Paul Perilli

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character… a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty… what you will.

No, that’s not an anti-National Endowment for the Arts rant out of Newsmax or the RNC. Those words are from page one of Henry Miller’s “prolonged insult” also known as Tropic of Cancer, a novel centered on Miller’s desire to portray his exuberance for living even if life for him at the time included poverty and failure. Considered shocking when it was published in Paris in 1934, few people today would be appalled by anything in it. But back then it had to be smuggled through U.S. Customs with Jane Eyre covers and started a thirty-year censorship debate that ended with a Supreme Court decision that inadvertently cleared Lenny Bruce of obscenity charges as well.

I didn’t hear of Miller until I was out of college. For good reason I suppose. His stream of consciousness narrations really may be a gob of spit in the face of Art. “Literary” was a word and concept that disgusted him. It wasn’t until I was freed from undergraduate classrooms that I was introduced to Tropic of Cancer and subsequently all of Miller’s other books.

At the time I shared a cabin on a lake in Northwood, New Hampshire. A postcard setting, which will forever mean isolated to me. I was there in retreat from the inner-city grid and grind I’d lived in up until then. That was popular to do in those days. To want to be close to nature. To breathe clean air and hike mountain trails and handsaw cords of wood to feed into the stove that kept the cabin warm. To live deliberately as was Thoreau’s intention at Walden Pond. “To front only the essential facts of life,” he wrote in Walden.

Back to my introduction to Tropic of Cancer, a book as far away literally and atmospherically from Walden and self-sufficient living as could be.

I was in Hamden, Connecticut visiting my cabin mate David’s family. By our third day there we had shared enough of our weed with his four siblings to run our stash dangerously low. With the intention of refreshing our supplies, David drove us across town to the address of a guy he had known since he was a high school junior and a steady supply of pot was needed to get through years of public schooling that were too easy for him. Still in the business, the guy had good stuff at a decent price and that remained the basis of their relationship.

Recently, David reminded me his name was Jeff. Jeff had long hair, a beard and seemed humored by most everything, the metallic snap-pop of a can of beer, a bag of Oreo cookies spilling out on a table. His apartment was a funky hippie pad that might now be seen as a set piece in a stage play about the anti-war movement, campus protests, tuning in, turning on and dropping out. It had the standard props: framed Matisse prints on the walls, a bronze Buddha on the coffee table, head shop items that included bongs and hash pipes, exotic plants hanging in the windows.

We were talking about books when Jeff turned away and went to his bookshelf.

“Take it, take this up there and read it, you’re going to like it,” he said.

I accepted the worn paperback he had two copies of. It was Tropic of Cancer. Our next transaction was costlier, the exchange of our cash for his weed.

In a 1938 review, Edmund Wilson wrote that Tropic of Cancer was historically important. Thirty years later Kate Millett bashed its male chauvinism. I wasn’t aware of any of that. I didn’t know what the book was about or what to expect. At the cabin I was reading everything I could buy for cheap at yard sales and secondhand shops. Everything I’d missed out on during my mostly classical Jesuit university education: revisionist histories, biographies, classic American novels, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Lessing, Pynchon, Solzhenitsyn. I assumed Tropic of Cancer would be an interesting addition to those and that was the reason David’s longtime supplier gave it to me.

Back in Northwood, under the spell of that most excellent weed, I sat on the rocker by the wood stove and read those 300 pages in an afternoon. In fact, being stoned might be the best way to do that for the first time. Whatever. It worked for me. I was intrigued and humored enough by the vulgar and rather depraved escapades of the narrator, a close acquaintance of the author I was sure, that I reread it a few days after that. In that quiet, rural isolation Miller was just the right antidote. So much so I couldn’t keep from imagining myself in Paris living hand to mouth and writing something wildly irreverent of my own.

Over those next months I went back to Tropic of Cancer so often I could quote from it. In fact, I can still bring up a few passages, including this one: “The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought.”

