----
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The writer Dodie Bellamy explores the themes of bodily or spiritual invasion and possession. Some of the footprints of her prose are formal interruptions, intertextual voices, temporal shifts and syntactical twists. Consistently striving for innovation and the forthright depiction of emotion, Bellamy introduces sex, often using tropes from horror films and other pop culture debris. Her work frequently confronts topics like feminism, cultural politics, queer culture, AIDS, and body issues. Her best known work, the novel The Letters of Mina Harker, which Eileen Myles calls a "luscious deeply fucked up extravagant work" and which Dennis Cooper calls "a masterpiece," resurrects the secretary-heroine of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mina Harker, against the backdrop of gritty South of Market San Francisco, where she possesses Bellamy's body, invades her life and circle of friends, and reenacts the romantic melodramas from her past in Stoker's original. -- Julia Bloch & Wikipedia
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. Ten years in the making, The Letters Of Mina Harker is an epistolary novel which brings the hero of Bram Stoker's fin de siecle masterpiece Dracula forward into the acronymic age of MTV, HIV, ATM, VCR. Like Dracula, the Mina Harker Letters trace a woman's romantic involvement with four very different men, as well as her affair with a culture that threatens simultaneously to destroy and invigorate her.
Dodie Bellamy:It's the 80s, and I'm giving a reading that's important to me, it's happening somewhere in San Francisco, for at this point I've only read in San Francisco. I've been fantasizing about this reading for weeks, I'm going to unveil the latest installment of The Letters of Mina Harker, where I've taken the writing to a new level of formal pyrotechnics, I've finally learned how to weave in high theory with the embarrassingly intimate and grotesque, how to shift at lightning speed from subject to subject, to toss subject after subject in the air and to catch them all again before they thud to the ground—no thud thud in my writing, none at all—I'm going to dazzle the crowd. In our fishbowl of experimental writing, pretension was good, there was no such thing as too pretentious. I wanted to out-pretension my peers, I wanted to glory in it. So, I read and it went pretty good. People didn't stand up on their chairs and applaud, but I was happy with my reception. And then poet Lisa Bernstein walked up to me and said, “What I love about your writing is you're such a gossip.” A gossip! I was incensed, crushed, victim of a primal blow to my self esteem. I imagined the entire audience elbowing one another and snickering, “Gossip!” -- from Body Language(Read the totality)
from The Letters of Mina Harker: Letter 1
Dear Reader,
KK says all horror novels begin with the locale and a description of the weather, "The Reader likes to feel situated." It's a cool clear San Francisco night, streetlights diffuse the vast panoply of the heavens but if you drive an hour north the stars are astonishing, the sky speckled like the black-suited shoulders of a guy with really bad dandruff, so many holes in the black your heart speeds for a moment what if the black collapses a misty glow flows along my recumbent silhouette, long white gown, long white neck, a livid face leans toward the bed, translucent claws lift my hem immobile thighs, white, white over my breasts floats Nosferatu's head, an exaggerated egg-shape, powdery with pointed ears, his lips stretch open pencil-thin, taut I am so aroused my clit flicks like a tongue so tender is his bite but I will never love him, he's too weird too intense from my open throat dark rivulets curve sucking sounds in stereo suck across the suck dim air of the Roxie Theater and suck dissolve in the audience's laughter faces radiant with ridicule and popcorn I shout, "That's me on the screen you assholes!" The laughter pauses then soars, fine grains of salt stinging the corners of its collective mouth. Who am I anyway? In Dracula, "Mina Harker" was this plain-Jane secretarial adjunct to the great European vampire killer, Dr. Van Helsing. I'm the one who gathered the notes, the journal entries, letters, ship logs, newsclippings, invoices, memoranda, asylum reports, telegrams—I transcribed them and ordered the morass so the Reader can move through it without getting lost no hassle, no danger—i.e., a plot or an amusement park, Safari Land, Transylvania Land. For my performance evaluation Van Helsing wrote, "Oh, Madam Mina, how can I say what I owe to you? This paper is as sunshine. It opens the gate to me. I am daze, I am dazzle, with so much light, and yet clouds roll in behind the light every time." After Dracula corrupted Lucy Westenra I was next on his hit-list, but four brave Christian men destroyed 50 coffins filled with dirt to save my soul—but turn to the last page of Stoker PRESTO ABRACADABRA on the