Jesse Cohn: OCCUPATIONS |
Occupations and Things I LoveWho Is Jesse Cohn?
I'm a person with a passion for reading, writing, talking, or perhaps a
collection of passions with a person: an overactive imagination equipped with
feet, hands, and mouth. I live where I've lived for most of my life -- in St.
Louis, Missouri, home of many famous writers (Marianne Moore, William S.
Burroughs, T.S. Eliot, Jane Smiley, Maya Angelou...) who went somewhere else to
be famous. I like it here -- it's got serious problems, but so have lots of
other cities. Somehow I wound up living in one of the last integrated
neighborhoods in the city. There's something about these little streets that's
incredibly pleasant: perhaps the proportion of the heights of trees to the width
of the road and the small, hilly front lawns makes a perfect Golden Section, or
maybe it's the way that people stay out on their porches all the way into
November. Whatever it is, I'm going to hate to leave this place. I want to become fluent in another language -- at least in French, which is my best second language. While on honeymoon in Paris, Darlene and I went to a small smoky café somewhere southwest of the Left Bank -- the Club des Poètes. There we met Jean-Pierre Rosnay (here's a picture of him) and his amazing wife, Marcelle, and heard poetry read as we had never heard it before. It's quite a different tradition than the American bohemian/beatnik kind -- a poetry reading seems to be understood as a performance more than a "reading." Poems are chanted, sung: the voice is invested in it. We were enchanted. Reading one of Jean-Pierre's poems (which had the line in it, "Qui traduira ma poème?" -- a dare, I thought), I tried to translate it. You can see the results here. Here is a sketch that Darlene made of an adjacent rooftop -- the view out of
one of the windows of the Hotel Cedex, in the vicinity of the Place Bastille.
I have been known to practice (but am now entirely out of practice in)
Aikido, which
I can only refer to oxymoronically as a "pacifist martial art" ("martial" is
arguably a bad translation of the bu character in budo). It's
dance, it's philosophy, it's art: in other words, really cool stuff. Anybody
who's interested in working on their relation to their own body and on the way
they deal with conflict and aggression ought to try it -- but remember that like
anything else, it can be abused and distorted: as with most other martial arts,
some people pursue Aikido as a power trip. Be sure your sensei (teacher)
understands the spiritual and ethical background of the art, which its founder (Morihei
Ueshiba, a Japanese war resister during WWII) dedicated to peace. I couldn't resist clipping and scanning a cartoon from the November 1st issue of The Nation -- it highlights some of the tangles issues around "representation" that I dealt with in my dissertation!
More later...
Created Summer 1997 -- Recreated Fall 2004
jessecohn@verizon.net
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