Miller Time-- On Henry Miller

" Henry Miller is not a writer; he’s a friend you turn to when your apartment walls close in on you and all the world begins to stink. When you’re most exasperated, Miller is there with his alternately cajoling, absurd, sincere, outraged, sage-like, funny voice, ruminating and gassing in a calm way. Miller’s voice always comes from the quietest corner of the bar. The rest of the occupants are slaughtering each other, offering polemical speeches, toasting their various diseases, and gouging their own thighs and arms with their fingernails in an effort to rid themselves of the itch of being truly alive. Unlike his distant cousin Céline, Miller never gets clobbered by these barroom brawlers. He gets close enough to the action to observe the lice and the whispered endearments between blows, but he never gets whacked by a piece of flying furniture. “Don’t struggle; get in the flow,” he advises in book after book. Much of this “flow” for Miller is in the flotsam – all sorts of deranged and eccentric characters – who are both more lively and can tell us more about life than comfortable citizens at the center. He doesn’t see the same divisions the rest of us have been taught to see. Wealthy hoarders or bourgeoisie hoarders may be deplorable, but the feeling I get after 30 years of browsing through Miller is that he’d knocked aside all compartmentalization; he would sit down for a meal with anybody who was unaffected and learn from him, provided of course that the companion sprung for the meal. Miller is the greatest of all freeloaders, surpassing even that other Joyce."...............

This is the opening lines from the opening essay in "MILLER , BUKOWSKI AND THEIR ENEMIES " (2nd Edition) Quite simply one of the best and most invigorating books you could ever read. Guillermo/William 

writes with passion, integrity ,fire, passion and a whole lot of bile about a range of writers he loves and the industry he has plenty of reason to despise. It is magnificent.

Go buy it. You won't regret it.

It's available on Kindle too.