anniversary of Dracula's death my "saved" loins heave forth an offspring. A.k.a. "sequel." A big tease, a big mistake—for the past hundred years imitators have barged into my story and hacked out enough sequels to fill a library bunglers with no credentials they keep shackling me to the most insipid suitors macho types who stomp around with crucifixes and bad British accents their acting as wooden as their stakes: these men save my soul? Dodie's the latest intruder, getting it all wrong in her attempts to be civilized—forget about her forget about them—this is The Letters of Mina Harker the authorized version if you want anything done right you have to do it yourself sucking sounds suck up the silence my throat is a cunt never will I perish in domesticity like a Jane Austen heroine—I dart across the moor fog condensing on my long plait of hair, my lives my deaths multiple as orgasms HARKEN THE WORDS OF MINA HARKER, FORTUNE COOKIES FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE.
The monstrous and the formless have as much right as anybody else.
(read the totality)
Read: Letter 7
Read: Letter 12
Read: Letter 20
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Image may be NSFW.
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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. ... 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.
DB:I wanted Pink Steam to be a prose collection, and I wanted it to be accessible. Some people who I’d like to be reading my writing are afraid of it. I’m hoping that Pink Steam will convince them that it’s not hard, it’s not painful, that there’s lots of pleasure in it. It’s just that I’ve been tarred with the “experimental” brush and many people are afraid of experimental writing, like they think it will bore them to death, and I sympathize with that. I’ve been taking meditation classes and I’ve had to come face to face with my own fear of boredom. But as far as writing goes, for many people, “conventional narrative = fun, cathartic, human, etc. Experimental writing = boring and pretentious.” Fun is important to me too, as is social significance and honesty, all that good stuff. -- from an interview with the writer Brian Pera(read the totality)
from Pink Steam: Spew Forth
Desperate times call for desperate measures. I was eating goat milk ice cream at Veggie Kingdom when I first saw Anya. It was 1979. A petite woman in her early thirties walked from table to table smiling demurely--shoulder-length blonde hair cascaded in soft waves about a pretty, perky face with an upturned nose--she looked like a cross between Michelle Pfeiffer and Lady of Lady and the Tramp. "That's Anya," someone said. The most incredible dress floated about her slight frame, layer upon irregular layer of pale blue chiffon, perforated throughout with holes, biggish ones, as if someone or something had once been trapped inside and punched its way out. "That's Anya Steppes," continued the man at the next table. "I love her dress," I said. "It's a replica of the native costume of Venus." "Venus?" I blurted out. He leaned over his soy grit stroganoff. "Yes, Venus--for Anya's a walk-in."
"What's a walk-in? Is that somebody who comes in without a reservation?" He smiled at me with his dark smudged hair, his graphite eyes, infinitely patient. He had an unusually high forehead, like Eraserhead, but cute. My hand reached toward him through the bright vegetarian air and our pointer fingers touched with a spark like the fingers of those burly naked gods in that famous, who did it, da Vinci, Michelangelo? "Hi, I'm Carla, Carla Moran." "Yes," he nodded knowingly, "I'm Steven. A walk-in is an enlightened soul who returns to Earth by taking over the body of a lesser soul who no longer wishes to inhabit it. The enlightened soul meets with the unhappy soul on the astral plane and says, 'Hey, I can help you out.' And so the body survives a suicide or a violent accident, then reawakens with the walk-in soul who works to raise the consciousness of mankind. Lots of geniuses and humanitarians through the years were walk-ins--Albert Schweitzer, Benjamin Franklin, Beethoven, the guy who invented the atom bomb. Anya took over the body of a twelve-year-old girl--from Tennessee--who died in a car wreck." (read the totality)
Five versions of Sonic Youth's Pink Steam
their song inspired by Dodie Bellamy
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.![]()
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.![]()
Dodie Bellamy's full-on dive into hardcore porny language in "Cunt-Ups" takes the path of that excess to a destination far more honest, intelligent, political, and socially engaged than the oh-so-serious work of many of her peers. Make no mistake: This is an incredibly dirty, funny, and irreverent book, grounded in that too-familiar subject of sex, but the work here twists itself into a heavy and heady exploration of sexual borders. Cunt-Ups (Tender Buttons) won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for poetry.
