Ray Harvey

A reader writes:

Dear Ray Harvey: I’m one of these guys with a big belly and a small penis. I’m heterosexual, and I drive a truck for a living. I do not get a lot of exercise. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been pained by the size of my penis. I’m seriously considering surgical augmentation (in my late thirties). Do you have particular thoughts on this issue? Should I, or shouldn’t I?

– Dick Weed

P.S. Pumps don’t work.

Dear Dick Weed: Indeed, I do have very particular thoughts on the issue, despite the fact that, as fate would have it, my problem is the exact opposite of yours. My thoughts are these:

Don’t do it.

Quoting from the gospels:

“A man’s life consisteth of more than the size of his dick” (The Gospel According to Ray, Chapter 1, Verse 1).

Didn’t you hear about the plastic surgeon who hung himself?

Listen, Mr. Weed, when it comes to satisfying a woman, you know the commandments:

Don’t stampede the clitoris.

Don’t neglect the labia.

I give you a new commandment now: The journey is the way.

Truckdriver, that’s an old German dictum, and what it means is something I’d like for you to take with you from here on out, every time you enter your bedroom, your wife, or your bigrig:

Sex is not a race, and intercourse is not the only kind of sex. There are plenty of things you can do with your lug nuts, your digits, your tungsten wires, and I’m not just blowing your horn when I say that.

At a bar where I once worked (for five godforsaken years), a customer told me one time that his penis was only three inches — but he swore up and down that most women didn’t like it that thick.

Mainly, Mr. Weed, what I’m suggesting to you is this: learn to enjoy the journey, because the journey is the way; your penis is only a small part of it (so to say).

Slow her down, friend, and I promise that your small penis will be all the penis she needs. It’s not as if you’re trying to make Amarillo by morning (or are you?) Enjoy the process, soup-to-nuts, the whole damn thing. As you know, the end will come soon enough, and all ends are bitter.

Now keep on trucking, big daddy.

Charles Bukowski

Dear Ray Harvey: Is Charles Bukowski a great artist?

– Billy Badass

Dear Billy Badass: No, he’s not. Bukowski is too sloppy to be a great artist. He lacks vision. He lacks depth and he lacks focus. Reading him, one is reminded of Truman Capote’s criticism of On the Road:

“That’s not writing; it’s typing.”

Here, for example, is a typical Bukowski poem:

A Radio With Guts

it was on the 2nd floor on Coronado Street
I used to get drunk
and throw the radio through the window
while it was playing, and, of course,
it would break the glass in the window
and the radio would sit there on the roof
still playing
and I’d tell my woman,
“Ah, what a marvelous radio!”
the next morning I’d take the window
off the hinges
and carry it down the street
to the glass man
who would put in another pane.
I kept throwing that radio through the window
each time I got drunk
and it would sit there on the roof
still playing-
a magic radio
a radio with guts,
and each morning I’d take the window
back to the glass man.
I don’t remember how it ended exactly
though I do remember
we finally moved out.
there was a woman downstairs who worked in
the garden in her bathing suit,
she really dug with that trowel
and she put her behind up in the air
and I used to sit in the window
and watch the sun shine all over that thing
while the music played.


What do you think?

And yet for all this, Bukowski does possess something — which is to say, he’s not altogether devoid of talent. For one thing, as you glimpse above, he has a genuine sense for beauty, at times, not consistently. And he’s intelligent. His all-time favorite movie was Eraserhead by David Lynch. Bukowski’s talent, however, remains largely fallow. If you’ve read a few Bukowski poems or stories, you’ve pretty much read them all.

In short, a little Bukowski, goes a very, very long way.

Here’s Bukowski at his best:

A reader writes:

Dear Ray Harvey: Is Shakespeare all that?

– Slo Readuh

Dear Slo Readuh: No, he’s not all that. He’s all that and more.

It’s impossible to overstate Shakespeare’s genius. Forget that his plots were largely borrowed; forget that he never created a major character who didn’t have significant flaws. None of that is where Shakespeare’s genius lies. As Vladimir Nabokov — who was at times (not consistently) an insightful critic — once expressed it: “The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has ever known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays. With Shakespeare, it is the metaphor that’s the thing, not the play.”

Aristotle believed the creation of metaphor to be the highest mark of literary genius. Shakespeare’s poetic skill is virtually bottomless. Even if you were to take away his plays, he’d still rank as one of the greatest sonneteers of all time.

It is, I admit, a tragedy that the Elizabethan language has become to our modern eyes and ears so difficult. Much of Shakespeare does indeed require footnotes, which of course can make for some very rough going. I do understand that. Yet when you push past that — which is to say, when you begin at last to penetrate Shakespeare — you’ll glimpse something you can’t believe.

John Keats was not speaking hyperbolically when he said that Shakespeare “smacks of the divine.” Nor was Samuel Taylor Coleridge when he said that Shakespeare “possessed myriad minds.” Shakespeare’s words contain the kind of truth that seems otherworldly. Neither is it an accident that Shakespeare is quoted more widely than the Bible.

