Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch

Chapter 7

I touch your mouth, with one finger I touch the edge of your mouth, I draw it as it if it came out of my hand, as if your mouth was for the first time just barely open, and closing my eyes is enough to undo it and start over. Each time I create the mouth I desire, the mouth that my hand chooses and draws for you on your face, one mouth chosen from all, chosen by me with sovereign freedom to draw with my hand on your face, and for some random chance I seek not to understand, it perfectly matches your smiling mouth, beneath the one my hand draws for you.

You look at me, you look at me closely, each time closer and then we play cyclops, we look at each other closer each time and our eyes grow, they grow closer, they overlap and the cyclops look at each other, breathing confusion, their mouths find each other and fight warmly, biting with their lips, resting their tongues lightly on their teeth, playing in their caverns where the heavy air comes and goes with the scent of an old perfume and silence. Then my hands want to hide in your hair, slowly stroke the depth of your hair while we kiss with mouths full of flowers or fish, of living movements, of dark fragrance. And if we bite each other, the pain is sweet, and if we drown in a short and terrible surge of breath, that instant death is beauty. And there is a single saliva and a single flavour of ripe fruit, and I can feel you shiver against me like a moon on the water.

from Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar

Now reread this passage and pay close attention to the sensations your body is experiencing as you read.

Julio Cortázar and his cat

Julio Cortázar and his cat.

A great writer about music and art. Probably a great dancer about architecture.

Writing about art

I cannot figure out who actually said this. Some say it was Steve Martin. Others say the proper quote was “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” and it has been attributed to Frank Zappa, Elvis Costello, and Laurie Anderson.

Regardless, writing about art (or music) and dancing about architecture are wonderful ideas! But I’m a better writer than dancer…

Neurology

Now reading: Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect With Others by Marco Iacoboni

I think the implications of mirror neurons for how we understand art may be profound…

Inuit Throat Singing

Christian Bök

Terrific performance by Christian Bök. His “reading” of a Hugo Ball poem reminds me of the overtones of Inuit Throat Singing…

From ubuweb:

In this seven-minute sound poetry tutorial, Christian Bök takes the most difficult things and makes them pleasurable and completely understandable. Produced by Curtis Fox for the Poetry Foundation, Curtis tries — and botches — a snippet of sound poetry. He then hands the mic over to Christian who makes it soar. Bök then goes on to precisely explain the piece and its historic context. I can’t imagine anything better to use as a teaching aid to explain and demonstrate this art form.

Direct link to audio:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/download-file?file=/audio/StopMakingSense_PoetryOffTheShelf050409.mp3

From the Poetry Foundation

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/audioitem.html?id=1608

On Kawara, JUNE 16, 1966

On Kawara, JUNE 16, 1966, “Two Tankers and two tugboats crashed in a fiery disaster in Lower New York Bay,1966, from Today series, 1966—present. © On Kawara. Photo: Bill Jacobson. Courtesy Dia Center

Excellent essay by Lynne Cooke here

John Cage

My father was an inventor. He was able to find solutions for problems of various kinds, in the fields of electrical engineering, medicine, submarine travel, seeing through fog, and travel in space without the use of fuel. He told me that if someone says “can’t” that shows you what to do. He also told me that my mother was always right even when she was wrong.

from John Cage, An Autobiographical Statement

Irony and Winnipeg

Being from Winnipeg (see post below), I deeply appreciate irony. I enjoy the way it prompts one to rethink received truths and to tinker with them. While irony became an overused concept in the mid- to late 90s (after the publication of Douglas Coupland’s Generation X) and subsequently fell out of fashion, it continues to offer the possibility for critique (and humor) in ways that I hope will be soon be vigorously revisited. I also value the fact that irony is difficult to deploy in the name of branding and/or marketing, because it is slippery and unreliable in terms of eliciting the kind of consumer response the rhetoric around “The American Dream” does. Ironists are not the most dependable or predictable consumers.

“Winnipeg is not a city, it is a form of irony”