DB: Cunt-Ups is a hermaphroditic salute to William Burroughs and Kathy Acker. I started the project as cut-ups, in the original Burroughs sense, as delineated in The Job. I used a variety of texts written by myself and others. Per Burroughs’ rather vague instructions, I cut each page of this material into four squares. For each cunt-up I chose two or three squares from my own source text, and one or two from other sources. I taped the new Frankenstein page together, typed it into my computer and then reworked the material. When my own source text was used up my cunt-ups were finished. The body with all organs slithers and lunges through netsex, psychic oozings, alien invasion, and serial murder. In ecstatic peristalsis the lover endlessly re/turns to life.
from Cunt-Ups
We felt for one another, coursing through the photographs, within range within everywhere, and I knew it was you, your navel or vagina because this is what my cock looks like. But I’m still licking your membrane, filled with some semi-fluid substance. You’re an eminent gynecologist and you’ve lobotomized your cunt. I’ve agree to run my tongue along your scar. I slide a portion of my substance into your vagina, this manifests as love, connecting us, and blood rolls out to our sides in luminous threads. The substance left me (unintentionally), can I still take you sometimes, physically, can we still cuddle and fuck? Can we fuck too? I manifest in front of you, unzipping your pants, you should be happy when you come because my little pointed tongue with its red tip can lay our burdens at the door. And I can’t keep your pussy off my dick. Now don’t degenerate into a phantasm, Puppy. Dear Fuck Slug. Dear Fuck Instrument through which one can express us. In either case we are cranberry. Desire for you is dripping out, a dispiriting state of affairs. (read the totality)
William Burroughs on the cut up technique
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.![]()
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.![]()
In this lively, entertaining collection of essays, Dodie Bellamy has written not only a helpful pedagogical tool, but an epic narrative of survival against institutional deadening and the proscriptiveness that shoots the young writer like poison darts from all sides. By the 90s funding for the arts had dwindled and graduate writing programs—“cash cows”—had risen to fill the slack. Simultaneously, literary production moved from an unstable, at times frightening street culture where experiment was privileged beyond all else, to an institutionalized realm—Academonia!—that enforces, or tends to enforce, conservative aesthetic values.
Four essays by Dodie Bellamy
Why does one do things that one feels queasy about? Why is there such a charge, for instance, in having sex with the mildly repulsive? Is it some kind of bottomy urge for submission, the intensity of crossing a little-tread boundary of desire? Or some riot grrrl nihilistic flipflop of conventional values? Or a Buddhist nudge to blast away the ego? Is it a visit from the figure Poe called “The Imp of the Perverse”? Why would I dole out $200 to take a weekend shamanism workshop with an organization called Foundation of the Sacred Stream? Why would I then send in another $275 for a higher level workshop, despite misgivings with the first one? As a former cult member, I’ve gorged on and spit up enough “spiritual” hocus pocus for three lifetimes. I’m so skeptical of New Age groups that even though friends swear that meditation would help me, I have yet to visit the local Shambhala Center. Once I made it all the way to their front door. I put my hand on the knob, and as the L-Taraval streetcar rumbled past, I felt a pang of anxiety and fled. So how did I find myself jumping into the Sacred Stream? (read the totality)
Hardcore Shamanism: Part 2, 'Shamanism Inc.
