I just read a haunting excerpt from a new novel called The Book of Heaven, by Patricia Storace (www.nybooks.com/articles/20397). It’s not specific about the country or the religion that creates the setting for the story, and I wonder whether Storace, like Margaret Atwood in her dystopian novels, combined aspects of different cultures to create a chilling but plausible fictional sect. Certainly the religious taboo against images of one kind or another is familiar enough, though the extreme to which it is taken here is fascinating food for thought. Illuminating the society from the viewpoint of an outsider who becomes an insider, Storace unfolds a whole series of insights about the senses and the body, beauty and self-consciousness, gender and culture, in just these few pages. The idea that an image might be assigned such fearful power as to be forbidden, and the reminder that the language of the body speaks clearly even, or especially, when we are not intentionally using it, seems awfully relevant to dancers (and reads well, too!), so you may want to check it out!