Was the internet made so marketers could haunt you in your home and you could shop anywhere at any time via a handheld hoohickey, or was it created for Triple Canopy? This month, Issue 14 of the online arts journal features Lucy Ives' selections of David Wojnarowicz's 30+ journals being digitised by NYU's Fales Library. She writes:
"Of his diary accounts of sex at the West Side piers and elsewhere, Wojnarowicz told Sylvère Lotringer:
"When I wrote them I was so excited to write them, to document them. I thought they were the most amazing things that I had ever seen. They were like films or they reminded me of Burroughs’s Wild Boys. I loved it. I loved the fact that it was outdoors, that it was by the river and in the wind. They were moments of incredible beauty to me.
"I remember when I first started becoming more and more aware of AIDS. And here I am sitting with all these journals, looking at them in total disgust. … And now, years later, I realize I shifted again and want these things.
"It is with this in mind that one reads Wojnarowicz’s accounts of anonymous sex, his cinematic reflection of the encounter. Many of the selections I have made here, then, are graphic—perhaps more so than other previously published excerpts from the journals. There are also mundane episodes. We see a Manhattan that barely resembles our own. And we see Wojnarowicz at work, taking photos of hell in an alley (homelessness, refuse) or visiting an editor at the Soho Weekly News, the paper that would first publish his “Rimbaud in New York” series. I have wanted to show both the explicitness and the everydayness of Wojnarowicz’s writing practice, as it is in this meeting of the extraordinary and the routine that one finds the crucible of the artist’s personal myth."
Issue 14 also has a gay short story by James McCourt called "The Canticle of Skoozle." Mirroring the marriage of high (canticle) and low (skoozle) in its title, the tale of heroworship of a high school's doomed star athlete is told in a regal voice conveyed in the all-cap symbols and abbreviations of a txt msg. Similarly, the accompanying collage mixes Nijinsky with Abercrombie. A sample:
"...O SKOOZLE! SKOOZLE! U HAD SUCH A BEAUTIFUL, FABULOUS, FINE HEAD ON YR SHOULDERS & ANOTHER CROWNING YR MAJESTIC MEMBER (THE WORD GLANS NEVER ENTERED YR VOCABULARY). GLORIOUS IT WAS 2 B ALIVE IN THOSE DAYS W U & 2 WATCH U B/ING YOUNG, THE VERY HEAVEN. WHEN WE SED U WR LIKE A BREATH OF SPRING WE DID NT COMMENT IDLY OR IN THE INANE MANNER OF REMARKING ON THE REFRESHING EFFECT OF AN AEROSOL AIR FRESHENER ON THE ROOM, 4 THERE WAS TH@ IN YR PERSONAL SCENT (ON ITS ACCOUNT THE PRINCIPAL, A LEARNED MAN VERSED IN M@TERS GREEK (HA-HA), DUBBED U HYAKINTHOS)..."
Thank you! I will definitely check this out.
Posted by: J.P. | October 27, 2011 at 11:36 AM