Many of the Unbearables had their work anthologized in the beautifully produced oversized volumn entitled Up Is Up But So Is Down. What follows is a review of that book by Anitta Santiago.
Up Is Up But So Is Down, Ed. Brandon Stosuy, New York, NY: New York University Press, 2006. $29.95
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 Lynne 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 material 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 opening text, Miguel Pinero’s Lower East Side poem, could not be more representative. From a consciousness of mortality 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 continuing to fuel the counterculture. The majority of the writings are marked by the New York of that particular era 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. 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 form. 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 12 th. 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.
The book romanticizes the Poetry “Scene” to the point of absurdity. In reality, at least from the mid-80’s onward, everyone was reading, and no one was listening; it was all narcissistic competition.
David Blanchard
August 3rd, 2007