Word: sustainers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...choice of topics does as much as his prose style to contribute to the tone of the collection. Funeral customs, diplomatic protocol, astrology as a historical phenomenon, and the treatment of children are all bizarre little sidepaths that serious scholars rarely explore, yet their unusualness makes it easy to sustain interest in them for a few pages. His thumbnail sketches of those sorts of topics illustrate an implicit thesis about the way things were in Victorian England, or wherever. These essays don't prove his thesis, but they flesh it out, and they are, as a group, a remarkably pleasant...
...they go out of Synanon, they are dead.") The new group, however, believes that its members can look forward to a future as nonaddicts. Consequently, the Delancey Street Family asks its members to stay only two years. During that time they learn vocational and business skills designed to sustain them in the outside world...
...Roll Right Stones." It's the key to the album's interest, for the discerning listener. "Roll Right Stones" is the only fourteen-minute song I know that's brought off successfully without a soaring guitar solo. Listen closely: there are several themes, subtle changes in tempo that sustain interest that to begin with was merely hypnotic. The song changes tempo, only slightly, something like six times in the first four minutes. It opens pastorally with mild flute in the introduction, and then evolves through each theme, culminating in a beautifully double-tracked accusation, "Many a thief can be seen...
...into deathly silence and inactivity the next. The varying dynamics of the play as it is written are brilliant, but the demands imposed upon the actors are rigorous: they have to carry hundreds of invisible people--not to mention the people in the audience--along this roller coaster, and sustain it all until the climax. In this production, the actors keep losing grip. We wallow in monotony until a particular line catches us suddenly and throws our heads back as the ride starts again for a while...
...frenzied that the room fills with string, crisscrossing all over, so dense that it obstructs his vision. He has intellectualized himself into the corner of a jungle, and he just barely escapes. An interior monologue like this, constructing a purely self-contained psychological state, is incredibly difficult to sustain. But Rhodes's instincts are so sure in this "head" writing that you are completely captivated...