Canis Minor Joseph Cornell made films of young women wandering through Manhattan parks or looking through windows, but when Stan Brakhage showed him films of a woman giving birth to a daughter, bringing a new young woman into the world, Cornell was outraged. Brakhage had made a mistake. In the star charts Cornell loved to paste into his boxes, Canis Minor is represented by a short straight line connecting two white dots. But one of the stars, Procyon, has a white dwarf companion, and the other, Gomeisa, may have been the original Arabic name for Sirius and later given to Beta Canis Minoris by mistake. Cornell ended his collaboration with Brakhage when Brakhage could not understand a reference to Pergolesi’s dog. Cornell had made a mistake: he had taken Bergese’s dog, which in the 1940s had been trained to type, and assigned it to the eighteenth-century Italian composer. Cornell was particularly moved by the dog’s habit of typing BAD DOG after it had made a mistake. "Gomeisa" means "little bleary-eyed one with filth in the corner of the eye."
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© 2007 prickofthespindle.com |
Mark Cunningham has poems in recent issues of Otoliths, Dusie, and Sawbuck, and a chapbook on the Right Hand Pointing website. Tarpaulin Sky Press will be bringing out a book tentatively titled Body Language, which will be a sort of diptych containing two separate collections, one titled Body (on parts of the body) and one titled Primer (on numbers and letters). |