Posts Tagged ‘Vladimir Nabokov’
On this day (April 23, 1564) was born the greatest poet the world has ever known. The following is a repost from an excellent question I once received: Dear Ray Harvey: Is Shakespeare all that? — Slo Readuh Dear Slo Readuh: No, he’s not all that. He’s all that and more. It’s impossible to overstate […]
Read More
Ceasar: The ides of March are come. Soothsayer: Ay, Caesar, but not gone. — William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 1. The word ides is derived from the ancient Roman calendar and comes from the Latin idus, which Oxford defines as “a day falling roughly in the middle of each month (the 15th day of March, May, […]
Read More
Truman Streckfus Persons was Truman Capote’s real name. The title Finnegans Wake contains no apostrophe in the word Finnegans. Thus Finnegans is a plural and Wake is a verb. Issac Newtons’s father was illiterate. Walt Whitman’s mother was illiterate. Roald Dahl was an anti-semite. Djuna Barnes had no formal education at all. Edmund Wilson once […]
Read More
Just recently, I came across the following Q & A, which, whether you agree with it or not — and her name, I know, is either toxic or life-affirming (I’m not an objectivist, for the record, but I liked The Fountainhead) — you will almost certainly find as provocative and thought-provoking as I did. It’s […]
Read More
Readers did not realize that two types of titles existed. One type was the title found by the dumb author or the clever publisher after the book had been written. That was simply a label stuck on and tapped with the side of the fist. Most of our worst bestsellers had that kind of title. […]
Read More
Margaret Atwood: Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get […]
Read More
There are 32 ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there’s only one plot: things are not what they seem. – Jim Thompson. Anthony Burgess was slightly less stringent on possible plots: he put the number at about five. What distinguishes one plot from another? Or, to put that question more […]
Read More
(c)Ray Harvey 2011