Hardcore Shamanism: Part 3, No Blood from This Turnip
I once had dinner in a Taoist restaurant with a serious young man. Let's call him "Rendezvous." We savored the restaurant's specialties, sweet and sour "pork" made from deep-fried gluten, roast "duck" made from tofu skins, and stir-fried "chicken" that tasted like it was grown on Mars. All these analogues reminded but never fooled, and our conversation naturally turned to writing and its relationship to the "real thing," that is, life. I asked him what he thought of Kathy Acker. Rendezvous swallowed a mouthful of slippery but genuine straw mushrooms, then admitted that he reads her books by skipping to the "dirty parts." I flashed back to when I was ten years old, and in my parents' bedroom I found a pulp paperback, Lust Campus. I was dying to cruise through those small yellowing pages, but my mother was in the next room. She hardly ever left me alone in the house: I bode my time. Weeks seemed to pass, though in actuality I think it was a few days. Finally, one fateful afternoon, she had errands to run, and decided to leave me home to watch the spaghetti sauce she had simmering on the stove. Opening the screen door she shouted at me, "I'll be back in an hour or so. Behave yourself." As soon as the latch clicked I darted into her bedroom. Lust Campus toppled off the bookshelf into my chubby eager little hands. I flipped rapidly through the pages past the tedious exposition until I landed on a sex passage - then sitting cross-legged on the polished oak floor I wallowed in obscenity while the spaghetti sauce burned to a scorched red mass, like lava. I remember a detailed description of taking off a woman's bra and an orgy where a group of college students were lying on the floor in a circle. Since I was so naive about the birds and the bees this didn't strike me as kinky, merely as information. All sex was equally arousing and this book was great. Then I heard my mother's key in the back door - I crammed the paperback in the bookcase and rushed to the living room, sprawled on the couch like nothing had happened. Dropping her purse on the coffee table my mother sniffed at the scorched air. "Dodie, what the hell have you been doing while I was gone?" "Nothin'." (read the totality)
As Kevin hunches over his boyfriend's chest and kisses him, suddenly the video slows down to a halt. Briefly the picture disappears altogether. Other viewers have caught on to their having sex and the network is overloaded. Our hunger for images jams the system. In this space sex is inevitable. That's what keeps us watching. Like crime scene photos, even when unpopulated the rooms feel charged. Webcam never gives the illusion of fluid "natural" movement. It's more like a series of stills that jerk into the next still. Kevin's empty bedroom twitches as the camera refreshes, so it appears to be alive, to be breathing. The kite-shaped leaves on the bedspread rustle. We sense the sacred and profane jostling in this stillness which is never really still. When Kevin enters the space, his body feels like a prop within the bedroom's languorous aloneness. Events break down into a series of mini-events, and the jumps between them evade the narrative pressure of our central nervous system. We sit in our office chairs exalting in their mystery. A hand strobes along a cock. Blink. White stuff spews out of it, caught in midair like a Muybridge horse. We're never sure what we're missing. Light through the venetian blinds stripes both the bed and Kevin. He looks half mummy, half tiger. (read the totality)
I met London-based artist Tariq Alvi midway through his spring residency at California College of the Arts, here in San Francisco, where he came to us fresh from the Shanghai Biennial. For weeks he and I saw each other at parties, openings, dinners. We went to movies with clumps of other artists. When Tariq suggested that we do something just the two of us, I came up with the idea of a New Age date—yoga followed by dinner at a raw foods restaurant. Tariq’s done yoga for years, but he’d never been to a yoga class before. He usually practices from one of the dozens of yoga videos he owns. An avid collector of workout videos, he even bought a multi-region DVD player to watch the exercise treasures he finds in the States. “Which is the most glamorous of all the yoga instruction tapes?” “Oh, Dodie, Ali MacGraw is brilliant.” (read the totality)
