Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 [Paperback]

Brandon Stosuy (Editor), Dennis Cooper (Editor), Eileen Myles (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2006

Among The Village Voices 25 Favorite Books of 2006

Winner of the 2007 AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show in the Trade Illustrated Book Design category.

Sometime after Andy Warhol’s heyday but before Soho became a tourist trap, a group of poets, punk rockers, guerilla journalists, graffiti artists, writers, and activists transformed lower Manhattan into an artistic scene so diverse it became known simply as “Downtown.“ Willfully unpolished and subversively intelligent, figures such as Spalding Gray, Kathy Acker, Richard Hell, David Wojnarowicz, Lynne Tillman, Miguel Piñero, and Eric Bogosian broke free from mainstream publishing to produce a flood of fiction, poetry, experimental theater, art, and music that breathed the life of the street.

The first book to capture the spontaneity of the Downtown literary scene, Up Is Up, But So Is Down collects more than 125 images and over 80 texts that encompass the most vital work produced between 1974 and 1992. Reflecting the unconventional genres that marked this period, the book includes flyers, zines, newsprint weeklies, book covers, and photographs of people and the city, many of them here made available to readers outside the scene for the first time. The book's striking and quirky design—complete with 2-color interior—brings each of these unique documents and images to life.

Brandon Stosuy arranges this hugely varied material chronologically to illustrate the dynamic views at play. He takes us from poetry readings in Alphabet City to happenings at Darinka, a Lower East Side apartment and performance space, to the St. Mark's Bookshop, unofficial crossroads of the counterculture, where home-printed copies of the latest zines were sold in Ziploc bags. Often attacking the bourgeois irony epitomized by the New Yorker’s short fiction, Downtown writers played ebulliently with form and content, sex and language, producing work that depicted the underbelly of real life.

With an afterword by Downtown icons Dennis Cooper and Eileen Myles, Up Is Up, But So Is Down gathers almost twenty years of New York City’s smartest and most explosive—as well as hard to find—writing, providing an indispensable archive of one of the most exciting artistic scenes in U.S. history.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

While the major players in New York's punk scene have had their songs anthologized and reissued several times, Stosuy believes the downtown literary culture has not been as well preserved. This vibrant time capsule, presented in a creatively designed oversize volume, aims to fill the gap by compiling poems and short stories and mixing in an assortment of magazine covers, hand-printed flyers and other artworks that demonstrate the performative and collaborative aspects of the scene's poetry readings and small magazines. Stosuy's skills as an archivist and cultural critic help him guide readers through the various subcultures. The talent roster is split between recognizable literary figures and the semiforgotten: Mary Gaitskill and Tama Janowitz are the biggest stars here, and monologues by Eric Bogosian and Spalding Gray are juxtaposed with pieces by performers like Penny Arcade, one of the last stars of Andy Warhol's Factory. In an afterword in the form of a dialogue, Cooper and Myles discuss how the AIDS crisis decimated this vibrant artistic community and share recollections of a heady time they say is still influencing the cultural scene. 180 illus. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“Up Is Up itself has a scrapbook feel. It gathers poems, excerpts and short stories as well as handmade magazine covers, pamphlets and posters that capture the collaborative, on-the-fly spirit of the period. . . . What is most arresting about UP IS UP is not its discovery of any individual genius but its invocation of an electrifying social energy that helped blast out an intellectual space for then-‘transgressive’ female and gay writers.”
-New York Times Book Review

,

“This is a kind of three-decade book celebrating the possibilities of a self-sufficient writing community right under the nose of the decaying, increasingly irrelevant, empire of New York publishing.”
-American Book Review

,

“Some of us like our angels with dirty faces; witness the lovingly reproduced artifacts of Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992, a comprehensive compendium of below-14th Street literary productions by everyone from Laurie Anderson to Nick Zedd, focusing on the output of small magazines of the era like Koff, Bomb, and Between C and D...[the] stories meld dry satire with heart-churningly desperate transmissions of damaged humanity.”
-Village Voice

