Author Archive
First, there was the scent of thyme. It drifted through her body in the form of fevers — an invisible emanation, soft and swirling, like a drift of water. The intangible fragrance of a thing, like an essence continually expelled. But by what or whom? Of what chemistry composed? Of what crude matter made? Entering […]
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I need someone to set a pick for me at the free-throw line of life.
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I recently discovered this song — on an obscure FM radio-station — and I fell in love with it. So I decided to make a bartending video to go along with it.
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Poems, unique among all literature, were for many centuries specifically meant to be learned by heart. They weren’t meant to be read and then forgotten. They were meant to be memorized and then recited aloud. This is called the oral tradition of poetry, which in essence means holding literature in the mind and heart to […]
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South of the border among the pluripresence of jellied heat, east of the setting sun, inNogales, Mexico, where this sort of thing can occur,you glimpse twenty meters to your right a thinMexican woman who’s walkingalone: black-haired, willowy, tall, her long arms aglow with toffee-colored skin, her wet eyes friendly yet faintly mocking. She isn’t old, though […]
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Oscar Fingal Wilde, the last of the great and hopelessly flamboyant, whose full name was Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, is perhaps because of his flamboyance and his fame frequently misrepresented and misconceived. He died 119 years ago this month. I offer here three of the most famous fabulations about Oscar: 3. Oscar only liked […]
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The Italian poet Petrarch (1304-1374) did not invent the Petrarchan sonnet, which is also known as the Italian sonnet. It was first used by Dante (1265-1321) and then later by many of Dante’s contemporaries. Petrarch’s excellence with the form, however, especially when celebrating his beloved Laura, made the Italian sonnet more widely known, so that even […]
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This recent tweet captures the half-assed distinction Marx tried to make between so-called bourgeois property and personal property: On the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre — when the totalitarian socialist government of China quashed, with extreme force, a political uprising by the people of China who rebelled at last against the obliteration of […]
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NOTE: This is the original version of a story that was many years in the making. It is a prototype. The theme and characters remain the same, but a more polished and significantly altered version can be read by click-clicking this. Neck Between Two Heads required a great deal of work. If you read along […]
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Farm subsidies have never made any sense. Despite almost a century of entrenchment, this remains as true today as it ever was — and I will show you specifically how: how and why, I should say, the subsidization of agriculture devastates the vital, beautiful industry of farming and agriculture. My notions are not just theory. […]
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That title is in quotation marks because it’s the title of an actual piece, which recently appeared in the Atlantic Magazine. This piece is an interview with a sociologist named Margaret Hagerman, who sought to “recruit white affluent families as subjects for the research she was doing on race” — and this is for a […]
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Often you’ll read or hear that with the exception of America, healthcare in all the world’s developed countries is recognized as the “basic human right” that it actually is. You’ll often hear in the next breath that “America is the only civilized country in the world that doesn’t offer universal healthcare to its people.” What […]
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This is a repost from some time ago — the most articulate and thoughtful and heartfelt review of this book that I ever received, from a wonderful person I’ve never met and with whom I barely communicated, and that was a long time ago: I finished reading Ray Harvey’s More and More unto the Perfect […]
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Why is college so expensive? For the exact same reason that healthcare has become so expensive. Which is the same reason rents in San Francisco and Boulder have become so expensive. Economist Daniel Lin, professor of economics at American University, explains this basic and well-known principle, in three short minutes: Even worse than the monetary […]
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I recently wrote about some of this, and then just last night I read the following. Native American Senator Elizabeth Warren, in kicking off what many think will be her 2020 Presidential run, proposes what she calls — apparently without irony — the Accountable Capitalism Act. As actual legislation, it will go nowhere and it’s […]
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(c)Ray Harvey 2011