He read THROWN (2014) by Kerry Howley in a sitting two weeks ago. I read it in multiple sittings a year ago.
Kerry Howley, 38, teaches nonfiction at University of Iowa. Thrown is her first book.
(16) Spectacle/violent ritual. “If you were a fourteenth-century Latvian looking to leave yourself, you might mask up and dance through streets reveling in Rabelaisian wonder, until the Catholic Church stopped you; were you a nineteenth-century Paiute Indian in the American West, you might try your hand at ritual millenarian dance, until the army stopped you; or an ancient maenad, join other womenfolk in ripping apart a live goat in the Greek countryside, until exhaustion stopped you.”
(23) Ring girls / thrownness. “These women, I thought, ought not let us see them shorn of their costumes so soon before the event itself. It occurred to me that they would both benefit from a brief explanation of Heideggerian thrownness (the “poignant sense of having been hurled into the world without preparation or consent,” to the layman)…”
(43) Shots at conformity. “It was Nietzsche who said that a certain type of ghostly, corpselike wretch turns away from Dionysian revelry in a spirit of ‘healthy-mindedness.’ I would write my fighterly thesis, but I would not fraternize with the healthy-minded; better to leave them to their prenatal yoga, their gluten-free diets, their dull if long lives of quietest self-preserving conformism.”
(45) Erik Koch on Whole Foods. “ ‘The biggest thing I always crave—I’m a big bread fanatic—bagels. I’ll go to Whole Foods—do you know Whole Foods Market?—oh my god, I love it.’”
(45) Wording. “Nose straight, undereyes unlined, skin taut and unbruised.”
(55) Erik Koch on why he's so good. “ ‘The reason I’m so good,’ Erik said later that night, when eight of us were together seated in Rocky’s basement, ‘is because I literally—I’m crazy. I don’t have a job. I don’t have any way of making money. I just decided to train six or seven hours a day.’”
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