I enjoy the way Miller pieces together bits of prose to create an intertwined journey through not only the landscape of the United States but the culture we have developed throughout this nation. It is at once both amazing and depressing.

I was refreshed to realize that for over 100 years at least people like Henry Miller have been looking for the root cause of what is wrong with us. We have collectively done many great things and are blessed with an amazing land of resources and yet not only do we readily rest on our laurels of luck, we trash the very source of that dumb luck. The Grand Canyon chapter points brilliantly to that.

I thought it interesting as well to discover little has changed since the 1930s. Literally. The story in Chicago could have happened today, as a matter of fact I've lived through it myself. Amazing!

One of my truly favorite works from Henry Miller. I recommend this to anyone interested in culture as seen through the eyes of an expatriate communicated with the color of raw language Miller is so well known for.

First of all, Henry Miller's mastery of the English language far exceeds most anyone you are likely to read. He is in that elite class of great writers. Secondly, when you read any of his books, letters, essays and whatnot, you feel is is right there in the room, cafe, or on the street with you, so conversational is he. In this book AIR CONDITIONED NIGHTMARE, he writes about a year on the road in the US, he was contracted to write about by his agent. What he found was a lot of sterile robotic buildings and people. As he said, it was a waste of a year in his life. It is an eye opening book about a land where imagination is difficult to find, sense of adventure minuscule, where the people are essentially lemmings, glomming along, while at the same time filled with a sense of arrogance because they get the sense of themselves not by intelligence, and insight, but by the fact that their country is big, robust, has a powerful military and is financially strong, which in the end has little or no meaning where the human condition, and their interaction with others, their land, is concerned. He found a country with no sense of culture, a country defining itself by how much money a person makes, which disgusted him. After having read this book, and having been back and forth in the US, the book rang so true I have not traveled it since. It is just a bunch of sameness from one end to the other. Naturally, some places are worse than others.

lmao the “addenda” is him saying he was rejected by the guggenheim fellowship and then a list of academics who won it that same year

“Sometimes I think that the best books on America are the imaginary ones written by those who have never seen the country.”

“Better the warped judgment of the condemned one than the most enlightened judgment of the on-looker. The condemned one reaches at last to his innocence. But the on-looker is not even aware of his guilt. For one crime which is expiated in prison ten thousand are committed thoughtlessly by those who condemn. There is neither beginning nor end to it. All are involved, even the holiest of the holy. Crime begins with God. It will end with man, when he finds God again. Crime is everywhere, in all the fibres and roots of our being. Every minute of the day adds fresh crimes to the calendar, both those which are detected and punished, and those which are not. The criminal hunts down the criminal. The judge condemns the judger. The innocent torture the innocent. Everywhere, in every family, every tribe, every great community, crimes, crimes, crimes. War is clean by comparison. The hangman is a gentle dove by comparison. Attila, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan—reckless automatons by comparison. Your father, your darling mother, your sweet sister: do you know the foul crimes they harbor in their breasts? Can you hold the mirror to iniquity when it is close at hand? Have you looked into the labyrinth of your own despicable heart? Have you sometimes envied the thug for his forthrightness? The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself.
All that you despise, all that you loathe, all that you reject, all that you condemn and seek to convert by punishment springs from you. The source of it is God whom you place outside, above and beyond. Crime is identification, first with God, then with your own image. Crime is all that lies outside the pack and which is envied, coveted, lusted after. Crime flashes a million brilliant knife blades every minute of the day, and in the night too when waking gives way to dream. Crime is such a tough, such an immense tarpaulin, stretching from infinity to infinity. Where are the monsters who know not crime? What realms do they inhabit? What prevents them from snuffing out the universe?”

“The woman had killed her children with an axe—that was her crime. She was a beautiful woman, with a soul. It was not she who slew the children, but the sharp blade of the axe.”

“A fellow like Rattner is different. He just had to paint—he was born to it. But for one like him there are a thousand who might just as well be carpentering or driving a truck. The difference, I suppose, is between procreation and creation—a difference of nine months.”

“Go West, young man! they used to say. Today we have to say: Shoot yourself, young man, there is no hope for you!”

“Do anything, be anything, say anything that comes into your head, because it’s all cuckoo and nobody will know the difference.”

“Between the funny sheet, a battleship, a dynamo, a radio broadcasting station it is hard for me to make any distinction of value. They are all in the same plane, all manifestations of restless, uncontrolled energy, of impermanency, of death and dissolution.”

“Man is just an irruption, like a wart or a pimple.”

“Stieglitz, who uses the pronoun I so frequently, is about as un-egotistical a man as I've ever encountered. This I of his is more like a rock. Stieglitz never speaks impersonally because to do so would be to deny that he is a person. He is the opposite of a personage, which is to say a personality. Stieglitz is an individual, a unique being. He doesn't put on any show of false modesty—why should he? Would you apologize for using God's name? Everything that Stieglitz says is based on pure conviction.”