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*
p.s. Hey. Here's my Dodie Bellamy Day from back in the day. She rules. If you don't already know that, find out why I say that. The evidence is up there for all to see. I hope you guys are hanging in there. Presumably, I am.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The writer Dodie Bellamy explores the themes of bodily or spiritual invasion and possession. Some of the footprints of her prose are formal interruptions, intertextual voices, temporal shifts and syntactical twists. Consistently striving for innovation and the forthright depiction of emotion, Bellamy introduces sex, often using tropes from horror films and other pop culture debris. Her work frequently confronts topics like feminism, cultural politics, queer culture, AIDS, and body issues. Her best known work, the novel The Letters of Mina Harker, which Eileen Myles calls a "luscious deeply fucked up extravagant work" and which Dennis Cooper calls "a masterpiece," resurrects the secretary-heroine of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mina Harker, against the backdrop of gritty South of Market San Francisco, where she possesses Bellamy's body, invades her life and circle of friends, and reenacts the romantic melodramas from her past in Stoker's original. -- Julia Bloch & Wikipedia
________________________
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Clik here to view.
The Letters of Mina Harker (1998)
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Ten years in the making, The Letters Of Mina Harker is an epistolary novel which brings the hero of Bram Stoker's fin de siecle masterpiece Dracula forward into the acronymic age of MTV, HIV, ATM, VCR. Like Dracula, the Mina Harker Letters trace a woman's romantic involvement with four very different men, as well as her affair with a culture that threatens simultaneously to destroy and invigorate her.Dodie Bellamy:It's the 80s, and I'm giving a reading that's important to me, it's happening somewhere in San Francisco, for at this point I've only read in San Francisco. I've been fantasizing about this reading for weeks, I'm going to unveil the latest installment of The Letters of Mina Harker, where I've taken the writing to a new level of formal pyrotechnics, I've finally learned how to weave in high theory with the embarrassingly intimate and grotesque, how to shift at lightning speed from subject to subject, to toss subject after subject in the air and to catch them all again before they thud to the ground—no thud thud in my writing, none at all—I'm going to dazzle the crowd. In our fishbowl of experimental writing, pretension was good, there was no such thing as too pretentious. I wanted to out-pretension my peers, I wanted to glory in it. So, I read and it went pretty good. People didn't stand up on their chairs and applaud, but I was happy with my reception. And then poet Lisa Bernstein walked up to me and said, “What I love about your writing is you're such a gossip.” A gossip! I was incensed, crushed, victim of a primal blow to my self esteem. I imagined the entire audience elbowing one another and snickering, “Gossip!” -- from Body Language(Read the totality)
from The Letters of Mina Harker: Letter 1
Dear Reader,
KK says all horror novels begin with the locale and a description of the weather, "The Reader likes to feel situated." It's a cool clear San Francisco night, streetlights diffuse the vast panoply of the heavens but if you drive an hour north the stars are astonishing, the sky speckled like the black-suited shoulders of a guy with really bad dandruff, so many holes in the black your heart speeds for a moment what if the black collapses a misty glow flows along my recumbent silhouette, long white gown, long white neck, a livid face leans toward the bed, translucent claws lift my hem immobile thighs, white, white over my breasts floats Nosferatu's head, an exaggerated egg-shape, powdery with pointed ears, his lips stretch open pencil-thin, taut I am so aroused my clit flicks like a tongue so tender is his bite but I will never love him, he's too weird too intense from my open throat dark rivulets curve sucking sounds in stereo suck across the suck dim air of the