Freed from any editorial restraints of the 1930s (its working title was Crazy Cock) Tropic of Cancer was an assault on literary and moral convention and that’s what I was drawn to. It was a prolonged middle finger to authority, prudes, killjoys, decorum, greed, the established order. God was insufficient. War was the only true obscenity. The world was a cancer eating itself away. Our heroes had killed themselves or were killing themselves.

I was entertained enough to set my other reading aside and go out and find Tropic of Capricorn, Sexus, Plexus, Nexus, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Black Spring. As I was recalling that time in Northwood for other reasons, I found myself thinking how Miller’s books had made the move with me from there to Cambridge but didn’t continue to New York a decade later. As much as I’d relished his wild prose flights and the disreputable underworld his narrators knew so well, away from the cabin and pot smoking their shock and awe wore off. My exuberance for his exuberance fizzled like a punctured balloon. Groveling for meals, fucking prostitutes, and a disregard for the life and death matters going on around him those years stopped appealing to me as entertainment even as the freedom he expressed himself with continued to attract.

I saw how his “ordinary” characters were, as Orwell stated in his essay Inside the Whale, “neither the manual worker nor the suburban householder, but the derelict, the declassé, the adventurer, the American intellectual without roots and without money.” They were neither for nor against. They were neutrals. Which in my thinking at the time was another true obscenity.

Recently, when I considered rereading Tropic of Cancer to find out if that opinion might have changed, it was a thought that didn’t get very far. I’m pretty sure my reaction to it would be hostile. And I’m content to keep the agreeable memories I have about reading it back then in Northwood just as they are.

(2000)

My non-fiction piece “Hacker” appears in bioStories.

Your honor, I plead no contest to the charge. I admit to carrying an open container in a brown bag. It was seven in the evening. I’d taken one sip when six officers in a van stopped me two blocks from my home, asked for an ID and issued the summons that’s brought me before your court. I didn’t at all mind the chuckle from the three sitting in back when I stated my disbelief that a date before a judge was in my future. I deserved it. No doubt. It’s a quality of life matter, one said. Of course I am aware of Mayor Guiliani’s policy. I should have known better, not opened the bottle of Brooklyn Lager in the bodega and instead waited until I was in my kitchen. Sure the $75 fine would be better spent on something else: books, dinner. But you do the crime, you get caught, you deserve to pay the fine. Please put my check to a cause that will improve this great city a little more.

Your honor, before I go I’d like to say a few words if you’ll allow. Thanks so much for giving me this moment. I see there are many more here that need to come before you, so I’ll be brief. Your honor, it’s evident I’m middle aged, five foot eight, a hundred forty pounds, graying hair. I try to beat back the inexorable impact time has on flesh by staying in shape. When the incident I’m guilty of happened I was walking home from the Y after running six miles on the treadmill. I made a stop at The Garden and bought the two bags of food I was carrying when the officer in the passenger’s seat asked me to come to the van. He was respectful. He called me mister. Though by then I wished I’d stopped at five miles. But I stayed on the machine to sweat off a few more fat cells. When it was over I was thirsty. I went for water. At the fountain someone was in line behind me and I didn’t want to take a lot of time quenching my own need. She also wanted to drink. I should have gone back when she finished. But I went straight to my sweats, put them on and left, my body still desiring fluid.

Your honor, the rest you know about. I bought a beer at a bodega, the cap on the bottle met the opener by the door, I sipped as I was walking home…

Your honor, I’m glad to be able to come clean and say my action on that fateful day disrupted the quality of life in Brooklyn. Now, thanks to the Mayor and his subordinates, it’s all going swell in New York. There are no more unregistered guns or dangerous drugs. No more illegal dumping, needy homeless people, or unsafe buildings. Subways are clean. Classrooms without disruption. Senior citizens no longer the vulnerable targets of corrupt scams. It’s safe to go out at any hour. To cross avenues when the walk light changes without fear of being run down. To feel we’re a society of laws administered to everyone no matter who they are and what areas of the city they live in. Tax paying citizens should feel secure knowing these six officers were doing their job when their eyes fell on me and my bagged bottle of beer.

Your honor, my appearance in your court proves the life around us is better. Much better. I vow not to break the law again. Ever.

