Walking Through Clear Water In a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories (Canons)

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I appreciated -- in fact, felt inspired by -- Cookie's lavishly dégagé attitude toward life. Hers is the kind of nonchalant style of describing ridiculous events that lesser writers, like myself, try to emulate but fail to even touch. She treats rape in several points in the book as a kind of fact of life -- something awful, yes, but also as something she can exploit to turn the tables on her rapists and abuse them in the best way she possibly could: through her writing, with sharp, eviscerating humor. The story of her road trip abduction in the South was the best one, and the funniest one, in my opinion. Overall, Cookie was empowered, drunk with empowerment even. It's upsetting how young she died. But the garland is never as lustrous. This is the first book in Semiotext(e)'s "Native Agents" series. It's selective and rare and just like that I'm a first edition hound again. And you know, slightly (totally) manically trying to get my hands on all I can find from the glamorous doomed dead blonde, the junkie bombshell. You don't have to judge. Just because you started wearing a beat-to-hell punk tee with sharp heels doesn't mean you invented high-low. We've all been there. When Scarpati’s lungs collapsed, many blamed the particles (and the many cigarettes) he had inhaled as a sculptor and restorative artist. But it was AIDS. In one of her last columns for Details magazine, Mueller wrote that Scarpati had been finally driven to create his own art when he was in the hospital. “Did he need to be physically tied down to finally do his important work?” she asks. “Vittorio has learned that like a flood of sunlight, hope can vanquish gloom ... I hope he comes home soon.” Mueller was an It Girl, discovered by John Waters for his film “ Multiple Maniacs” in 1970. When Mueller met Waters, she writes, “I felt like I was meeting my new family.” After learning the cult filmmaker was born prematurely, “I envisioned him as an infant, compact like a pound cake, lying in a clear plastic preemie life support box ... already rococo and bursting his bunting wrapper with his dreams and plans of film scenarios.” Piecing her stories together, readers will be hard-pressed to solve the riddle of her character, when most of her time, from Baltimore to Berlin, is spent in conducting “socio-behavioral studies,” a pastime she shared with Waters. Among the many things she has seen are Vogue cover models queueing in line with the down-and-low for a heroin fix, the night crowds that make the Berlin Film Festival “much more fun” than Cannes, the fuss that one anonymous but incredibly well-connected MFA graduate will make by OD’ing at his own birthday party. Her stories exemplify what creative writing lecturers may be at pains to teach about the link between point of view and characterization: If you want to evoke the idea of who someone really is, start by showing us what they see.

Mueller was living on borrowed time too. While Scarpati was in the hospital, she and her friend, artist Scott Covert, went to Provincetown, Mass. “She had this card that I found,” Covert remembers in Chloe Griffin’s oral biography of Mueller, “Edgewise.” “It had something she would repeat to herself, for some kind of visualization, like a mantra: ‘I will live long enough to write my novel — one year, two years ... .’ I don’t know what the novel was about; maybe her life. She wanted to dedicate it to her son.” Mandell, Jonathan (January 4, 1990). "Cookie & Vittorio". New York Newsday. p.Part II/4 . Retrieved March 20, 2022– via Newspapers.com. MIT Press Direct is a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide. It's not just the stories that are exciting, it's the revelation they contain—that we might allow such wildness to stumble on to our own paths, even just for an afternoon. I love her for reminding me, with gentle pressure between the lines, to go out tonight, to see what happens, to live a little harder.A lot of people got tattoos that summer. Some got hooked,” she wrote. “That following winter, in Provincetown, tattoo fever overtook the town… It was better than hanging in a bar, more sociable than Canasta, more exciting than Monopoly, as challenging as Scrabble, and cheaper than gambling at poker. In the old traditional New England way, it was an arty masochist’s version of a sewing bee.” We have Mueller to thank—or blame—for the cottage industry of Brooklyn handpoke artists. Established in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design. urn:lcp:walkingthroughcl0000muel:epub:9e90a343-9d21-41c1-9434-fcd5a9c3720e Foldoutcount 0 Identifier walkingthroughcl0000muel Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s23d0m23p09 Invoice 1652 Isbn 0936756616 Lccn 2002514450 Ocr tesseract 5.2.0-1-gc42a Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9181 Ocr_module_version 0.0.18 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA403203 Openlibrary_edition The original version was published as a memoir in 1990 after Mueller died of AIDS-related complications, but subsequently fell out of print and became a hard-sought cult classic. The new edition of Walking Through Clear Water is almost three times the size of the original, and includes unpublished work. Divided up by the places she lived—Baltimore, Provincetown, and New York—the book chronicles Mueller’s life, her fiction, and the impact of her columns “Ask Dr. Mueller” and “Art and About.” In 1969, Cookie Mueller suffered a fallopian tube infection she mistook to be her period. When she woke up in an unknown hospital bed, she felt disoriented but otherwise “great, clean, and very neat.” A nurse had done her hair up in tight braided pigtails, each one ending in a white surgical rubber band to prevent her hair from snapping off amid fever-induced agitation. As the narrator of her autobiographical story points out, no white girl or woman over the age of twelve can pull off pigtails or ponytails, so it is to be understood that Mueller looked “dumb.” On cue, film director John Waters walked in, accompanied by actress Mink Stole.