Frustrated and depressed during the BP/Gulf Oil spill of 2010, I looked for something to read that might either a) take my mind off of it or b) help me to make some kind of sense of what was happening. I picked up this book and it had an oddly therapeutic effect. Not because it's a happy book, it's really quite angry and harshly critical of so much that Miller saw in America when he returned from Europe--which I guess is part of what prompted him to go in the first place, but his critiques of mid-century America serve to show that we in the twenty-first century aren't the first to be angry and frustrated with the things that are happening that we feel we have no control over. In fact, such things have been going on for a long time, and appear to be getting worse, but there are also good people out there, and the will to keep trying. Miller's descriptions of his friends and favorite places that feed his soul provide a counterpoint to the negatives that he details, so that you can walk away from this book with a sense of hope, however world-weary it may be.

Comfort zone! At this point I think I could read a Henry Miller book backwards and it wouldn't really make a difference what I think of it. His language is so glittery that there should be sequins on the pages.

"[N]owhere else in the world is the divorce between man and nature so complete" as it is in the United States Henry Miller writes in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, published in 1945. Today gentrification and corporate takeovers of American life have made Miller's nightmarish observations of the USA evermore relevant.

Henry Miller returned to the States in 1939, having lived abroad (in Paris) for a decade and having spent a yearlong sabbatical in Greece. The start of the second world war brought him back to his native land, not as a prodigal son, but as someone wanting to come back and make reparations before setting back again, perhaps forever. The USA that Henry Miller left in the 20s was a world of gross inequalities, industrial heavyweights and racial prejudice. He returned to find that not much had changed, and although he set out to find something beautiful in this land, it took thousands of miles of travel before he could find anything much to say at all.

I think there is some beautiful terrain and there are some interesting, and not entirely negative, things to say about this country if one looks for them. But Miller, as Steinbeck would later observe in his Travels with Charley may have found some beautiful landscapes (for Miller mostly in the Deep South and the Southwest), but the American condition was hollow and empty - a meaningless world of plastics and of sterility.

A good chunk of this book is concerned with character studies. It is not a travelogue in the sense that his book on Greece, The Colossus of Maroussi, can be considered. It's not a road book like Kerouac's On the Road or Steinbeck's Travels with Charley either. It's a book of reflections, thoughts on men of strong character (few though they be), and observations of a social experiment gone wrong, of a young nation spoiled by capitalism, corporatism and consumerism, a land of empty promises and of broken people. If it seems bleak it's because it is, but also because he holds up a mirror to our society today. It's the same, except now the reflection is just as ugly as ever, but the mirror is broken and dirty too. Yet if you look closely enough you'll see there are some flowers in the distance growing up in the concrete jungle, some undeniable geniuses mingling with the hoi polloi, a few hints of beautiful design amidst the architecture that is otherwise strictly utilitarian. Henry Miller saw some of it, but there was more that he overlooked.

Henry Miller, on a road trip. The road trip through America.

Update: I'm abandoning this one some 50 pages in. He is far too annoying and the racism is really grating on me. If you have read it, and know that it improves, please tell me.


In this book so far, Miller goes from being a more-or-less cool sex-drugs-and-rock&roll guy (as in Sexus/Nexus/Plexus and the Tropics) to being an archetypal Grumpy Old Man. The train is ugly! I don't like the skyline! That station is horrific! That seagull shows the utter decline of the American nation! I can't stand looking at these bland office blocks a second longer!

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is an especially important Miller work, as it was not banned in the U.S., as were Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. Miller’s influence on the Beats is obvious. The Air-Conditioned Nightmare reads like the Ur-text for Kerouac’s On the Road. Miller’s songs of praise for sex, art, food, freedom from normal bourgeois life are all repeated by the Beat writers.

See http://www.thesatirist.com/books/Air-...

Every American should read at least one or two chapters of TA-CN. My favorite chapter concerns his visit to New Iberia, LA. After reading it I traveled there to tour the famous Weeks Hall house, which although now a public museum, was every bit as magnificent as HM described it. Lately I'm into travel lit, and this is the best of the best as far as that category goes. Miller's word choices are also always a delight.

إذا كنت مستعد أن تفقأ الفقاعة الفكرية والثقافية التي تراها اليوم، فاقرأ هذا الكتاب

Henry Miller frequently wrote about great titles of books that he came across. He himself produced a notable amount of great titles such as the title of this book written upon his return to the US after his years in France and a brief sojourn in Greece. Miller was truly a linguistic anarchist, a semantic villain of the rarest kind who in his heart of hearts truly believed that the typewriter was heavier than the pen. They say that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover (I have a friend who for instance chooses which wine she buys by the "pretty- ness" of the labels, while I myself choose my wine, out of dire necessity it should be noted, by it's price tag), but judging a book by it's title; now that is a different matter altogether!

I myself have written a great number of fancy titles, some of them with covers, some without a cover, but practically all of them without any content as of yet.

Here are some examples:

East of the Equator
Death, Shackles and the Pursuit of Misery
Jesus Saved Me, But He Let My Brother Drown - The Dark Side of Religion
Profound Nonsense and other Poems of Nothingness
The Inverted Vertebrae
An Antidote For Life
The Nightmares of an Insomniac
Spherical Cubism & other failed Art Movements of the 20th Century
The Equinox Paradox
Occham's Toothbrush - The Art of Bathroom Philosophy
The Divisibility of Infinity
Pavlov's Cat meet Schrödinger's Dog
The Evolution of Inanimate Objects


All these titles are hereby copyrighted by me for eventual use in case of emergency, literary or otherwise.