,

“Exhilarating. . . . Up Is Up reproduces flyers and pages from lit mags to convey downtown's heady DIY ethos. The writing itself displays sensibilities that are at once fiery and cool. Cookie Mueller, Dennis Cooper, Wojnarowicz and many others merge crackling prose and a matter-of-fact tone to burrow into disturbing corners of sexual desire. AIDS takes a serious toll in the '80s, and becomes the haunting focus in amazing selections by novelist Gary Indiana and poet Tim Dlugos. Even as the scene begins to wind down, the book nails the deep thrills of talk and collaboration, especially in novelist Lynne Tillman's complex rendering of two friends' bar-set conversation. That gift for gab lives on in the epilogue, a spirited conversation between Eileen Myles and Cooper, who resist mythologizing but invoke the scene's glory nonetheless.”
-Time Out New York

,

“Up Is Up is a remarkable monument to the vibrancy of the Downtown scene. There are moments of romantic myth-making, dysfunctional beauty and hilarious profundity. It documents a now-gone era when lower Manhattan was an affordable oasis for artists, writers and musicians, when poetry and prose rubbed up against punk and visual art before drunkenly stumbling into an endless pansexual orgy.”
-New York Press

,

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 500 pages
• Publisher: NYU Press (October 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814740111
• ISBN-13: 978-0814740118
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 8.6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #877,955 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dark Allegory, November 16, 2006

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 (Paperback)

(I love the way that when you search for this book on Amazon, and ask for "Up is Up" you get the insane Richard Pryor-Lonette McKee vehicle WHICH WAY IS UP? and also THE POP-UP BOOK OF CELEBRITY MELTDOWNS by "Melcher Media." That one I ordered!)

You don't have to be a New Yorker to fall for the grit, abandon, and passionate politics exhibited by the writers and poets Brandon Stosuy has collected in this jumbo book of unreason. You can skip the part where he explains why the book begins in 1974 and ends in 1992, though afterwards you'll want to go back and follow up on this intrihuing explanations, but first time readers will want to just jump right in with a giant splash into the grimy glamorous downtown swimming hole. The 1970s begin on a brash note with Kathy Acker, Ed Sanders, the debut of Patti Smith, "Blank Generation" by Richard Hell, the eternally underrated Constance De Jong, and a long, long, long piece by Laurie Anderson. In fact there's a power and cohesion about the writing in this section that the book afterward fails to recover. That's not to say that the rest of the book is dull, for the social issues of crime, poverty, and most of all the AIDS epidemic complicate the Downtown aesthetic in totally interesting and provocative ways. I'm just saying . . . If there was a time when "Downtown" was fun, maybe the 1970s were it, and Stosuy cannily reprints (from the much missed zine BIKINI GIRL) a hilarious three way interview between editor Lisa Falour, novelist Lynne Tillman, and style icon slash photographer slash urban Narcissus Gerard Malanga that is a sort of mock salute to the old-style Factory school. Here you will also a great poem, "I Missed Punk" from 1979 by Peter Schjeldahl. I'm indifferent to his work at the New Yorker and feel, couldn't he still have stayed a poet too, or did he have to give it all up when his muse took a powder? In any case, "I Missed Punk" is super.

In general, the poetry isn't up to the silver standard of the prose work here, which is strange considering all the great poets who lived Downtown in the period; but some of this must be assigned to Stosuy's apparent preference for prose, for he could have printed any number of poems by, for example, Eileen Myles or Dennis Cooper or Brad Gooch, opting instead for stories by each of them. That said, there are some beautiful poems here, by Tim Dlugos, Susie Timmons, David Trinidad, Bob Holman, Penny Arcade, among others; and even the duds exhibit a sort of snapshot realism about the period that brings it all to life like throwing sea monkeys into a glass of water. What happened to Susie Timmons? Is she still writing? I haven't mentioned yet the sheer churn of names, the wave of stars that flickered out into the night, people who stopped writing, who disappeared into drugs or drink, or just into mediocrity after brilliant beginnings . . . but editor Stosuy has made this one of his themes, noting the contents of fugitive magazines, or big anthologies, in which the names we still know today mingle with the head-scratchers. Well, you know how time fades away.