The last of Mueller's quotes, an elegy of her intent and existence, was written shortly before her death: a b "Cookie Mueller Dead; Actress and Writer, 40". The New York Times. November 15, 1989. p.B 28. ProQuest 110155682 . Retrieved November 8, 2020– via ProQuest. In her art review column for Details, the independent downtown culture magazine, Mueller didn’t review art as much as she lamented about the state of the art world, and waxed poetic whenever she was moved to do so. “You have to have opinions while looking for art or searching out the other forms of divinity in daily life,” she succinctly says in her May 1987 essay as she rereads her most recent column.

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It’s a mixture of Possum’s Run Amok, Patti Smith essence, Girl Interrupted, Funny Weather by Olivia Liang, wild, sensational, wisdom and humor.

With a swath of pivotal events in Mueller's life—including her brother's death at age 14, the result of climbing a dead tree, which collapsed on him in the woods near their home—she went on to pursue her writing, and in high school hung out with the hippie crowd. One of Mueller's idiosyncrasies as a teen was that she constantly dyed her hair: "'Whenever you're depressed, just change your hair color,' she [her mother] always told me, years later, when I was a teenager: I was never denied a bottle of hair bleach or dye. In my closet there weren't many clothes, but there were tons of bottles."Mueller's unflappability, her refusal of stasis and self-pity, her hunger for beauty, her readiness to find it where few else would look—all of it adds up into a singular code for living, in which the worst thing a person could do is flinch. Recounting the snarling pain of being in labor with no epidural, Mueller grumbles, “Even the usually silent plants on the windowsill, benevolently doing their miraculous carbon monoxide to oxygen exchange, were wheezing with asthmatic photosynthesis… If this was the way it was going to be, then it better be worth it.” (She decides the birth is worthwhile after the nurses give her son an Elvis pompadour in his hospital photos.) Cookie Mueller (1949–1989), née Dorothy Karen Mueller, played leading roles in John Waters's Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Desperate Living, and Multiple Maniacs. She wrote for the East Village Eye and Details magazine, performed in a series of plays by Gary Indiana, and wrote numerous stories that would only be published posthumously. She died in New York City of AIDS-related complications at age 40. She was also prophetic. She featured Jean-Michel Basquiat in her very first column for the magazine, and accurately predicted that one day the East Village art scene would be studied in art history classes. In 1959, with eyes the same size, I got to see some of America traveling in the old green Plymouth with my parents, who couldn't stand each other, and my brother and sister, who loved everyone. [Cookie's brother Michael actually died in an accident on March 20, 1955.] I remember the Erie Canal on a dismal day, the Maine coastline in a storm, Georgia willow trees in the rain, and the Luray Caverns in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia where the stalagmites and -tites were poorly lit.