Activity timeline
February 20, 2010
November 15, 2009
"Madame still had a slight accent and often spoke on the show as if she were talking exclusively to one person or character who was very important to her… Mario’d fallen in love with the first Madame Psychosis programs because he felt like he was listening to someone sad read out loud from yellow letters she’d taken out of a shoebox on a rainy P.M., stuff about heartbreak and people you loved dying and U.S. woe, stuff that was real. It is increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real in this way."
September 20, 2009
"That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses' trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlightening quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a blueish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightening lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up of changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor ...
"They took to riding by night, silent jornadas save for the trundling of the wagons and the wheeze of the animals. Under the moonlight a strange party of elders with the white dust thick on their mustaches and their eyebrows. They moved on and the starts jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack mountains. They came to know the nightskies well. Western eyes that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients. Tethered to the polestar they round the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite. The sand lay blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad of eyes winking ...
"The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they'd ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come."
September 13, 2009
"The Mennonite watches the enshadowed dark before them as it is reflected to him in the mirror over the bar. He turns to them. His eyes are wet, he speaks slowly. The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making onto a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than dogs."
Robert J added Blood Meridian to his library.
March 31, 2009
In referring to her dancers, who every morning put their bodies through all the classic dance positions before they even begin, she mentions in passing what I found most essential about her philosophy toward ritual:
"What makes it a ritual is that they do it without questioning the need."
The second chapter, "rituals of preparation", contains Tharp's best and most memorable advice. By making parts of her day (especially the earliest parts) ritualistic, she forgoes the true difficulty of those tasks because "it is one more item in my arsenal of routines, and one less thing to think about."
"First steps are hard." She recognizes that the first moment of a morning isn't easy, especially for a creative person. But by waking up every morning at 5:30, and hailing a cab quickly thereafter, she gets a leg up on that challenge. "Thinking of it as a ritual has a transforming effect on the activity. Turning something into a ritual eliminates the question, Why am I doing this?"
She thinks we should be less concerned with what we like and what we don't, what's hard and what's easy, and instead we should create rituals ...
In setting the stage to describe her habit, Tharp does some of her best writing in the opening chapters. Her central concern is ritual, and she opens that language up with a few great sentences (that hint at the concept of "scratching", which she introduces later):
"My daily routines are transactional. Everything that happens in my day is a transaction between the external world and my internal world. Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable."
She closes the chapter by making an anecdotal reference to the Karate Kid, in which Mr. Miyagi teaches Daniel the ways of high karate by forcing him into simplistic chores (rituals), that instill the ability for him to later defend himself without thinking, because the instincts were already planted through ritual.
March 30, 2009
March 16, 2009
robertjosiah replies...
Quiet, right?