Rattlebrained

As it turned out, I wasn’t in much of a touristy mood yesterday because I had just discovered that one of my friends had passed away last year, and that I wasn’t aware of it. I was planning on visiting but when the email bounced I felt something was amiss.

As far as I’m concerned, blogs aren’t really a good place to post private sadness, however since the friend in question, Richard Connelly Miller, was an extraordinary person besides being the author of some of the better books that I have read, I will try and get you interested in his work.

But first, please go read the San Francisco chronicle article about him: Renaissance man.

When I went to SFAI in the late 70’s he was a teacher who became a friend to the point that when much to my surprise I ended up back in Switzerland, I wrote to him and we have corresponded ever since. Unfortunately, last year I got caught up in my money making t-shirt dream world and not being someone who writes with spontaneous ease, had a long spell of “no energy for writing personal stuff at the end of the day”. A bad place to be and not worth it, trust me!

His best known book Bohemia: The Protoculture Then and Now – 1977, is (I quote from the inner cover blurb) …a historical study which shows the movement of the sixties to be simply one more step in the evolution of a force which has its roots in early nineteenth century France.

If you have any interest in history and the sixties, and well we should, surrounded as we are now by the veil of a sick right wing populist future, this is absolutely a book to read.
Richard was overflowing with historical knowledge, but it was his never ending questioning and his delight at sharing it all that was truly formidable. An evening with him was a gold mine of ideas, query and fun. This is the outlook you meet in his factually based novels, Snail, Squed, Sowboy: A Factual Fanciful Fiction, Mosca: A Factual Fiction, Seaville, A Blue Water Adventure or Tanglefoot, an (Almost) True Story of Civil Wars and Cities to name a few. (Read some of them for free! follow the links). All action filled fast paced and not for the dull masses, labeled by William Burroughs as “deliriously serious” to which I would add “deliriously intelligent”.

It shows something of our society that his older books are – as far as I can tell – mostly out of print, although I’m sure most can be found used. One can only wonder at how many other people who truly have something to say go unnoticed behind all the hype surrounded cheapness, published to keep the thickheaded brainless.