Roxie Theater and suck dissolve in the audience's laughter faces radiant with ridicule and popcorn I shout, "That's me on the screen you assholes!" The laughter pauses then soars, fine grains of salt stinging the corners of its collective mouth. Who am I anyway? In Dracula, "Mina Harker" was this plain-Jane secretarial adjunct to the great European vampire killer, Dr. Van Helsing. I'm the one who gathered the notes, the journal entries, letters, ship logs, newsclippings, invoices, memoranda, asylum reports, telegrams—I transcribed them and ordered the morass so the Reader can move through it without getting lost no hassle, no danger—i.e., a plot or an amusement park, Safari Land, Transylvania Land. For my performance evaluation Van Helsing wrote, "Oh, Madam Mina, how can I say what I owe to you? This paper is as sunshine. It opens the gate to me. I am daze, I am dazzle, with so much light, and yet clouds roll in behind the light every time." After Dracula corrupted Lucy Westenra I was next on his hit-list, but four brave Christian men destroyed 50 coffins filled with dirt to save my soul—but turn to the last page of Stoker PRESTO ABRACADABRA on the anniversary of Dracula's death my "saved" loins heave forth an offspring. A.k.a. "sequel." A big tease, a big mistake—for the past hundred years imitators have barged into my story and hacked out enough sequels to fill a library bunglers with no credentials they keep shackling me to the most insipid suitors macho types who stomp around with crucifixes and bad British accents their acting as wooden as their stakes: these men save my soul? Dodie's the latest intruder, getting it all wrong in her attempts to be civilized—forget about her forget about them—this is The Letters of Mina Harker the authorized version if you want anything done right you have to do it yourself sucking sounds suck up the silence my throat is a cunt never will I perish in domesticity like a Jane Austen heroine—I dart across the moor fog condensing on my long plait of hair, my lives my deaths multiple as orgasms HARKEN THE WORDS OF MINA HARKER, FORTUNE COOKIES FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE.
The monstrous and the formless have as much right as anybody else.
(read the totality)
Read: Letter 7
Read: Letter 12
Read: Letter 20
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Pink Steam (2004)
Image may be NSFW.
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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. ... 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.DB:I wanted Pink Steam to be a prose collection, and I wanted it to be accessible. Some people who I’d like to be reading my writing are afraid of it. I’m hoping that Pink Steam will convince them that it’s not hard, it’s not painful, that there’s lots of pleasure in it. It’s just that I’ve been tarred with the “experimental” brush and many people are afraid of experimental writing, like they think it will bore them to death, and I sympathize with that. I’ve been taking meditation classes and I’ve had to come face to face with my own fear of boredom. But as far as writing goes, for many people, “conventional narrative = fun, cathartic, human, etc. Experimental writing = boring and pretentious.” Fun is important to me too, as is social significance and honesty, all that good stuff. -- from an interview with the writer Brian Pera(read the totality)
from Pink Steam: Spew Forth
Desperate times call for desperate measures. I was eating goat milk ice cream at Veggie Kingdom when I first saw Anya. It was 1979. A petite woman in her early thirties walked from table to table smiling demurely--shoulder-length blonde hair cascaded in soft waves about a pretty, perky face with an upturned nose--she looked like a cross between Michelle Pfeiffer and Lady of Lady and the Tramp. "That's Anya," someone said. The most incredible dress floated about her slight frame, layer upon irregular layer of pale blue chiffon, perforated throughout with holes, biggish ones, as if someone or something had once been trapped inside and punched its way out. "That's Anya Steppes," continued the man at the next table. "I love her dress," I said. "It's a replica of the native costume of Venus." "Venus?" I blurted out. He leaned over his soy grit stroganoff. "Yes, Venus--for Anya's a walk-in."
