Who Is Jesse Cohn?

You can go to my teaching portfolio to see what I do for a living, or to a page of some of my writings to find out about my thoughts on books and life. Here, you will learn (for instance) what books I have most enjoyed reading recently, or the fact that I love cats and Chinese food, that I habitually listen to old Motown soul sounds and roots reggae, that Halloween is my favorite holiday and that I am haunted by the paintings of Remedios Varo... In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled "Bordando el Manto Terrestre," were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, gold-spun hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships, and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears... (Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49)

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