Joan Harvey’s fiction, poetry, essays, and translations have appeared in numerous literary journals. She has won prizes for both poetry and fiction, and work of hers has been read on the radio in Manhattan and Aspen, Colorado. Recently a piece she wrote about the election, “Ghost Ship of State,” was performed as a small opera. She is a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and lives in the hills above Boulder, Colorado. Email: thomyris [at] gmail.com
by Joan Harvey POZZO: Which of you smells so bad? ESTRAGON: He has stinking breath and I have stinking feet. POZZO: I must go. ― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot There are many perplexing things in the world, but one of the more perplexing, only recently discovered by me, is that a substantial number of…
by Joan Harvey The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world. —Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Violence When a young gunman murdered ten people at a supermarket in Boulder, a place I’d been in the week before the shooting, I was reading the letters…
by Joan Harvey For several years I enjoyed discussions about neuroscience with a friend (now deceased) who was a top rock climber. He and his buddies, when not performing solo climbs with torn shoulder muscles and sleeping on cliffside bivouacs, would listen to Sam Harris and talk neuroscience. We have conquered mountains, was their creed;…
by Joan Harvey As we’ve all noticed, as soon you mention something about, say, your neighbor’s annoying poodle and your phone is anywhere within a three mile radius, you immediately get ads for poodles, poodle accessories, poodle food, and yet more poodles. I must have been talking or writing to someone about my immune issues,…
by Joan Harvey I always knew that we couldn’t Make America Great Again without Sarah Palin. So when she retreated to Alaska to be with John Galt and all the others who shrugged because they were tired of holding up the Lib-tards and their socialist laziness, I figured we were on the path to becoming…
by Joan Harvey In my first column for 3 Quarks Daily I wrote that we are still fighting both the Civil War and WWII. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. puts it: “two hideous demons slumber under the floorboards of Western culture: anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism.” We have learned that any steps forward will be met…
by Joan Harvey Ariana Reines and Terry Tempest Williams, writers one would never expect to be buddies, but who bonded at Harvard Divinity School, are having a public Zoom discussion in order to sell books. It’s a lovely, friendly discussion, but I’m shocked, shocked to hear that they send each other AUDIO letters. Audio letters?…
by Joan Harvey The new book by Sandor Ellix Katz, Fermentation as Metaphor, is “Dedicated to bubbly excitement, in its infinite effervescent manifestations.” As our Covid Days drag on, I have a dream about champagne flutes gone missing, though I manage to find other glasses that will do. I suspect this is a dream about…
by Joan Harvey “Asked in an interview with Alex Jones, the far-right conspiracy theorist, what Trump should do against Democrats who “think they can steal” the election, Roger Stone — a close confidant of the president whose 40-month prison sentence for witness tampering and lying to Congress was commuted by Trump earlier this year — said that…
by Joan Harvey The Passive Vampire by Ghérasim Luca, 1945. Translated into English by Krzysztof Fijalkowski (Prague, Twisted Spoon Press, 2008) If it is true, as is claimed that after death man continues a phantom existence I’ll let you know. Ghérasim Luca, La Mort morte, 1941 Vive le vampire! James Joyce, Ulysses A book travels through…
by Joan Harvey It’s summertime. Things are heating up. A comet trips across the night sky; I make out its vast and blurry tail, then watch a sharp bright shooting star fall through the heavens. I drag a mattress out onto the deck and lie under a massive blanket of stars, a very milky way.…
by Joan Harvey Let’s face it, I’m tired. A phrase completely knotted up in the rather damaged circuitry that is my brain with Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles who managed to out-Dietrich Dietrich while being her own amazing self (if you haven’t watched this in at least the past few days you probably should). But,…
by Joan Harvey I learned in New Jersey that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people. —James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see…
by Joan Harvey At night you’d think my house abandoned. Come closer. You can see and hear the writing-paper lines of light and the voices of my radio Jerónimo’s House, Elizabeth Bishop Don Quixote, and with him, of course, faithful Sancho Panza, inhabit my kitchen; primarily the space between the sink and the kitchen island. I…
by Joan Harvey 1) invisibility I’ve been pondering how, in all the Covid-19 turmoil, so many who believe in an invisible God have become the last to give credence to actually existing but invisible substances. There is some irony in people risking their lives by crowding together to pray to something for which there is…
by Joan Harvey It’s a foggy gray day and the stock market is in free fall. Last week, because I’m one of those careless people who doesn’t pay too much attention to these things, I decided to go against my grain and try to educate myself a little more about the new plague. It is,…
by Joan Harvey Everyone at every moment is guided by what he sees most clearly—compounded with what he sees least clearly. —Paul Valéry And while this show is going in public, in the background, the wrecking crew is working. —Noam Chomsky Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar is proposing a new nickname for his…
by Joan Harvey The radio music is smooth now, sentimental, semi-classic in the popular vein…music something like a golden bell, promising that tomorrow will be better. Jazz, good jazz, tells no such lies. —Charles Wright, The Messenger Recently, in an independent bookstore in a city I was visiting, one of the books I randomly scooped…
by Joan Harvey It was inevitable. Michael Pollan’s justly lauded book, How to Change Your Mind, was going to lead straight, sensible, old people to doing drugs. “Today I am a middle-aged journalist working in London, the finance editor of The Economist, a wife, mother, and, to all appearances, a person totally devoid of countercultural…
by Joan Harvey On this last Veterans Day, a young friend shared an essay on Facebook by veteran Rory Fanning about his wish that Veterans Day, which celebrates militarism, be changed back to Armistice Day, to celebrate those working for justice and peace. I hadn’t known that Armistice Day, which was established after WWI, had…