July 27, 2011 Reading of “Entropy”
Hi everyone!
On Wednesday, August 3rd @ 7pm I’ll be reading my short story, “Entropy.” The reading itself will last about 20 to 30 minutes. Details and an excerpt below:
Entropy, a Reading by Ariel Dreyer
Wednesday, August 3rd @ 7pm
A Gallery
192 Commercial St.
Provincetown, MA
“THE SPEED OF THE W AKING WORLD runs me off the tracks. I was born deaf to rhythm, dumb to numbers, and blind to all things quantifiable. I clap on the up, confuse five and six, and, without realizing, will spend an hour on something that should take ten minutes.
Chris, my fiancé, says I have an erratic heartbeat. When we’re lying in bed, after I’ve finished writing for the night, he’ll sometimes put his head to my chest and listen (because, he says, I never tell him anything). The thumps that resound from that mass of muscle are always unpredictable: they speed up then slow down, go legato then staccato and flutter away at hummingbird-speed.
Some might say I’m overanalyzing myself, but I think I have an abnormal resistance to the progression of time. If you were to access my entire Google-search history, you would find, among Toll House cookie recipes and links to free movie downloads, the map points on my vain net-quest for immortality. To wit: the quasi- scientific health benefits of spirulina (a type of algae said to grant the consumer eternal life), articles on Aubrey de Grey (a geneticist racing to offer humankind biological immortality), and a Wikipedia page on various views of the afterlife. Somewhere along the way I stumbled across a book called The Selfish Gene, by British geneticist Richard Dawkins. Genes, says Dawkins, must be selfish in order to replicate, and thus to continue to exist; and we are mere “survival machines” for our genes, the vehicles by which they launch themselves into the future. Individuals, he points out, are transient, but genes, if successful, can last forever. In his book, Dawkins coined the term “meme”–a cultural transmission passed on from person to person. Memes, like genes, are passed on through natural selection, they are immortal, and they can mutate. They are ideas, trends, religions, languages, stories, vestiges of a fundamental desire to propagate, to perpetuate; traces of our legacies.”
PRAISE FOR “ENTROPY” FROM READERS:
“This was the best short story I’ve read in a long time.”
“This was beautiful. I think I now need to go do something completely absurd and wonderful.”
“This is a stunning piece… You’re ahead of the game with this one”
“You seem influenced by Proust and an obsession with Time and Memories, and a rolling rhythm like waves from the ocean lapping at your feet brings Virginia Woolf to mind.”
“Reading stuff like this makes me excited about new writing. This has substance and tension. And depth. And your language is riveting too. Very engaging… Thanks for this enlightening read.”
“In George Orwell’s Why I Write, he says something about good writing being something you feel connected to automatically because you could have written it– you have had the same thoughts in some form, and you feel automatic empathy– Or, shit, maybe that was Jack Kerouac. (Henry Miller?) I can’t remember. Anyway, that was the thought I had when I was reading this. It’s something intrinsic.”
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