Thursday, April 23, 2026
At the Still Point . . . 3×3 Dance
https://www.instagram.com/p/DXdck-1lVRL/?img_index=7
Posted in the early morning (EDT) of April 23, 2026.
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Tuesday, December 17, 2024
For Arlene Croce, Dance Critic,
Who Reportedly Died at 90 Yesterday
At the still point . . . Ballet Blanc.
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Who Reportedly Died at 90 Yesterday
Who Reportedly Died at 90 Yesterday
Monday, October 7, 2024
Monday, September 23, 2024
Point Alpha — “What’s Your Rush, Miss Minutes?”
"Sometimes a wind comes before the rain
and sends birds sailing past the window,
spirit birds that ride the night,
stranger than dreams."
— The end of DeLillo's Point Omega
Meanwhile on that YouTube date . . .
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Thursday, February 23, 2023
“Where Whirled and Well”
— Conrad Aiken, Great Circle
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.
— T. S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday"
About the Centre:
See also Dorm Room.
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Monday, August 22, 2022
Tokens/Totems
See Ballet Blanc and Black Art in this journal.
From the former:
"A blank underlies the trials of device."
— Wallace Stevens
From the latter:
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Friday, February 4, 2022
Movement and Words
New York Times eulogy today for "a wizard of movement and words"—
See as well the previous post and Ballet Blanc .
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Thursday, July 29, 2021
Catchphrases from the City of Angels
"Go away — I'm asleep."
— Epitaph of the late Joan Hackett.
Hackett is at top center
in the poster below.
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Saturday, December 5, 2020
Wednesday, August 1, 2018
Publish or …
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From The New York Times online on July 29 — " Ms. Appelbaum’s favorite authors, she said in an interview with The Internet Writing Journal in 1998, were too many to count, but they included George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Anne Tyler and Julian Barnes. 'I love to see writers expand our range of understanding, experience, knowledge, even happiness,' she said in that interview. 'Publishing has always struck me as a way to change the world.' " A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: Judith Appelbaum, Guru On Publishing, Dies at 78. |
See a review of the new Anne Tyler novel Clock Dance
in today's online New York Times .
For a more abstract dance, see Ballet Blanc .
"A blank underlies the trials of device." — Wallace Stevens
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Wednesday, June 27, 2018
Friday, December 9, 2016
Snow Dance
See Ballet Blanc in this journal.
For a darker perspective, click on the image below.
See also Cartier in The Hexagon of Opposition.
Happy birthday to Kirk Douglas.
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Sunday, November 29, 2015
There the Dance Is
In memory of ballet designer
Yolanda Sonnabend, who
reportedly died at 80 on Nov. 9,
see posts on Apollo, Ballet Blanc,
maps of New Haven, etc., etc., etc.
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Sunday, October 18, 2015
Ballet Blanc
For more about the coordinatization problem
of the previous post, see Ballet Blanc .
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Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Entertainment Theory
From "Entertainment," a 1981 story by M. A. Foster—
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"For some time, Cormen had enjoyed a peculiar suspicion, which he had learned from his wanderings around the city, and cultivated with a little notebook, in which he had made a detailed series of notes and jottings, as well as crude, but effective, charts and maps of certain districts. 'Cormen's Problem,' as it was known, was familiar to the members of the circle in which he moved; in fact, if he had not been so effective with his productions and so engaging in his personality, they might have considered him a bore. It seemed, so the suspicion went, that the city was slowly shrinking, as evidenced by abandoned districts along the city edges. Beyond the empty houses were ruins, and beyond that, traces of foundations and street lines. Moreover, it had recently dawned on him that there were no roads out of the city, although there were no restraints. One hardly noticed this—it was the norm. But like many an easy assumption, once broken it became increasingly obvious. Cormen's acquaintances were tolerant of his aberration, but generally unsympathetic. What he needed was proof, something he could demonstrate in black and white—and color if required. But the city was reluctant, so it appeared, to give up its realities so easily. The Master Entertainment Center, MEC, would not answer direct queries about this, even though it would obediently show him presentations, pictorial or symbolic as he required, of the areas in question. But it was tiresome detail work, in which he had to proceed completely on his own." |
Lily Collins in City of Bones (2013)—
American Folk Art (see August 23, 2011) —
See as well Ballet Blanc .
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Thursday, January 9, 2003
Thursday January 9, 2003
Balanchine's Birthday
Today seems an appropriate day to celebrate Apollo and the nine Muses.
From a website on Balanchine's and Stravinsky's ballet, "Apollon Musagete":
In his Poetics of Music (1942) Stravinsky says: "Summing up: What is important for the lucid ordering of the work– for its crystallization– is that all the Dionysian elements which set the imagination of the artist in motion and make the life-sap rise must be properly subjugated before they intoxicate us, and must finally be made to submit to the law: Apollo demands it." Stravinsky conceived Apollo as a ballet blanc– a "white ballet" with classical choreography and monochromatic attire. Envisioning the work in his mind's eye, he found that "the absence of many-colored hues and of all superfluities produced a wonderful freshness." Upon first hearing Apollo, Diaghilev found it "music somehow not of this world, but from somewhere else above." The ballet closes with an Apotheosis in which Apollo leads the Muses towards Parnassus. Here, the gravely beautiful music with which the work began is truly recapitulated "on high"– ceaselessly recycled, frozen in time.
— Joseph Horowitz
Another website invoking Apollo:
The icon that I use… is the nine-fold square…. The nine-fold square has centre, periphery, axes and diagonals. But all are present only in their bare essentials. It is also a sequence of eight triads. Four pass through the centre and four do not. This is the garden of Apollo, the field of Reason….
In accordance with these remarks, here is the underlying structure for a ballet blanc:
This structure may seem too simple to support movements of interest, but consider the following (click to enlarge):
As Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, paraphrasing Horace, remarks in his Whitsun, 1939, preface to the new edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse, "tamen usque recurret Apollo."
The alert reader will note that in the above diagrams, only eight of the positions move.
Which muse remains at the center?
Consider the remark of T. S. Eliot, "At the still point, there the dance is," and the fact that on the day Eliot turned 60, Olivia Newton-John was born. How, indeed, in the words of another "sixty-year-old smiling public man," can we know the dancer from the dance?