Thursday, June 24, 2004

The Coincidence of Kiss

Today, Roy Arenella has written me something of a letter. Actually, he wrote two letters packaged as one:

First, a folded white card with Brancusi's sculpture "The Kiss" with three red exes over the actual kissing (an X being the representation of an osculatory smack in the symbolic language of ancient epistles). Roy reports that he "first used this simple idea in 1973 on a commercially produced postcard sent to Martine [his wife] in Paris" and that he likes "this newer version better than the first one...because the means & materials here are even simpler and more direct—while the idea remains just as forceful."


Roy Arenella, "The Kiss" (June 2004 Version)

Second, Roy had included this typewritten (okay, probably laser-printed) report of a coincidence:

The other day when you posted a blog entry titled "Who is Roy Arenella...." Martine (my wife) e-mailed the address of your site to several of our friends so they could read what you'd written. One of them, a lawyer with the NY State Comptroller's office, told her (in a phone conversation several days later) that on the same day he read your blog his office had need of information regarding record retention. In pursuing resources to that end he found your name (first heard of, on your blog on that very day) listed in a directory that he had consulted.

Amazing. Maybe he ran across my classic text, Retention and Disposition of Records: How Long to Keep Records and How to Destroy Them.

This Arenellian mailing is numbered 254X. I assume the X stands for "kiss."

un violon d'ingres

No comments: