'Mary in my urine, my mouth, my heart, my madness, my sleep; my sea, my me:' Or, Caul (1966) by Mary Glass – A Lecture by Professor Carol Mavor

Along with Yvonne Rainer, Anna Halprin and Simone Forti, Mary Glass (b. 1936) is an innovative dancer and choreographer, instrumental to the Bay Area art scene of the 1960s and 70s. She is known for her experimental movements based on sounds and images of the ocean. She often danced nude. Her most famous piece, Caul, grew from a letter that she had sent to her close-friend, lover and confidante (the abstract painter Eliza Vesper, 1926–2014). As Mary wrote: 'I see you. You as blue nothing: without your long-fingered hands, your full breasts with their rosy areolae, your belly with its soft path of thin hair to your vulva, your legs like limbs of thoughts. You are not in me, but of me.' One day in 1966, on an early morning, rosy with the same promise, Eliza filmed Mary dancing Caul: nude, from behind on the beach at Point Lobos.

Professor Carol Mavor is writer who takes creative risks in form (literary and experimental) and political risks in content (sexuality, race in America, child-loving and the maternal). Her Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust and D. W. Winnicott was named by Grayson Perry in the Guardian as his 2008 as 'Book of the Year.'  Maggie Nelson describes Mavor's sixth monograph, Aurelia: Art and Literature Through the Eyes and Mouth of the Fairy Tale, as 'enigmatic, and full of magic as its subjects.' Currently Mavor is working on a new book, Serendipity: The Alphabetical Afterlife of the Object. She is also working on a trilogy of short books on the art of the 1960s in Northern California: Like a Lake, and Like the Sea and Like a Tree.