Author Archive
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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The following list, which comes from two contests held by the Washington Post, is not new — in fact, it’s been making the internet rounds for a while now — but you’ll never get tired of reading it: 1. Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center. 2. He […]
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The trucker who lives next door is seldom home. He’s a long-haul trucker, he’s over-the-road. He earns good money and does not spend. There’s something ascetical about him, something well read and wise. He’s forty. His hair is long. He wears jeans and combat boots. Sallow and haggard, his face is handsome nevertheless. His willowy […]
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Syncretism is a term that means the combining or reconciling of opposing practices and principles. It’s most commonly used in a religious or philosophical context, and as with Easter, Christmas too is syncretic in its origins: a pagan celebration whose provenance long predates Christ’s birth but which eventually made its way into the Christian mainstream. […]
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The Goths, as recounted by a Gothic historian named Jordanes (mid 6th Century AD), were a Teutonic-Germanic people whose original homeland was, according to this same Jordanes, in southern Sweden. At that time, this half-barbaric band was ruled by a king called Berig. It was King Berig who led his people south to the shores […]
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“One of the tests of a good writer,” said the poet Karl Shapiro, “is editorial acumen, the ability to turn down your work. It’s the amateur who falls in love with his own written words and holds them sacrosanct.” I think that that’s essentially true. I think also that anyone can learn to write formulaic […]
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(c)Ray Harvey 2011