But it was Herman Melville, who thought Shakespeare “the profoundest of thinkers,” that captures the locus of his genius most appositely of all. Melville said that Shakespeare was “master at the art of telling truth even though it be covertly, and by snatches…. It is those deep far-away things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare.”

Like Nabokov, Melville believed that it is neither the tragedies nor the comedies that make Shakespeare great: it’s the insights into humanity, which come at you constantly from among his plays and sonnets “like flashes of lightning illuminating the mysteries below.”

That’s not all: Shakespeare’s greatest living admirer (and arguably the world’s best-read human being) the critic Harold Bloom (not to be confused, as he so often is, with that hack Howard Bloom), honestly believes that in creating so many convincing characters, Shakespeare went far in creating our modern-day conception of humanity itself. It is an incredible statement, and yet I, for one, won’t argue it. In Harold Bloom’s own words:

“Shakespeare, who at the least changed our ways of presenting human nature, if not human nature itself, does not portray himself anywhere in his plays.”

Even more interestingly, perhaps, Mr. Bloom goes on to say this:

If I could question any dead author, it would be Shakespeare, and I would not waste my seconds by asking the identity of the Dark Lady or the precisely nuanced elements of homoeroticism in the relationship with Southhampton (or another). Naively, I would blurt out: did it comfort you to have fashioned woman and men more real than living men and women? (Harold Bloom, Genius, p. 18).

The profundity of his question is, I believe, the truest test of Bloom’s sincerity, for that question is almost frighteningly subtle. But apart from the insight it provides us into Bloom’s own brain, it illustrates something even more significant:

It’s long been observed that one of the best measures of literature is when you can discuss the characters of a story or play as if those characters were real people: when you can talk about their personalities; when you can psychologize over them, their choice of careers, their deeds; when you can pick their brains and discuss their addictions and predispositions as if these characters were actual human beings. Many playwrights and novelists, and even many modern day screenplay-writers, have created characters that meet this criteria. But no one — and I mean no one — has come close to creating the sheer number of these characters that Shakespeare did. Love these people or hate them, Shakespeare brought to life a gallery of women and men who are completely human — and he did it in a language whose prosody for practitioners still astounds.

That is the real power of art.

So no, gentle Slo Readuh, Shakespeare is not overrated. He is, if anything, vastly underrated.

A reader writes:

Dear Ray Harvey: Who’s the better filmmaker, Quentin Tarantino or David Lynch?

P. Durango

Dear P. Durango: Are you kidding me? But there’s no comparison.

As a filmmaker, David Lynch possesses innumerable shortcomings, foremost of which is the fact that he’s an obscurantist extraordinaire — and this is no small thing.

The symbolic in art, you see, must never supersede the literal — or to put that another way, the symbolic meaning must always remain secondary to the literal meaning, and the literal must hold up on its own without reference to the symbolic. When an artist makes the symbolic meaning the tail that wags the dog, as David Lynch so often does, she defaults on art’s primary function: making the abstract concrete.

Yet for all this, David Lynch is not only the better filmmaker: he’s better by light years.

Quentin Tarantino barely makes it above average. He makes good B movies.

It’s true that Tarantino can tell a story (at times, not consistently). This isn’t really his problem.

His problem is that he lacks depth.

If theme is the meaning that a story’s events add up to — and it is — then Tarantino’s movies are almost all themeless because they add up to nothing. They’re action movies, which, even as action movies go, are often boring and wildly gratuitous. (Inglorious Basterds was a notable exception.)

Tarantion’s dialogue at its best is good, but it, too, is inconsistent. Pulp Fiction, slightly campy now, remains by far his best movie.

Reservoir Dogs? You see skill there, in flashes, despite its wobbly plot. But there’s no getting around the fact that Quentin Tarantino could never in a million years create Wild at Heart and Sailor Ripley, let alone the John Merrick that David Lynch gave us in his awesome version of the Elephant Man — John Merrick dancing alone in his room with tophat and cane, the pure poignancy of which scene is unforgettable.

Tarantino has yet to match Pulp Fiction. It seems to me now that he never will.

Pulp Fiction spawned a thousand imitators — and for good reason: it was funny and it was original. And yet its appeal has dated a little: many scenes still hold up and are as fresh today as they were fifteen years ago. But an almost equal number (i.e. “The Bonnie Situation”) have grown stale and are unconvincing. Time has sunk them.

The David Lynch of Twin Peaks and the David Lynch of Blue Velvet has a depth and intelligence that Tarantino cannot match. Wild at Heart, which is half a decade older than Pulp Fiction, has proven more durable by far.

Just incidentally, Quentin Tarantino’s “The Man From Hollywood” (his Four Rooms contribution) was taken from a Roald Dahl short story called “The Gambler,” and if you want to see where Tarantino got his idea for the ending of Reservoir Dogs, please watch this movie, which was based on the novel by Lawrence Block.

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things.”

Said Oscar Wilde.

Esthetics — or aesthetics, if you prefer — is the philosophy of art.

It is a sub-branch of epistemology. Epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge, spawns esthetics like Superman spawns sequels.

Esthetics is classified as a sub-branch of epistemology because art is a by-product of the reasoning brain — which is why animals (for example) don’t create art or enjoy it — or, at any rate, not without some intensive human coaxing and coaching.

