By
Anthony, at 6:02 PM
Another gem from Tom Robbins:
"...You'd get the boss on the line and say, 'Listen, I've been sick ever since I started working here, but today I'm well and I won't be in anymore.' Call in well."
By
Anthony, at 6:05 PM
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
By
Jack Saturday, at 9:19 AM
Hey Anthony,thanks for the Robbins quotes.
Here's one for you:
Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
Tom Robbins
By
Jack Saturday, at 9:22 AM
devo:
I read and collected Henry Miller writings since age 18. At age 29 I re-read all of Miller when I decided to follow his example more significantly, and live the free creative life and the life of the quester/searcher/finder, whatever the cost. My favorite of his was “Hamlet,” a thousand-page collection of letters he wrote while flying in his creative prime— I don’t know if the uncut version is available commercially, I read a hardcover copy from the McPherson library at the University of Victoria. I also did a little artistic drawing of Henry in that book, if you want to go to that library and see it—dated ’79.
When Bill Russell leant me a treasured book of his, about the Irish Rovers, with articles and such he had saved, I somehow lost it, or it was stolen or something. Bill was a humorous “registered schizophrenic” with whom I had a written correspondence across town—I still have some of his 300-(legal size)-page handwritten letters. I had turned him on to Henry Miller, which changed his life as it has others who read his books. So I gave him my entire Miller collection as compensation.
Dave Richardson, a “hippy” who worked for the Post Office when I did in the mid-1970s, skinny, highly intelligent, literate, guitar player with long straight blond hair one day pulled out of his back pocket a battered paperback of Tropic of Cancer which I had recommended. Last I heard of him someone said he had quit the Post Office and headed for Paris.
A girl friend of mine, an actress who at that time called herself ”Morgana”, sent me a book about Henry called Henry Miller—Between Heaven And Hell, in which Emil White, Henry’s old friend, had inscribed: “for Morgana, Poet, Painter and gorgeous woman—out of this world and very much in.” Unless it went the way of Bill’s book, it must be around, though I dumped most of my book collection last year. She later told me that Emil, an old fart, true to his friend’s famous style, came on to her and her mother both, who visited him. Hey, I found it! The book is in terrible shape, I think it was damaged in a flood around 1991, some of the last pages are stuck together. Hey, maybe some Miller fan would pay a fortune for this old damaged book with Emil’s signature—think it’s worth posting on Ebay?
Many years later I was sitting in the Lieutenant Governor’s mansion grounds reading some slim volumes about Henry as a very old man. Apparently the damn guy was down on hippies because they were “lazy!” Yeah, right, y’old bastard. I think you were just jealous of their hairiness, baldy. But and however, who can say what happens in one’s 80’s? We’re not there yet. Certainly 50 has been far, far different than I thought.
On Henry, it must be stated that he was, if you believe his writings, a rapist, though you would think his forced attentions on women was welcomed by them. But the “autobiographical romances” fooled Anaïs Nin, who took him as a lover to experience the wild free bohemian, and found a quiet watcher entirely different than the anarchic character.
“Even if I must become a wild and natural park inhabited only by idle dreamers I must not stop to rest here in the ordered fatuity of responsible, adult life. I must do this in remembrance of a life beyond all comparison with the life which was promised me, in remembrance of the life of a child who was strangled and stifled by the mutual consent of those who had surrendered.”
--Henry Miller,
Tropic of Capricorn
By
Jack Saturday, at 9:41 AM
Post a Comment
<< Home