"What's a walk-in? Is that somebody who comes in without a reservation?" He smiled at me with his dark smudged hair, his graphite eyes, infinitely patient. He had an unusually high forehead, like Eraserhead, but cute. My hand reached toward him through the bright vegetarian air and our pointer fingers touched with a spark like the fingers of those burly naked gods in that famous, who did it, da Vinci, Michelangelo? "Hi, I'm Carla, Carla Moran." "Yes," he nodded knowingly, "I'm Steven. A walk-in is an enlightened soul who returns to Earth by taking over the body of a lesser soul who no longer wishes to inhabit it. The enlightened soul meets with the unhappy soul on the astral plane and says, 'Hey, I can help you out.' And so the body survives a suicide or a violent accident, then reawakens with the walk-in soul who works to raise the consciousness of mankind. Lots of geniuses and humanitarians through the years were walk-ins--Albert Schweitzer, Benjamin Franklin, Beethoven, the guy who invented the atom bomb. Anya took over the body of a twelve-year-old girl--from Tennessee--who died in a car wreck." (read the totality)
Five versions of Sonic Youth's Pink Steam
their song inspired by Dodie Bellamy
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Cunt Ups (2001)
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Dodie Bellamy's full-on dive into hardcore porny language in "Cunt-Ups" takes the path of that excess to a destination far more honest, intelligent, political, and socially engaged than the oh-so-serious work of many of her peers. Make no mistake: This is an incredibly dirty, funny, and irreverent book, grounded in that too-familiar subject of sex, but the work here twists itself into a heavy and heady exploration of sexual borders. Cunt-Ups (Tender Buttons) won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for poetry.DB: Cunt-Ups is a hermaphroditic salute to William Burroughs and Kathy Acker. I started the project as cut-ups, in the original Burroughs sense, as delineated in The Job. I used a variety of texts written by myself and others. Per Burroughs’ rather vague instructions, I cut each page of this material into four squares. For each cunt-up I chose two or three squares from my own source text, and one or two from other sources. I taped the new Frankenstein page together, typed it into my computer and then reworked the material. When my own source text was used up my cunt-ups were finished. The body with all organs slithers and lunges through netsex, psychic oozings, alien invasion, and serial murder. In ecstatic peristalsis the lover endlessly re/turns to life.
from Cunt-Ups
We felt for one another, coursing through the photographs, within range within everywhere, and I knew it was you, your navel or vagina because this is what my cock looks like. But I’m still licking your membrane, filled with some semi-fluid substance. You’re an eminent gynecologist and you’ve lobotomized your cunt. I’ve agree to run my tongue along your scar. I slide a portion of my substance into your vagina, this manifests as love, connecting us, and blood rolls out to our sides in luminous threads. The substance left me (unintentionally), can I still take you sometimes, physically, can we still cuddle and fuck? Can we fuck too? I manifest in front of you, unzipping your pants, you should be happy when you come because my little pointed tongue with its red tip can lay our burdens at the door. And I can’t keep your pussy off my dick. Now don’t degenerate into a phantasm, Puppy. Dear Fuck Slug. Dear Fuck Instrument through which one can express us. In either case we are cranberry. Desire for you is dripping out, a dispiriting state of affairs. (read the totality)
William Burroughs on the cut up technique
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Academonia (2006)
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
In this lively, entertaining collection of essays, Dodie Bellamy has written not only a helpful pedagogical tool, but an epic narrative of survival against institutional deadening and the proscriptiveness that shoots the young writer like poison darts from all sides. By the 90s funding for the arts had dwindled and graduate writing programs—“cash cows”—had risen to fill the slack. Simultaneously, literary production moved from an unstable, at times frightening street culture where experiment was privileged beyond all else, to an institutionalized realm—Academonia!—that enforces, or tends to enforce, conservative aesthetic values.Four essays by Dodie Bellamy
Hardcore Shamanism: Part 1, Hello Frog
Hardcore Shamanism: Part 2, 'Shamanism Inc.
Hardcore Shamanism: Part 3, No Blood from This Turnip
Can't We Just Call It Sex?
