Interview With Author Nick Cascino
Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
Ever since I picked up a pen, I’ve been turning my thoughts into stories. Admittedly my first works couldn’t be sold by carnival barkers , but my style has improved greatly over the years and I’m proud of my latest work presented on my website and the last four books I’ve written.
Over the years, I developed an attraction to comedy and have used it successfully in business correspondence and speeches. Yes, folks actually laughed and it was quite inspiring. Considering the challenges of this world, I now feel I have a moral obligation to make people laugh. All of my stories have a foundation in comedy from which drama and deeper concerns can be approached.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
I present the second chapter in the Doctor Misery Series, DOCTOR MISERY’S CITY OF MUSIC. Why misery in a comedy? His name is actually Bruno Z. Mizzieri. The double Z should be pronounced the same as in pizza, but he never succeeded in getting others to follow the Italian pronunciation when he moved to the United States.
Doctor Mizzieri was an aspiring astrophysicist, gifted in science and music, but a wicked trick of fate forced him into bookmaking, once the realm of organized crime yet now championed by Corporate America. This is exemplary of the mystifying paradoxes in human nature, how seamlessly we turn crimes into virtues and virtues into crimes. Music transforms the same way, a struggle between harmony and dissonance that attempts to resolve, yet often this takes tremendous sweeps of chord progressions and time in the process (I’m not talking Fall Out Boy here, more Wagner and Mahler).
Mizzieri discovered that the superhighway to gaining enlightenment is music. It’s pure thought and emotion, an incredibly efficient intelligence in the way it transforms our psyches. Through music, the great mathematician and bookmaker Doctor Bruno Mizzieri discovered Quantum Arousal Theory:
Applying quantum arousal techniques, we can achieve advanced synesthesia, the blending/crossing of the senses in scientifically applied proportions. As vision, hearing, tasting, smelling, touch and intellectual stimulation merge, our sensorium expands exponentially and becomes wavelike. This permits us to perceive existence as the wavefunction, a range of possibilities, not as one static reality.
Using these techniques assisted with carefully curated music and his own compositions, he was able to recreate realities to satisfy his aspirations. He painfully discovered the danger in his pursuits and backed away. However his pupil, Doctor Praterius, learns these techniques and pursues their use with ill intent.
This leads us to ask; Does music have a conscience, or does it perpetuate our current state of mind, whether virtue, desire, anger, deviancy or madness? Exploring the concepts in CITY OF MUSIC, you can create your own personal leitmotifs to see if music can indeed unlock the unconscious, delicately navigating the melodic boundaries between enlightenment, rapture, or moral annihilation. But let’s not get carried away. You may just experience the joys of comedy, perhaps the highest form of human intelligence.
By the way, I use so much mythology in this book that I was sued by Zeus, Vishnu and Dionysus at the same time, the subpoena delivered by Hermes when I was checking out at Trader Joe’s. Believe me, you don’t want to be chased by a guy with wings on his shoes (ironically they had run out of organic chicken wings).
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I often have ideas driving and will dictate them into my phone for future retrieval. Many great chapters were pulled together this way, but the downside is I tend to speed up when the creative juices flow. I attempted to explain this to a cop once and he doubled the fine.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
I’m engaged in a lifelong pursuit of comparative mythologies. The works of Carl Jung have been a huge influence, especially MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS, and we must give homage to Freud despite his focus on sexual libido, the personal unconscious and cigars.
What are you working on now?
I’m expanding my website and further developing the concept of the personal leitmotif. Here’s a snapshot. I continually update new insights on Doctormisery.com:
Music is highly transformative and at a minimum fundamental to our mental health. Composers, playwrights and filmmakers have used leitmotifs, signposts in music, to transform characters and drive ideas and emotions across narratives. Simply stated, it’s a musical idea that recurs and transforms. While this concept dates back to ancient times in Mesopotamian, Chinese and Greek Drama and Philosophy, it gained traction in the 19th Century operas of German composer E.T.A. Hoffman who was a major influence on Richard Wagner. The operas of Wagner were milestones in the utilization of leitmotifs but he died just before the invention of cinema, where the integration of sight, sound and narrative enabled the leitmotif to soar.
But why leave this concept to the consumption of the arts? We can enrich our own transformations by incorporating leitmotifs into our daily lives. As we engage with the power of music throughout the day, we can use this concept to transform isolated building blocks into a cohesive whole, to create a soundtrack to the soul. It can help us integrate various aspects of our life, whether work, relationships, dining, exercising, even our dreams and goals, into a greater harmony. It can also help us understand the duality of human nature, the acknowledgement of darker forces that contrast with and serve to define our morality. In the case of Wagner, these concepts have sometimes fostered extremism, and we must recognize when music’s hypnotic effects delude us.
I propose establishing a “Leitmotif of the Day” or week or month or however often we can focus on a musical idea. These are musical signposts that set tone and mood. They train us to hear how rhythms, melodies, and pitches create a cultural and emotional resonance. They can rise up spontaneously from the environment like a song on the radio or be painstakingly selected through research, but the best approach may be establishing a healthy flow between random and pre-conceived influences. These musical cues may stir memories, dreams and emotions, joyous or painful. Contrasting a piece of music with others or transforming compositions from orderly melodies to jazz improvisations, perhaps accenting them with polyrhythms may achieve a greater meaning and depth. These transforming leitmotifs can be instruments that guide us into the future.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
I believe in cross promotion, using multiple techniques across channels especially when you’re starting out. Online, one must gain an understanding of keywords – it takes time and trial and error, but this can’t be farmed out unless one has significant marketing resources. Developing good content on your website is essential, more important than having a developer creating something slick but heartless. I’m also promoting the book with comedy routines at open mics in New York when my wife approves.
For anyone who reads my book and gives a review on Amazon, I’m happy to create a personal leitmotif suggestion for that honorable soul, a melody or chord progression that can be built upon using the techniques noted above.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
For aspiring writers, I say it’s never too late to get started (it took me a few decades fighting the seductive allure of financial management), but as one who occasionally procrastinates, I advise that it’s never to early, so get off your hypnotizing devices and start writing!
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
Be skeptical of all advice.
What are you reading now?
Continuing my study of comparative mythology, I’m focused on the trickster archetype, ranging from Dionysus/Bacchus in the western tradition to the great cosmic trickers of the Americas and Africa, from ancient times to the present day, from Ananse the Spider to Robin Williams.
What’s next for you as a writer?
Another book in the series is in the works. I’m also working on a sea adventure inspired by Moby Dick, but this may take more time considering I need to re-read that mammoth text.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
Definitely the GREAT GATSBY, CATCHER IN THE RYE, and CAT IN THE HAT.
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