Art is the process of capturing through an artistic medium abstract ideas and the emotions that go along with them.

That is the definition of art.

Art is not a luxury item but a human necessity.

Quoting Oscar Wilde once again, who is at his best in the esthetic arena:

“The function of art is to recreate, from the rough material of actual existence, a new world that will be more marvelous, more enduring, and more true than the world that common eyes look upon.”

Art starts with an abstraction such as jealousy, and in an artistic creation like Othello, shows us how in human life jealousy manifests.

The degree to which an artistic creation persuades or seems plausible is the degree to which it is good or bad. Contrary to popular belief, art can and should be held to standards. Of a poor film, therefore, it is perfectly proper to say “This movie sucks!”

Painting and drawing perform the same function as our Othello example, but in a purely visual manner.

Sculpture does so by visual-tactile means.

Music, which is unique among the arts, captures so-called emotional abstractions, via sound, so that when we hear music, we feel ourselves perhaps excited, or melancholic, or thoughtful, or sexy, whathaveyou.

It should also be noted here (not quite parenthetically) that music’s modus operandi is not well understood — not in terms of how the brain organizes sound into euphony, and why, exactly, melody and harmony strike human ears in the precise way that they do.

To qualify as a legitimate art form, the medium must have the power to convey ideas in a perceptual form — which is to say immediately.

That’s why culinary art is not, in the true sense, an actual art but a skill: the best foie gras in the world cannot convey even the simplest human abstraction, let alone something as complex as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

The same thing is true of sewing, gem-cutting, carpentry, and a million other skills and trades as well. They are not actually arts because they don’t have the power to capture or convey a wide range of abstract meaning. They cannot objectify reality through their medium.

That’s what art does. That is why art is a necessity.

To truly qualify as art, the medium must be able to reproduce nature, via sensory data, and then infuse that data with conceptual content.

Plays and screenplays, for instance, are art.

Movies are art.

Novels and poems are art.

Dancing is art but not a primary: it depends upon music.

This same is true of acting: it depends upon a script, which is one of the reasons that scripts sometimes feel flat when they’re read rather than watched, and why an actor without a script is like a clam without a shell.

Cinematography, like photography, occupies the middleground. Both contain an artistic component, and yet both are stylistically confined — they record more than they create — and are therefore more skill than art.
(Journalism is analogous to this: it too has an artistic component — specifically, in the freedom of writing style afforded it — but journalism also primarily records.)

Art came into existence within the human species because the human brain operates by means of abstractions, which is to say words, which is to say ideas formed by means of words.

Abstractions are thoughts — or, to put that more precisely, abstractions are the human way of grasping the natural world.

We do this by means of thought.

And we think by means of words.

Art assists.

And that is why esthetics is a sub-branch of epistemology.

The senses — sight, sound, touch, taste, and hearing — are what feed our brains with the raw sensory data Oscar Wilde speaks of in the previous quotation.

The brain then processes this raw sensory data conceptually — that is, through a process of abstraction, or, in other words, through thinking — which is essentially the process of learning words and grasping what in reality those words denote.

By means of sensory data, art recasts reality and shows us our abstractions made solid.

Art thereby enhances reality.

And because, as its name implies, art is artificial, it also perfects reality.

Artists themselves are among the most inarticulate when it comes to explaining the nature and function of art. To get beyond their artsy mumbo-jumbo, so that we can see clearly at last what gives rise to art, we need not listen to artists and art critics, but instead merely observe how the artistic drive develops in children. “Through Children,” said Dostoevsky, “the soul is healed.”

Observe what the child with that big stick of sidewalk-chalk draws upon the concrete.

A large yellow crescent with blue stars around it.

A white house in a field.

A blazing sun coming up over black mountains.

Animals.

Stick figures.

Death.

War.

Now ask yourself this: what drives a child to make those drawings?

What is she thinking about that makes her want to set it down in concrete form?

What dictates her subject-matter?

Why did she choose this and not that?

What is the child doing?

And, as important, what is that process doing for her?

Ask yourself:

Why did prehistoric humans paint animals and hunting scenes upon cave walls? What drove that urge? Why did these people choose the subjects they chose? And what did painting those things fulfill within them?

Why have humans always invented stories?

Why have humans always enjoyed listening to those stories, or seeing them played out?

Why the human invention of musical instruments?

Why did David “dance with all his might before the Lord”?

What need is being fulfilled in this?

The answer to these questions is the same:

Each one of those things, through whichever medium, captures the abstract and makes it real and immediate.

Humans — the rational animal — need this because our rational mind operates in an opposite manner: it is thoughtful, inductive, long-range. Art brings the entirety of the elegant universe into our immediate ken.

Art makes the conceptual perceptual.

There is no mood or passion that art cannot give us…. Art is mind expressing itself under the conditions of matter, and thus, even in the lowliest of her manifestations, she speaks to both sense and soul alike…. It is through art, and only through art, that we can realize our perfection; through art, and through art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence…. Like Aristotle, like Goethe after he had read Kant, we desire the concrete, and nothing but the concrete can satisfy us.

– Oscar Wilde