More from Martha Graham: > There is a wonderful Icelandic term: “doom eager.” You are doom eager for destiny no matter what it costs you. The ordeal of isolation, the ordeal of loneliness, the ordeal of doubt, the ordeal of vulnerability which it takes to compose in any medium, is

In her memoir, Blood Memory, the choreographer Martha Graham writes about Louis Horst, one of her key collaborators. She first encountered Horst in Ruth St. Denis’s dance company. At Denishawn, Graham was a promising young dancer and Horst, the musical accompanist: > [Horst] would give an edge to a

This passage, from Martha Graham’s memoir, Blood Memory, seems like an appropriate start for the final essay of a very tough year. Graham laments the loss of the suppleness of her youth even as she continues to choreograph other dancers: > I don’t demand, at the beginning, any

There’s a point at which everything comes together. Always. Persevering to that point is the central challenge of being a writer. Throughout the week, I assemble scraps of ideas for this newsletter. By Thursday or Friday, thematic connections have formed, seemingly of their own accord. When it’s time

About twenty years ago, I decided to make an independent film. I’d made a number of videos by that point and I felt ready to take my efforts to the next level. (I wasn’t, but that’s a different story.) At the time, I was working in a

Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’

Just a quick one this morning to help propel you through the final days of NaNoWriMo [https://nanowrimo.org/]. Or at least shake off the funk of Black Friday buyer’s remorse. If you’re a regular reader, you might wonder why I look for ideas everywhere but the world

In The Craft of Writing [https://bookshop.org/books/the-craft-of-writing/9780393300505], the editor William Sloane writes that the ability to tell a good story, the “narrative faculty,” can’t be taught: > Its techniques can be discussed—foreshadowing, for instance, or the structure of scenes in fiction and nonfiction, perhaps

In a 1982 interview [http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/musn82.htm], Brian Eno said: > My reputation is far bigger than my sales. I was talking to Lou Reed the other day and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold 30,000 copies in the

A couple of years have passed since Stanley Kubrick’s death. His assistant Tony Frewin invites journalist and documentary filmmaker Jon Ronson to the late director’s house. There, Ronson is to be given the rare opportunity of studying Kubrick’s archives. No, not the archived films themselves, but all