Paul Tharp

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On `To the One of Fictive Music'

By Paul Tharp | April 26

This is butterfly news from the top of the hill for all you fly butterflies out there. I'm Metamorphoses and yes, it's mid-spring and the critters are crawling, you see them? The caterpillars, and you know what that means: More fly butterflies soon to be streaking the friendly skies. I've seen a few straggling butterflies out on the skies. One can't be too careful just on a fly to the studio, with the wind, the webs and obstructions. We know well the obstructions of which I speak, dear butterflies, the loathsome machines designed by humans known as automobiles.

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From the `Lights Out' Convention

By Paul Tharp | April 19

This week lawmakers met to discuss plans to fight one of America's fiercest killers: sunlight. Representatives from 32 states met at the 16th annual Lights Out Convention at Sun City's underground resort in Sunnyside, Calif. They discussed plans, among them a "sunlight tax," to reduce Americans' exposure to deadly rays, which over time may cause skin irritations and cancers. Skin cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the United States.

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All Made for the King's Jewelry

By Paul Tharp | April 12

Some 400 years ago the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote a parody on identity known as "The Ship of Theseus." The ship that carried that mythical hero to triumph over the minotaur, and to Antiope, took its lumps in the roughening waters of the Aegean Sea. Each time it returned, on the dock the old repairman carried the splintered boards of the wooden hulk and laid them in his shed. After a time, all of the ship's original boards were heaped in the shed, waterlogged, and the ship that ferried Theseus over the sea was made solely of repair parts.

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Think of the Reasons We Publish

By Paul Tharp | April 5

On Monday, this paper published an op-ed piece taken from the advertisement by David Horowitz on reparations for slavery. By printing the ad as an op-ed this paper forwent the only good thing that could have come from its publishing -- an $800 offering by Horowitz -- and instead raised an irrelevant First Amendment dispute. The First Amendment dispute is irrelevant because no one tried to stop this paper from publishing the piece. No censors, no oppressors, not even protesters demonstrated against its publishing.

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Studying the Old Identity Question

By Paul Tharp | March 29

This weekend I visited the zoo with a problem: precisely, whether or not I was an animal. It was clear enough before departure that I was. Yet something asked to be confirmed.It struck me last Wednesday, on the Web. The Associated Press was reporting how scientists had discovered in Kenya a second genus of pre-humans some 3.6 million years old. It raised new questions, they said, about the origins of our species.

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Paying Homage to a Crude Circle

By Paul Tharp | March 22

Standing, knees locked, before "The Circle of Life." Matisse in December, tied up on a green gallery wall, overstuffed. Green-faced Chicago. Sunlight through an open window. Cold air corrodes canvas. Sun melts the snow outside.For some reason I'm thinking of now.This minute, much later, on the verge of spring. One of two verbs, one falling, one leaping. This one gives birth, for the living rebirth, and some say, redemption for the dead. It's redemptive because the dead live on, through the living.It's a circle. They gave us a way, and words I speak not in any clear manner.

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A Story for the Itsy-Bitsy Spider

By Paul Tharp | March 8

These words are yours not because you understand their meaning but because, I suspect, you sense the trembling of my voice. You've been troubling me. You see, I am a human. We humans, you must know, are animals of diverse capabilities. We're complex, big-brained beings who with the slate of this natural world, a growing knowledge of its rules and - most importantly - an opposable thumb, have shaped our own grand version of it. Our world has a likeness all its own. We inch through it with familiar instruments: system, progress.

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The Dream of the Last American

By Paul Tharp | March 1

The drawing was simple. A squiggly contour line the boy made over the broad white of the page. It was a lake with two islands. He penciled in the trees, row after row circling the lake before tapering off into the bald lead humps of hills. In the open spaces and among the trees he drew triangles, tepees he'd seen in the history books from the parlor of his father's house. He was a boy. Triangles made men. They spread. On the eastern shore of the lake they gathered, with their bronze skin, wading knee-high into the water with arrows in hand, fast as fish, or faster.

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The Reprise of the Siamese Dream

By Paul Tharp | February 22

This is a difficult thing, mostly because you and I are unlike. Our unlikeness took one of us after the severing of the cord to the crib by the window, the second to a dim corner, bound by the wailing cry of our neighbors.They're grown now. You and I migrated home. It was the first name we knew, as children, and our mother's face the first we loved. She was the first of green stables, ferry between the bonds of the earth and life above it. We were protons, neutrons and the hopelessly divided electrons. Then we found a butterfly on the sidewalk, with broken wings.

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Cheers to `Over the Hill' Holden

By Paul Tharp | February 15

Holden Caulfield tells us at one point in J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" he thinks some of his fellow characters act so phony they can't possibly be real.You ever feel the same? Meet people so phony you can't believe they're real? Me too. That's why Salinger's characters are so believable. They're real. Or better -- they're phony. Holden merely points out things we all know intuitively.Still it's always amazed me how I and just about everyone else relate to Holden on such a personal level.