Hello Kitty Has No Mouth

Lyrics

1 hello kitty has no mouth. hello kitty, created in 1974 by yuko shimizu, has no mouth. hello kitty's mouth was the zippered opening of the vinyl coin purse where she first appeared soft and gaping and ready to be filled with cash. sanrio says she is mouthless because she is universal mouthless because she speaks all languages mouthless because she can feel any emotion depending on how you look at her endlessly reproducible the perfect commodity mouthless so she can be immortal. she did gain a mouth once in 1987, on hello kitty's furry tale theatre her first television show she could actually talk. in the last episode, the little matchstick girl, she shivers in the cold lighting match after match to keep herself warm until the last one grants her a vision of heaven and the snow covers her dead little body. a hello kitty with a mouth can end the cycle: she can speak, and thus finally be silent. goodbye, kitty. 2 mori ogai wrote a short story in 1890. mori ogai wrote a short story, "the dancing girl," in 1890. mori ogai wanted to write a short story like the german ones he had been translating but written japanese didn't have an "I" exactly didn't have the pronoun exactly, not in the way german did didn't have first person narration quite yet so the first scene is in a crowded saloon of a ship and the narrator describes who is not there: not the shipmen, not the card players, not anyone except for one person, sitting on a bench looking at the empty room who must be the narrator, since he's the only one left. and so mori ogai created a first person by eliminating everyone else. 3 japanese has three scripts. japanese has three scripts, kanji, hiragana, and katakana. japanese has three scripts, and katakana is blocky, angular used for telegrams, and onomatopoeia, but mostly for foreign words. a thousand years ago, it was used as a reading guide for buddhist scripture, a way to give sound and order to dense chinese characters rendering holy sanskrit truths. in the 1980s, katakana was used for computer text its simplicity so well-­‐suited to the screen it was as if those monks putting brush to page ten centuries before had pixels in mind all along. in the poetry of kiriu minashita, katakana is a virus, infecting her language, interrupting her thoughts with a cold machinic voice a videogame opponent to the possibility of expression: password is incorrect. don't talk back. press start to continue. and katakana was used, over and over again by poet survivors of the atomic bombings trying to record their experiences in the immediate aftermath their normal script rendered useless by that which could not be described leaving only pages and pages of stark, angled writing: language rendered foreign from itself, language become sound effect, telegrams from the end of the world.