> He overlaid a Leonardo self-portrait drawing on the lady's
> face--bone structure appeared vaguely similar
Yes, that's the one. Still can't remember who it was here either. But the
gay guys who come into the local are all convinced of it as gospel.
> Apparently the dead are unusually resistant.
This is a profound truth.
best
Dave
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, June 02, 2001 11:14 PM
Subject: Re: Perloff intro to Luca
> Yeah, created a big splash a couple of years ago--I also can't remember
the
> guy's name. He overlaid a Leonardo self-portrait drawing on the lady's
> face--bone structure appeared vaguely similar. Of course, the
self-portrait
> was in extreme old age, many years after the Mona Lisa. Art historians
> didn't take it very seriously.
>
> Something like 20 years ago the Journal of Polymorphous Perversity
> published "The Psychoanalysis of the Dead." A very useful paper.
Apparently
> the dead are unusually resistant.
>
> Mark
>
> At 11:02 PM 6/2/2001 +0100, you wrote:
> >I recall someone, can't remember who, claiming with all seriousness that
not
> >only was Lisa Mona a man, but she was a _self-portrait_, to be exact,
> >Leonardo in drag!
> >
> >best
> >
> >Dave
> >
> >
> >----- Original Message -----
> >From: "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]>
> >To: <[log in to unmask]>
> >Sent: Saturday, June 02, 2001 8:22 PM
> >Subject: Perloff intro to Luca
> >
> >
> >In furtherance of my shameless pursuit of book sales, the following from
> >Marjorie Perloff:
> >
> >INTRODUCTION to Rochelle Owens' _Luca: Discourse on Life and Death_
> >
> > In 1919 Marcel Duchamp bought on the Rue de Rivoli a cheap
postcard
> >reproduction of the Mona Lisa and decided to give Leonardo's famous
> >enigmatic face a black-penciled mustache, curling up at the corners, and
a
> >neat small goatee. Underneath the portrait Duchamp inscribed the letters
> >LHOOQ, a sequence which, read aloud in French, equals elle a chaud au cul
> >(she has a hot ass). But his was not just a crude joke; as he explained
it
> >many years later, "The curious thing about that mustache and goatee is
that
> >when you look at the Mona Lisa it becomes a man. It is not a woman
> >disguised as a man; it is a real man, and that was my discovery, without
> >realizing it at the time."
> > Here Duchamp implies playfully what Freud, in his famous study of
> >Leonardo
> >da Vinci, took very seriously-namely the artist's latent homosexuality.
In
> >both cases the model herself (a local merchant's wife) is seen as mere
> >object-"the occasion for these ruses," to use Frank O'Hara's phrase in
"In
> >Memory of My Feelings." And of course art historians have taken this
object
> >status as given: Ernst Gombrich, for example, argues that the universal
> >appeal of the Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile may be attributed to
"Leonardo's
> >famous invention which the Italians call sfumato-the blurred outline and
> >mellow colors that allow one form to merge with another and always leave
> >something to the imagination."
> > Indeed, the painting's sfumato does leave something to the
> >imagination,
> >and in her brilliantly inventive Luca: Discourse on Life and Death
Rochelle
> >Owens has imaginatively recreated Mona Lisa from multiple perspectives,
> >including Mona Lisa's own.
> > Owens' is a profound meditation on how Leonardo's painting-the
very
> >epitome of Renaissance art-was really produced and disseminated, and what
> >the process meant to the women (Mona and her friend Flora, who appears in
> >so many of Leonardo's works) as well as the children who served as models
> >for Jesus and St. John the Baptist in various paintings. Owens'
> >"narrative"-which is complexly disjunctive, weaving in and out of
> >Renaissance Florence, our own time, and the more distant past of
> >pre-Columbian cultures-circles around three characters: "Lenny"
(Leonardo)
> >the artist/scientist, the artist's model Mona Lisa, referred to here as
> >Mona or "La Gioconda" ("the smiling woman"), as the painting is also
> >called, and Siggy or Sigmund Freud, whose rationalist analysis destroys
the
> >heart and soul of the culture it "murders to dissect." In the course of
the
> >narrative Mona and Flora become part of a larger company of women,
> >especially poor women from various Indian tribes, who continue to be
> >oppressed in the Americas of the present:
> >
> > Leo na r do had not heard you you answer
> > correctly you calculate the edge reflect
> >
> > Reflect on the sketch
> >
> > of Indian women
> >
> > The conjunction of time frames and situations makes for a bravura
> >performance-that rare long poetic sequence that holds the reader's
> >attention from beginning to end even though it is by no means a linear
> >narrative.
> > Just as Marx will never seem the same after one reads Owens'
Karl
> >Marx
> >Play (1973), so "Lenny" emerges as a complex character, obsessed with
> >anatomy and hence the dissection of cadavers, much taken with young boys,
> >alternately giggly and abstracted-and always consumed by his work.
Sigmund
> >is his alter ego-hard, cold, "triumphantly smil[ing] on reading / a
> >pathological review of a great man." In "The First Person," for example,
we
> >read:
> >
> > you said
> > the smile of Gioconda floats upon
> >
> > her features you hook your neck
> > pursing your lips saturate your dry
> > eyelids with oil and very lightly
> >
> > brush in this preherstory widening
> > your fibrous memory
> >
> > This passage gives us a good idea of the diction and tone that
> >distinguish
> >Luca from most poetry written today. Owens' theme, here as in The Joe
Poems
> >or Futz, is that of violation-the violation of one person's space by
those
> >who want to control or absorb it, who will not let it be. Freud's
"fibrous
> >memory" won't let the Leonardo story be; he has to explain childhood
> >memories as homosexual fantasies and find explanatory mechanisms for the
> >artist's sublimation. But Owens doesn't relate these things
> >dispassionately: in her macabre vision Freud is seen "hook[ing] [his]
neck"
> >and, in a horrific image, "saturating [his] dry/ eyelids with oil."
> > Owens does not shrink from the violence and horror she finds
> >everywhere
> >around her and which she projects back, most convincingly, into what was
> >supposed to be, according to Burckhardt and Berenson, the ordered and
> >measured world of Renaissance Florence. This poet enters her narrative
and
> >calls the shots as she sees them:
> >
> > At times it seemed
> > to her she looked like other women
> > wearing a baffled look her brain
> > retained an image the very long
> > teeth due to gum deterioration her
> >
> > exhaling suddenly looking in the
> > middle instead holding her head to the
> > side.
> >
> > The sardonic suggestion that Mona Lisa's fabled smile is the
result
> >of gum
> >deterioration is characteristic of Owens' x-ray vision. Her packed,
heavily
> >accented free verse erupts like a volcano, as in this description, early
in
> >the poem, of Mona's illness:
> >
> > Thin body of fiber
> >
> > Desperately sick for want
> > of a cleaner wound the woman followed
> > Mona's orders as if there is any
> > doubt water salt sugar protein
> >
> > potassium calcium urinate spon-
> >
> > taneously then the exposed & opened
> > entire lens would rupture the rule
> > in most cases the patient adjusts
> > following this three to
> >
> > seven fine sutures of silk or dog-gut.
> >
> > Notice the strange collision of highly concrete nouns as in lines
> >5-6
> >above, with the indeterminacy of reference produced by syntactic ellipsis
> >and a quirky absence of punctuation. In lines 8-9 one expects a period
> >after "rupture," and the next phrase should read, "the rule / in most
cases
> >[is that] the patient adjusts, / following this three to seven fine
sutures
> >of silk or dog-gut." And even the adjectival modifier here is
non-sensical.
> >A surgeon might say, "Give him three to seven sutures" or "He will need
> >three to seven sutures," but in what situation would one say, "following
> >this three to seven fine sutures?" If one knew that Y followed X one
would
> >not be in the uncertainty about X that is registered here. And sound
> >repetition tells the same story. The predominant sound is that of
> >syllables ending with an emphatic /t/ stop: want, salt, protein, urinate/
> >potassium, rupture, patient, sutures, dog-gut. The poet's voice fairly
> >chokes as it vividly recounts the many threads of the Mona/Flora
> >story-threads that come together later in the poem when the Renaissance
> >motifs are seen through an Aztec prism-words like "Aztec" and "Tlaloc"
> >reinforcing the sound structure of the earlier passages and ironizing the
> >claims of the conquistadores, whose plunder of American soil parallels
> >Lenny's earlier plunder of the very bodies and souls of his female models
> >in the interest of anatomical study as well as the art of painting.
> > Rochelle Owens' writing, here as elsewhere, is sui generis. She
is,
> >in
> >many ways, a proto-language poet, her marked ellipses, syntactic
oddities,
> >and dense and clashing verbal surfaces recalling the long poems of Bruce
> >Andrews and Ron Silliman. But Owens is angrier, more energetic, and more
> >assertive than most of her Language counterparts, male and female, and
she
> >presents herself as curiously non-introspective. Hers is a universe of
> >stark gesture, lightning flash, and uncompromising judgement: it is
> >imperative, in her poetic world, to face up to the horror, even as the
> >point of view is flexible enough to avoid all dogmatism.
> > Immensely learned, sophisticated, and witty in its conceits, this
> >Discourse on Life and Death demands two kinds of reading. First, it
should
> >be read through from beginning to end as if it were a novel; in this
> >instance, our concern is with character and the interchange between
people,
> >and we watch carefully as Mona and Flora and the children evolve before
our
> >eyes.
> > But a second reading is required to note the poem's
> >microstructure-its
> >superb modulation of rhythms and internal rhymes, its ironies and
> >paradoxes. It is the layering of cultures and especially of myths,
> >including our own contemporary myths of the Great Creative Genius (always
> >male), creating beauty out of the detritus around him, that makes Luca
so
> >distinctive. Watch out, Owens seems to be saying, for those high-minded
> >claims and take another look at the evidence of actual life-"a stream of
> >molten lava burning," "doses of nitrogen muscle saliva," or even "the
> >seams/ of a discarded wallet."
> > Owens has no easy answers for the pain and sorrow she presents
for
> >our
> >contemplation, but her insistent questioning is itself a gift.
> > Marjorie Perloff
> >
>