I once had dinner in a Taoist restaurant with a serious young man. Let's call him "Rendezvous." We savored the restaurant's specialties, sweet and sour "pork" made from deep-fried gluten, roast "duck" made from tofu skins, and stir-fried "chicken" that tasted like it was grown on Mars. All these analogues reminded but never fooled, and our conversation naturally turned to writing and its relationship to the "real thing," that is, life. I asked him what he thought of Kathy Acker. Rendezvous swallowed a mouthful of slippery but genuine straw mushrooms, then admitted that he reads her books by skipping to the "dirty parts." I flashed back to when I was ten years old, and in my parents' bedroom I found a pulp paperback, Lust Campus. I was dying to cruise through those small yellowing pages, but my mother was in the next room. She hardly ever left me alone in the house: I bode my time. Weeks seemed to pass, though in actuality I think it was a few days. Finally, one fateful afternoon, she had errands to run, and decided to leave me home to watch the spaghetti sauce she had simmering on the stove. Opening the screen door she shouted at me, "I'll be back in an hour or so. Behave yourself." As soon as the latch clicked I darted into her bedroom. Lust Campus toppled off the bookshelf into my chubby eager little hands. I flipped rapidly through the pages past the tedious exposition until I landed on a sex passage - then sitting cross-legged on the polished oak floor I wallowed in obscenity while the spaghetti sauce burned to a scorched red mass, like lava. I remember a detailed description of taking off a woman's bra and an orgy where a group of college students were lying on the floor in a circle. Since I was so naive about the birds and the bees this didn't strike me as kinky, merely as information. All sex was equally arousing and this book was great. Then I heard my mother's key in the back door - I crammed the paperback in the bookcase and rushed to the living room, sprawled on the couch like nothing had happened. Dropping her purse on the coffee table my mother sniffed at the scorched air. "Dodie, what the hell have you been doing while I was gone?" "Nothin'." (read the totality)
As Kevin hunches over his boyfriend's chest and kisses him, suddenly the video slows down to a halt. Briefly the picture disappears altogether. Other viewers have caught on to their having sex and the network is overloaded. Our hunger for images jams the system. In this space sex is inevitable. That's what keeps us watching. Like crime scene photos, even when unpopulated the rooms feel charged. Webcam never gives the illusion of fluid "natural" movement. It's more like a series of stills that jerk into the next still. Kevin's empty bedroom twitches as the camera refreshes, so it appears to be alive, to be breathing. The kite-shaped leaves on the bedspread rustle. We sense the sacred and profane jostling in this stillness which is never really still. When Kevin enters the space, his body feels like a prop within the bedroom's languorous aloneness. Events break down into a series of mini-events, and the jumps between them evade the narrative pressure of our central nervous system. We sit in our office chairs exalting in their mystery. A hand strobes along a cock. Blink. White stuff spews out of it, caught in midair like a Muybridge horse. We're never sure what we're missing. Light through the venetian blinds stripes both the bed and Kevin. He looks half mummy, half tiger. (read the totality)
I met London-based artist Tariq Alvi midway through his spring residency at California College of the Arts, here in San Francisco, where he came to us fresh from the Shanghai Biennial. For weeks he and I saw each other at parties, openings, dinners. We went to movies with clumps of other artists. When Tariq suggested that we do something just the two of us, I came up with the idea of a New Age date—yoga followed by dinner at a raw foods restaurant. Tariq’s done yoga for years, but he’d never been to a yoga class before. He usually practices from one of the dozens of yoga videos he owns. An avid collector of workout videos, he even bought a multi-region DVD player to watch the exercise treasures he finds in the States. “Which is the most glamorous of all the yoga instruction tapes?” “Oh, Dodie, Ali MacGraw is brilliant.” (read the totality)
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Further
* Justine Pimlott's Fag Hags: Women Who Love Gay Men, a documentary partly about the relationship of Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian
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p.s. Hey. Here's my Dodie Bellamy Day from back in the day. She rules. If you don't already know that, find out why I say that. The evidence is up there for all to see. I hope you guys are hanging in there. Presumably, I am.