Thank you.

– complaint copied from an old notebook

(2001)

– more recently I was fined $180 for proceeding through a red light on my bike at 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning when there was no traffic approaching in either direction, except for the police car coming up behind me

 

First appeared in July, 1999 in Beta Online, betaonline.com (defunct), an e-magazine about computers and technology published by David Tomere.

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Invested members of the cyber faith are forever suggesting I am information deficient, not digitized enough, web page short. They know there’s no URL or hyperlink on the Internet that’s my own, that family, friends and strangers can click on to find some wonderful text and images by or about me. In fact, I feel guilty knowing there are spaces in my day, entire blocks of minutes, twenty, thirty at a time, when I’m not accessing data that may be vital to my financial, social, sexual, physical, and spiritual health. I’ve never made a stock trade or bought a book online, or inquired into the home and/or email addresses of ex girlfriends. My vacations remain undocumented and unscanned. Instead of residing on the Web, they’re impressions in my memory, which is to say in a murky, muddled, non-chip environment. To recall details about them requires a great effort of concentration instead of a simple click of a mouse button. I’ve accomplished things I’ve not announced to the world in a mass emailing, never subscribed to a newsgroup, nor read through a single piece of the junk mail that fills my In Box. If I’m to believe the cyber lords all of this means my life’s incomplete and future uncertain. I’m being left behind as others zoom past me on the Information Highway. But this needn’t be. The latest digital technologies will set me on the right track and solve this problem. And if not solve it, I’ll at least be able to get more information about how I might. More access to information is (apparently) what I need and want. That’s the key point here. And to most all of life from now on: information access.

Bill Gates was on television a while ago demonstrating how the Internet will be available in cars of the future. A panel on the dashboard will display stock symbols and their real-time prices, the latest political news, Hollywood gossip, email. All of his vehicle’s are equipped with it, of course, and this is why we’ll all need it. To keep up with Bill, as well as our next door and global neighbors. As if it’s inevitable. Our need and choice. A requirement for better living. But why would we want such a thing? I asked him. But he didn’t hear me through the screen. He implied to the interviewer that more information will set us free. The more we have access to, the freer we’ll be. Freer from what, I wasn’t sure. But when the shackles are off, why bother digging for an answer? And when you’re worth 50 billion (this figure may be low) no one is going to call you on anything. Bill Gates said this is the way it is from here on. Smart devices and applications everywhere in our lives, including our cars, assisting and controlling everything we do (he neglected to mention anything about monitoring, a minor oversight). The reporter’s silence implied, yes it will be without question, Mr. Gates.

I will say Bill seemed earnest during this chat about having information at your fingertips even while you’re driving. Information. More of it. Easier access to it. I admit being impressed for a while. Until I stepped back into my own life. When I did, what was most evident to me is that Bill doesn’t, as I do, drive on the Brooklyn/Queens Expressway. No way. If he did, he wouldn’t want streaming banners of information distracting him from what’s really important. Living. Continued existence in one whole and healthy piece. The BQE’s congested, filled with dangerous potholes and asphalt undulations, bumper-to-bumper with unsafe speeding cars and trucks driven by irritated people who’d like nothing more than for you to go away so they can move faster. There’s not enough information on this planet, and every other planet beyond the cloud cover, that can save your life on it should you make a steering error and veer into the path of a thundering cement truck while reading the latest act of sexual misconduct by a high government official. If my non-server-based data banks are insistent about anything, it’s to never, ever attempt a stock trade while driving on this elevated, crumbling chunk of concrete. One mistake I could be dead, and no amount of information will bring me back. No, I don’t suggest a stock buy on the BQE at rush hour. Not even an Internet IPO at issue price. I’d hate to be killed or maimed squinting at an email. I don’t know about yours, but the majority of mine aren’t worth risking my life for.

As Marx wrote about the Industrial Age, those who control the means of production (the Capitalists) control the masses around the world (the Proletariat). Which suggests those in the Information Age who shape and control access to it (the Informationists) control those of us who need and want it (the Informationariat).

But that’s a joke.

I think?