Live with the Itchy Hearts
Welcome!
My name is Carey Harrison, and this website is primarily
devoted to my writing. An overview of my career is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carey_Harrison
Updates, news and upcoming events can be found here:
Contact me if you have any questions, at ranald.carew@gmail.com
On this site, you will find links to excerpts from novels and plays, some entire, some in excerpts, both published and performed and unpublished and unperformed. There are also links to a few photographs.
Below, excerpts from assorted reviews of my books & plays:
Here are excerpts from seven novels unconnected by
character or theme but written (in the order below) in the course of a year:
As An
Unperfect Actor On The Stage…
(They were written in
365 days precisely: Flatbroke & Vine was begun on the morning of
May 9 2005 and As An Unperfect Actor On The Stage... was completed on
the evening of May 8 2006. Six of the novels were written in the eight months
surrounding August to November 2005, a four-month period during which the
700-page A Perfect Innocent was written; the last four books in five
months. 700,000 words in the twelvemonth. 1,800 words a day. My email confirms
this: as storage I sent myself the day's work every evening. I had a
full-time teaching post and other duties at the time and, apart from
Wednesday, my free day, the books were almost entirely written before
breakfast. Anything is possible, it seems, when the time is right. My previous
700-page novel, Richard's Feet, took twelve years to complete.)
Below, links to three recently completed stage
plays, the first a 30-minute comedy staged off-Broadway during May and June
2009, the other two a pair of full-length ‘dream plays,’ one of which, Magus, was performed in June 2010 (see
‘news’ link, above):
Scenes
From A Misunderstanding – first scene
Midget
In A Catsuit Reciting Spinoza - entire
Next, two BBC World Service radio plays, entire, the first
one the winner of the 2006 WorldPlay award for the best play broadcast by an
English-language broadcaster:
Plus, a screenplay, The Stand-In, written with
John Keller, and available at our film company’s website, http://monitorlizardfilms.com/
Some 40 of my essays on language, culture and the
classroom are available to subscribers at http://vocabulareview.com and http://thescreamonline.com
My book reviews can be found in the online archives of The
San Francisco Chronicle, The
Next,
Some photographs:
One of my
tattoos: the opening section, Für Marcel Proust, of Theodor Adorno’s
Minima Moralia, in the original German
with
two of my exes, Roxy the boa and Dorothy, my brother’s car
My wife Claire’s
painting of me at work
Performing
at the Kennedy Center
Finally -
Some favorites, those nearest to my heart:
Novels: William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Saul
Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse,
Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, Iris Murdoch’s Under The Net,
Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Stories: John Keller’s Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher,
Robert Stone’s Under The Pitons. Dramatists: Aeschylus, Shakespeare,
Racine, Chekhov, Pirandello. Poets: Li Po, Dante, Herbert, Laforgue, Whitman,
Dickinson, Robert Kelly. Movies: Lars von Trier’s Europa, Michelangelo
Antonioni’s L’Avventura. Philosophers, despite their mutual antagonism:
Adorno and Heidegger. Composers: Handel, Bach, Scarlatti, Mozart, Beethoven,
Chopin, Pårt. Painters: Rembrandt, Vermeer, Caillebotte, Samuel Palmer, de
Staël. Supreme and unmatched artist: Gaudi.