Slant Board. 1961

“Before moving to New York in 1959, choreographer Simone Forti spent four heady, formative years in San Francisco. There, she trained with the postmodern dance pioneer Anna Halprin, who rejected the stylistic constraints of ballet and modern dance. On Halprin’s outdoor dance deck in wooded Marin County, Forti explored improvisation, her motions guided by a keen alertness to the body’s anatomy. She also organized open-work sessions with her then husband, the Minimalist artist Robert Morris, gathering artists for communal, multidisciplinary explorations of movement, objects, sound, and light. At the end of the decade, Forti and Morris moved east. In New York, she began developing the pieces she eventually called Dance Constructions: dances based around ordinary movement, chance, and simple objects like rope and plywood boards. First performed in 1960 at the Reuben Gallery in Soho, and then in Yoko Ono’s loft the following year, they marked ‘a…

Well it’s not very often you hear me referring to Greek drama. My main connection was being involved in productions of Aristophanes’ plays when I was at university. Yes, yes, I pranced about the stage in some kind of draped confection that bore no resemblance to any known historical wardrobe. As above. Why were we wearing tinsel halos I wonder? And I think this must have been a rehearsal as everyone has their hair down, not up, I’m wearing specs and I always went myopic for actual performances. And thank the Goddess I’m being right royally upstaged and I cant’t actually see the costume on me.

Enough of that. Back to now. So why am I thinking about Greek drama…? Well a lot of the ways we think about writing can be traced back to Greek traditions. And today I’ve been thinking about The Chorus.

So here’s how I know…

Good Morning!

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Breathe-in experience,
breathe-out poetry.
— Muriel Rukeyser,
poet, social justice activist
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“Poetry and beauty are always
making peace. When you read
something beautiful you find
coexistence; it breaks walls down.”
— Mahmoud Darwish,
Palestinian poet
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J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1937 painting of Rivendell

“Rivendell is a valley in J. R. R. Tolkien‘s fictional world of Middle-earth, representing both a homely place of sanctuary and a magical Elvish otherworld. It is an important location in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, being the place where the quest to destroy the One Ring began. Rivendell’s feeling of peace may have contributed to the popularity of The Lord of the Rings during the war-troubled 1960s. … The house of Elrond in Rivendell is also called The Last Homely House East of the Sea, alluding to the wilderness (Rhovanion) that lies east of the Misty Mountains. Rivendell lay in eastern Eriador at the edge of a narrow gorge of the river Bruinen (one of the main approaches to Rivendell comes from the nearby Ford of Bruinen), well hidden in…

“By the time On Tour with Eric Clapton was released in 1970, the husband/wife pairing of Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett could loosely be placed in the category of ‘seasoned veterans’ within the music industry, despite the fact that they had only been recording as a unit for a very short period of time. … Working on the television show would bring Bramlett in contact with Leon Russell (also a member of the Shindig! band) and Russell would play a very important role in Delaney’s musical future (and the pair also filtered into a potent scene of musicians featuring former Byrds members Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman that would eventually spawn The Flying Burrito Brothers). Bonnie Lynn O’Farrell was climbing her own ladder in the music industry, putting two notable notches onto her musical resume at a very early age, singing with blues legend Albert King and later, the Ike and…

I thought I would ignore the story you have read about in every publication: the unprecedented indictment of a former President of the United States. Special Counsel Jack Smith released the indictment yesterday, and I read every word. It is a dramatic narrative of a man who was determined to hold onto state secrets, storing them in public spaces, hiding them when necessary, completely indifferent to the law governing classified documents. The irony, as the indictment points out, is that Trump repeatedly lambasted Hillary Clinton in 2016 for being careless with state secrets and promised to enforce the law if elected.

If you haven’t read the indictment, please do so. At the least, it may make you wonder how Republicans can bring themselves, even now, to echo Trump’s claims that he is the victim of a witch-hunt.

Heather Cox Richardson summarizes the events of the past 24 hours and the…

Azar Nafisi was teaching American literature in Iran at the time of the revolution in 1979. Because she refused to wear the mandated head covering, she was forced to leave the university. She continued to teach her students in her home. She moved to the United States in 1997. In 2003, she published Reading Lolita in Teheran, which was a huge bestseller. She became an American citizen in 2008. Please open the link and read the interview in full. It appeared on the website of American Purpose.

Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Azar Nafisi has championed literature as an act of resistance against threats to freedom and imagination. To read dangerously, as Nafisi puts it, is to arouse curiosity and challenge the status quo.

Sahar Soleimany sat down with the critically acclaimed Iranian-American author to talk about the importance of resistance writers at a time of heightened threats to…

Opinion | June 8, 2023: “There’s a well-known passage in the title essay of Joan Didion’s 1979 collection ‘The White Album’ that begins with a litany of 1960s tragedies, including the massacre at My Lai, a harrowing story of child abandonment and a very brief and cryptic mention of Robert Kennedy’s assassination: ‘I watched Robert Kennedy’s funeral on a veranda at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu.’ The section concludes with a personal revelation: In June of 1968, Ms. Didion experienced ‘an attack of vertigo, nausea and a feeling that she was going to pass out,’ for which she underwent an extensive psychiatric evaluation and was prescribed amitriptyline, an antidepressant. ‘By way of comment,’ she wrote, ‘I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.’ Over 40 years later, ‘The White Album’ is regarded as…

Timothy Snyder is a historian at Yale Univerity who has written extensively on European history and threats to democracy. This essay is a fascinating history of Ukraine, which was published in The New Yorker.

He writes:

When Vladimir Putin denies the reality of the Ukrainian state, he is speaking the familiar language of empire. For five hundred years, European conquerors called the societies that they encountered “tribes,” treating them as incapable of governing themselves. As we see in the ruins of Ukrainian cities, and in the Russian practice of mass killing, rape, and deportation, the claim that a nation does not exist is the rhetorical preparation for destroying it.

Empire’s story divides subjects from objects. As the philosopher Frantz Fanon argued, colonizers see themselves as actors with purpose, and the colonized as instruments to realize the imperial vision. Putin took a pronounced colonial turn when returning to the Presidency…