The 80s is a much huger section, as the commercial realities of BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY and SLAVES OFF NEW YORK seemed to bear down on the more avant-garde, formalist work that preceded it, so that "Downtown" began to market itself in numerous subtle, and subtly arrogant ways. Heroically many artists took their economics realistically as a subject and began to whirl it around in Duchampian ways. The magazine "Between C & D" came right off those primitive computer printers on folded, pegged paper, and each copy was then stuffed into an elongated quart-sized baggie for immaculate consumption. Indeed this was the golden age of the "Between C & D" writers, their work highlights of Stosuy's volume. Lines blurred between genres, and New York's theatricality is rarely far away from the presentation of such texts as Karen Finley's "Baby Birds," Richard Prince's sublime "Practicing without a License," Sarah Schulman's "Girls, Visions and Everything," Eric Bogosian's ponderous "In the Dark." AIDS comes along and knocks everything into a cocked hat, and the graphics that often overpower these pages find themselves now shadowed by a fighting, communal spirit close in tone to the Revolutionary Calendar. Though "Downtown" apparently ends in 1992, with the death of the artist David Wojnarowicz, Stosuy still finds a hundred pages of 1990s material, a Jacobean flowering of excess and despair that includes Bruce Benderson, Mary Gaitskill, the late David Rattray, and the amazing Susan Daitch.

Physically the book weighs a ton and straphangers won't be folding it over their elbow like the New York Post. I wasn't crazy about how every page is on a different color, most of them leaning towards the bleak or the dayglo. (The designer Angela Lidderdale's celebrated work on Benetton's COLORS magazine has leached into her book design.) And after prolonged immersion in the book I found out that in fact I was wrong; many pages in a row are printed in standard black and white. I was just feeling cornea fatigue I suppose. Stosuy, a fiction writer with an anthropologist's zest for reconstructing lost cultures, has found a wealth of material to support his thesis that the "downtown" writing scene of the post-Watergate Manhattan had energy and style to spare. I want him to come to San Francisco and I will show him around and persuade him that we did the same thing here only with less publicity, better weather, and cuter guys.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the strongest books of the year, November 14, 2006

By 

Ed Park (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 (Paperback)

There are good books that you read, enjoy, and put back on the shelf; and then there are books like UP IS UP..., which you keep nearby to facilitate the frequent dips you know you'll need. Obsession is mandatory. Even the downtown agnostic will be won over by the energy, inventiveness, and humor of the selections; the book's terrific size and design (reproducing dozens of small-run journal pages, photos, handbills, and the like) make it totally addictive. This is hands down one of the strongest books of the year. To mangle the Velvets, down for me is up.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars BELLY OF THE BEAST: THE DOWNTOWN LIT SCENE, November 29, 2006

By 

Michael Lindgren (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 (Paperback)

The poets and writers whose work is collected in UP IS UP BUT SO IS DOWN: NEW YORK'S UNDERGROUND LITERARY SCENE 1974 -- 1992 are not writers you will find between the pages of THE NEW YORKER or in tidy academic anthologies. The men and women who populated the now-legendary downtown scene of New York in the 70s and 80s wrote scabrous, violent, and often bitterly funny verse and prose with a force and irreverence that made their words jump off the page, or, in many cases, the stage. Editor Brandon Stosuy has done a remarkable job in assembling the messy strands of downtown writing -- culled from fanzines, underground journals, flyers, and photographs -- into a thorough and vibrant whole. An essential document and a guidepost for any budding literary avant-gardist.

Michael Lindgren