Pink Steam [Paperback]

Dodie Bellamy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 15, 2008

Pink steam rises from the vats of melting goo in the Vincent Price 3-D horror classic, House of Wax. Railroad buffs know pink steam as the first blast from a newly christened steam engine, which appears pink as it spews out rust. And now Pink Steam, the book, reveals the intimate secrets of Dodie Bellamy's life--sex, shoplifting, voyeurism, writing. Like L. Frank Baum's Dorothy, in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Bellamy grows up in a dreary Midwestern town. She's a bossy, queer child who identifies with the freaks she watches on The Twilight Zone. Her father's a carpenter obsessed with Kipling's The Jungle Book--the only book he's ever read. Her mother is a pragmatist who longs for a normal daughter. Eventually Bellamy hurls out of Indiana tumbles into Oz--San Francisco s bohemian Mission District. As she attempts to reconcile her working class origins with the privileged insanity of her arts community, everything crackles and blurs. True confession bleeds into high theory into trash cinema (soundtrack provided by David Bowie and Oliver Messiaen). Kathy Acker, Diane Arbus, and Bernadette Mayer are the fates who guide Bellamy as she searches for a voice in a whirlwind of sizzling images and strange encounters. In this world a woman can turn into a giant reptile, f**k a demon, lust for King Kong--and still feel repressed, constricted. As she battles on the frontiers of uberfemale vision, Bellamy tries on genre after genre--horror tale, essay, letter, academic novel, the fortune cookie tags of daily life. But, like off-the-rack clothing, no form fits exactly right. Pink Steam barges beyond the clichés of gendered experience. Unafraid of the personal, unabashed by politics and sex, Bellamy makes confusion her OK Corral. When the legend is greater than the truth, print the legend. Dodie Bellamy is the girl who shot Liberty Valance.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Bellamy is David Lynch in print, teen porn under fluorescent lights, a sandpaper jumpsuit sandy side in. -- Lynn Breedlove, author of Godspeed: A Novel

Bellamy is David Lynch in print, teen porn under fluorescent lights, a sandpaper jumpsuit sandy side in. --Lynn Breedlove, author of Godspeed: A Novel

Dodie Bellamy may well be America's answer to Roland Barthes. -- Steven Shaviro, Washington Review

Dodie Bellamy may well be America's answer to Roland Barthes. --Steven Shapiro, Washington Review of Books

If anyone can drag the sleeping, stagnant beast of contemporary literature into the future, [Bellamy] can. -- Brian Pera, author of Troublemaker

If anyone can drag the sleeping, stagnant beast of contemporary literature into the future, [Bellamy] can. --Brian Pera, author of Troublemaker

Dodie Bellamy may well be America's answer to Roland Barthes. --Steven Shapiro, Washington Review of Books

If anyone can drag the sleeping, stagnant beast of contemporary literature into the future, [Bellamy] can. --Brian Pera, author of Troublemaker

About the Author

Dodie Bellamy's book Cunt-Ups (Tender Buttons) won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for poetry. University of Wisconsin Press is reprinting her infamous epistolary vampire novel, The Letters of Mina Harker. She lives in San Francisco with the writer Kevin Killian and Blanche the cat.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Suspect Thoughts Press (February 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0974638803
• ISBN-13: 978-0974638805
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #887,298 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Lots of Steam Indeed, May 13, 2007

By 

Gary F. Taylor "GFT" (Biloxi, MS USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pink Steam (Paperback)

Dodie Bellamy's PINK STEAM is essentially twenty-two semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical essays thrown out over the course of one hundred ninety page to no particular point except the language itself--which is in this case a tangled effort to emulate Burroughs and other of his ilk. The end result is largely that of prose-poem pretentions.

This is not to say that Bellamy has no talent. She does indeed: her characters are often memorable, her images are often imaginative, and she can turn a phrase with the best of them. Obsessed with pop culture, her reflections run the gamut from Judy Garland to David Bowie to Sylvia Plath and from King Kong to Doris Day to Barbie, and the way in which she looks upon these icons is often unexpected. Her characters, which range from lusted-over gay friends to compulsive shoplifters to transient lovers, are often fascinating as well.

But there is no getting around the fact that PINK STEAM is incredibly, incredibly over-written. Bellamy seems determined to endow every inch of her prose with poetic qualifications. Metaphors, similes, ironies, changes in spacing between words, shifts between first and third person, and idiosyncratic punctuations don't so much crowd the pages as they meet for unpleasant confrontation. At one point she writes "Any woman who let's a man get her under his thumb is a fool." It is indicative of the book that I did not know if the incorrect use of "let's" was deliberate or accidental. It is perhaps even more indicative of the book that I didn't much care one way or another.

I can't say that I'd call it pink, but I'd certainly call it steam, and I do mean steam in great abundance. This is a "niche market book" that virtually redefines the word "niche." I give it three stars on the basis of Bellamy's occasional flashes of brilliance--but I cannot recommend it in any general sense.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

10 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ADDICTING, August 30, 2004

By 

Brian C. Bauman "brian bauman" (boulder, co) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pink Steam (Paperback)

Pink Steam is amazing. This collection is day glow, polka-dotted, sickly sweet like button candy, but with a tanas root under-taste, like those milkshakes Doctor Saperstein prescribed the heroine in "Rosemary's Baby". There is a diabolical quality to the writing, which shakes the reader up, forcing us to pay attention. Although experimentation reigns supreme, there is an inevitability to the stories that gives them propulsion, and keeps the reader hungry for more ...the woven texture of combined pop cultural reference, personal exploit and sharp insight locks together to form an original object d'arte. This tapestry creates a living, breathing web, speckled with dew and sweat, catching light and refracting it into blood-jewels, bubble gum pieces with liquid insides. This is a book you'll come back to again and again.