Archive for 2012
In a lecture he delivered at Cornell University, Vladimir Nabokov said this: “A work of art shouldn’t make you think, it should make you shiver.” And yet in reply to that one must ask: what about those of us who actually like for a book to make us think? What about those of us who […]
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In my occupation, I serve a great deal of St. Germain (elderflower liquor), and it got me thinking: The Count of St. Germain, it turns out (purported death: February 27, 1784), was among other things a violinist, pianist, composer, inventor, traveler, courtier, adventurer, armchair scientist and alchemist, writer, wit, self-mythologizer, and brilliant conversationalist. He was, […]
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Under threat of arrest during the Reign of Terror, the French writer Nicolas Chamfort (1741 — 1794) shot himself in the head and slit his own throat. Then died of pneumonia while recovering in his bed. Whereas Lavoisier was guillotined in the Reign of Terror. “A good book is twice as good if it’s short.” Said […]
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Seven o’clock in the evening. A hot and moth-populated mountain night. Gasteneau sat alone in a rundown motel on the outskirts of town, a cheap room that he’d rented for this reason, because it was cheap, and because he could have it by the day or by the week, and because it was spacious and […]
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Saphho was small and dark, yet in his famous rendering of her, Raphael made her blond and fleshy. Richard Wagner wore pink underwear and was about five feet tall. Gauguin fathered at least four illegitimate children in Tahiti — this in addition to the legitimate clan he abandoned back home. Beethoven, Brahms, Gluck, Haydn, Mahler, Mozart, […]
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Suspense, which isn’t a genre but a specific manifestation of plot, is when you can’t put the book down because you must learn what happens next. Suspense is when you’re champing at the bit. It’s when you’re berserk to know more. It’s when, beside yourself with anticipation, you feel as though you’ll come undone if […]
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Life is an unceasing sequence of single actions, said Ludwig von Mises. And so, in many ways, is plot. But, unlike life, plot is selective — and what that means, among other things, is that the author is the selector. The author chooses the actions his characters undertake. This, incidentally, is one of the primary […]
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Cynic and skeptic are often confused and often conflated, though in actuality the only thing they really have in common is that their provenance is philosophical. The difference between the cynic and the skeptic is the difference between epistemology and ethics. It is the difference between brain and body. Skepticism is an epistemological word. Cynicism […]
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L Wilson Hunt, of Chanticleer Book Reviews, wrote a flattering and insightful piece on my novel More and More unto the Perfect Day. That review reads, in part: Bizarre things are beginning to happen to Joel Gasteneau. A strange illness has left him feeling weak and haunted by vivid dreams, and he feels that he […]
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A sonorous body produced by periodic vibrations. Hermann von Helmholtz defined music as. Without music, life would be a mistake. Said Nietzsche, a chronic insomniac whose eyesight was dire. Music is neither good or bad — to the deaf. Said Spinoza. Henriette Sontag, the soprano at the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth, turned Beethoven around […]
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Here Are My Top Thirteen Best First Sentences in Literature: 13. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. (Paul Auster, City of Glass) 12. A few miles south of Soledad, […]
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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtM5yIQm6jw&w=420&h=315] Bartending, which, for better or worse, consumes a great deal of my time, is a subject that evidently interests people to no end — judging, at least, from the sheer number of questions I get on the matter — and often I’m asked: Ray, why bartending? The answer is, my love of literature, […]
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There’s a dirty little secret about writing talent which editors and publishers don’t usually speak of, but which I’d like to share. That dirty little secret is this: Writing talent doesn’t really exist. As a matter of fact, there’s no such thing as innate writing talent, and the most important trait a writer can possess […]
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(c)Ray Harvey 2011