Where do I begin?�

For most of you, Henry Miller is an obscure if not meaningless name.� For me he is an indescribable and indefinable inspiration.

All my life I had heard about the book Tropic of Cancer but never thought much of it.� Then I decided to be a writer, and as a part of my studies, on a fluke in fact, I decided to give it a read, since I�d heard it mentioned so many times.

My life has never been the same sense�for the better I might add.� The best.

It made me feel alive again.� Everything was new.� I started calling on prostitutes, just to see what it was like, mainly because he did.� Each one of them was a little adventure.� The ones I liked most were the ones who had lived hard lives.� The ones I liked the least were the bimbos with big tits, secretaries moonlighting for the new car payments.

There is a visceral energy in and about the underworld of sex and �alternative lifestyles��

But I�m straying from the point.

The point is that this great man wrote a great, honest book about the adventures of a lonely, philosophizing expatriate in Paris in the late 1920�s and early 1930�s.� He was a rapscallion and an artist to the marrow of his bones.� The book is semi-biographical, too, as was Jack Kerouac�s On the Road, which somehow makes it all the more endearing.

Tropic of Cancer is clearly the work of a genius, as profound an opus as any ever written, yet our sucky American, conservative, controlling establishment prohibited the book from being published in the homeland of its author until sometime in the 1960�s - 30 to 40 years after it had been composed.

If you are an artist - be it a writer, poet, actor, musician - you have to make a point of reading this book.� Buy it in a used bookstore, hardcover, so that you can smell the dust on the pages and feel the weight of the binding.

The book is too vast, too curious, too profound and, not least of all, too damned funny to discuss at length, here, so I�ll leave you with a couple of excerpts:

�Whatever I do, let it bring joy!� Whatever I do, let it bring ecstasy!�

�If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality.

The task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life.