Customer Reviews

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

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(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.

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.

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

Up Is Up But So Is Down is a book you have to turn over a lot, and I don't just mean in your head. You can see this already from the cover. Be careful reading it on the subway as you will inevitably hit someone with either the book or your elbow as you turn it round to read a particular zine cover or flyer or look at a picture or poster. This shifting and turning of the book makes you immediately aware of the fact that this is not just reading you are doing here. In a way, the words work a lot like the images and flyers and covers. You turn them over in order to see. Similarly, the images being related to print, you turn the images over in order to read. You are constantly reading and looking. The connection between text and image is palpable. In his introduction, editor Brandon Stosuy calls the book a "snapshot," and I recall the Eudora Welty quote "A good snapshot stops a moment from running away."

Is this what the book sets out to do and does it succeed? On the one hand, there is a clear sense that the moment is gone. Much of the writing, Stosuy notes is out of print, overlooked, forgotten and never even known beyond its first publication. The introduction details how it could not be any other way. The book chronicles a literature that from its inception had been running away. From ad hoc performances to self-made, self distributed zines, permanency at no point seemed part of the consciousness of the scene. Time, however, is certainly in the consciousness of the book, and with the book, gets turned over a lot as well. Reading Edward Sanders' 1975 poem "The Age," one feels the tragic resonances with the present day ("criminals of the right will rise up...to chop up candidates in the name of some person-with-a-serotonin-imbalance's moan of national security"), and where Sanders' "Age" differs from ours ("this is the poets' era), that, too, is tragic. A conversation between Gerard Malanga, Lisa Falour, and Lynn Tillman makes you feel intimately part of a life you most likely never lived as you eavesdrop on conversations about bondage photography and Andy Warhol. As you eavesdrop, though, there are these peculiar moments, Tillman saying "I never lasted long enough to see that," Falour responding, "you missed a great scene." They are talking about a film, one written for Malanga but of which he does not have a copy, as it was borrowed and never returned. This little snapshot, if you will, already suggests the ephemerality, that the scene (downtown, not the movie) was already bound up with "never [lasting] long enough," "missed," lost and never returned, that it was already running way.

If the scene is already conscious of its running away, the early to mid-80s run seems to say along with Spalding Gray, "why rush it?" The largest section of the book, here downtown writing seems to be basking in its self, for its limited time only. The beginning poem Miguel Pinero's Lower East Side poem, could not be more representative. From a consciousness of mortality and ephemerality comes a eulogy to the Lower East Side, to downtown. Reading right along, literary experimentation reaches new horizons as Holly Anderson invents new visions of form, the engagement of the cultural and political climate of the post-Cold War continues to fuel the counterculture. Downtown is at its most downtown. The majority of the writings are marked by New York and/or time even in their very titles. Its provinciality is brought even closer to home as New York is narrowed to Avenue A, Third Avenue, St. Mark's, the Bowery etc. Modern Saint, Modern Romance, Newspaper Poem, Red Tape's Assembl-Age all point to a particular moment in time, that being the present moment. There are two sides to this insular scope. On the one hand, there is much writing that in its content, from sexual relationships to the meeting of strangers to sexual meetings between strangers, treats the isolation and loneliness endemic to the city and to counterculture. On the other hand, the writing itself is rooted in its insular community. Writers dedicate stories to other writers, as in Molinaro's "AC-DC" for Bruce Benderson, and the collective the Unbearables forms. This is made visible, too, in the flyers advertising readings and parties, the names that come together time and again, together in downtown. The party goes on and the band plays on. By the late 80s the community is shaken by the AIDS virus and that early consciousness of mortality and death ends in eulogies to Cookie Mueller. By the nineties you have memories and more eulogies, memorial poetry readings, and the literature of survivors.

Two of the most powerful images in the book are these index card/postcard flyers for an Eileen Myles reading. The first one written out by hand advertises that her reading will be on Friday, March 13th. The second, written in what looks like crayon, reads "Oops" and says the event will take place the 12th. There is something about looking at these makeshift scribbled postcards in this sturdy volume. No, it tells you nothing about the event itself, whenever or if ever it did happen. You can wonder about the guy who got the first postcard and not the second and realize that it was possible to "miss the scene" even then. The scene was always running away and could not be stopped because the scene was exactly the running away. But Up Is Up But So Is Down is that picture postcard the scene sends to you from wherever it was off to, saying, "wish you were there." Reading it, you'll wish you were there, too, and having read it, you'll cherish that at least you have the postcard. [...]