Archive for 2012
The following, composed in rather rapid fashion, is an off-the-cuff top-five list of movies that are better than the book: Number 5: The English Patient, a well-written novel by Sri Lankan-Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje. The movie, directed by the English auteur Anthony Minghella (RIP), with phenomenal acting performances by Juliette Binoche and the stunning and […]
Read More
A reader writes: Dear Sir: Why do rabbits and eggs represent Easter, which also celebrates the resurrection of Christ? — Peter Dear Peter: Easter primarily represents the advent of springtime, just as Christ’s resurrection does. The Old-English word Eastre derives from an Anglo-Saxon Pagan goddess named Eostre, about whom very little is known. What we […]
Read More
Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favorite child. And his name is David Copperfield. Wrote Charles Dickens. Where does that phrase “heart of hearts” come from? Well, nowhere. It’s a perversion of Shakespeare’s heart of heart, which appears in Hamlet (Act 3, scene 2, 71-74): Hamlet: Give me that […]
Read More
A reader writes: Dear Sir: We read your book for book-club and I found it boring and reprehensible by turns. Between your endless descriptions and your philosophizing, I caught myself wondering, who would write such things? Who would publish such things? And there should really be a warning of what is to come. The book, […]
Read More
He trudged into the desert, taking almost nothing with him but water and a ghost- ly old photo of a lady beside the ocean. That first night, he lay above a dry creek bed. Below, he heard vipers moving through the sand with a side-winding motion, and he did not sleep. He’d grown obsessed with […]
Read More
CONTEST CLOSED. WINNER SELECTED. The Journal Pulp is offering a $200.00 cash prize for the following: Best first sentence for a novel about a poet truckdriver who loves the landscape almost as much as he fears the big black rig he sometimes sees in his rear-view mirror the moment before that rig vanishes. Rules […]
Read More
William Shakespeare — who’s remarkable for so many things that it’s easy to forget the thing he’s perhaps most remarkable for: the fact that he doesn’t reveal himself in any of his plays — was born in 1564, in Stratford, a tiny village which at that time had a population of approximately 1,500 people. In […]
Read More
Goethe at fourteen-years-old once heard Wolfgang Mozart (aged six) play the harpsichord: “The little man, with powdered wig and sword,” Goethe described him as. Luciano Pavarotti could not read music. David Bowie has a tattoo of a lizard on his ankle. Haydn and Beethoven each nominated Handel as the greatest of composers. Whereas Berlioz called […]
Read More
It’s no secret that I will on occasion deliberately mix my metaphors and figures of speech, so to speak, and yet I’ll be among the first to admit that if left unchecked this practice can go horribly awry, leaving even the hottest of your readers ice-cold. Still, I’ll often defend the practice publicly, on poetic […]
Read More
Plot is not memoir. Plot is not diary. Plot is not journal. Plot is not history. Plot is not erotica. Plot is not dialogue. Plot is not essay. Plot is not philosophy. Plot is not chronicle. Plot is not action alone. Plot is something very specific: it is the method by which you present your […]
Read More
It’s been said that a true artist doesn’t ever lose sight of reality: she stylizes it. It’s been also noted that a good painting often looks more real than reality itself. The reason both of these things are true is that art — which includes literature — is selectivity. Selectivity is the process of choosing […]
Read More
Or perhaps you have. Yet the following list, laid out in no particular order (with the exception of the last one, at the bottom of this list), is relatively obscure: Nothing is as it seems under the sharp western sun. After recovering from an enigmatic and near-fatal illness, Gasteneau, a man with an iron will, […]
Read More
A reader writes: Dear Sir: You are reported to have said that there is no order or disorder in the universe apart from what man himself puts there — this in spite of your well-known preoccupation with a fluid and congruent universe. Can you tell us how you reconcile this, with regard in particular to […]
Read More
There’s a game that certain writers like to play — and in answer to your next question, it’s not called Hide-The-Salami (although that one is popular with certain writers as well, myself perhaps foremost among them), but “Eavesdropping.” Here’s how you play: Sit in a public place. Sit near people who look interesting. Have something […]
Read More
“There is no work of art without a subject,” said Ortega — and with him here I do not demur. Subject-matter isn’t the only component of art — nor is it the most complicated — but it is the most fundamental. It is the component toward which all others are geared. Subject is what the […]
Read More
(c)Ray Harvey 2011