Filtrer
Semiotexte
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On Hervé Guibert and the difficulty of writing and speaking about someone beloved and revered.
"Soon that was my nickname for Hervé, what with my habit of italianizing the names of my nearest and dearest ... Hervelino: that didn't make me think so much of Hervé as of us both. The word might not seem like much but it was him and it was me, he took it for himself." Mathieu Lindon met the writer and photographer Hervé Guibert in 1978. The nickname Hervelino marked the start of their friendship, which was cemented a decade later by the years they both spent in Rome. Guibert was a pensionnaire at the Villa Médicis starting in 1987; Lindon became a fellow pensionnaire the next year, and the two would stay in Italy until 1990. These Roman years are at the heart of this autobiographie à deux that alternates between humor and melancholy. Guibert had just learned that he was HIV-positive and would die not long after returning to France and rising to fame with his searing masterpiece To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life--in which Lindon himself was a character.
Hervelino is a book about the difficulty of writing and speaking about someone beloved and revered. In recounting their time in Italy, Lindon contends with the impossibility of writing about Guibert: "To write about Rome is to skip over everything I don't dare to write because it's so hard to make sense of Hervé." Hervelino is a story of a singular friendship, and of the books read and shared by the friend who was loved and lost. As it closes with each inscription Guibert wrote for his friend Mathieu and with Lindon's present-day commentary below it, what remains are shards and fragments of a friendship sealed by illness and death, enshrined by literature and love. -
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Reynaldo rivera : provisional notes for a disappeared city
Rivera Reynaldo
- Semiotexte
- 24 Novembre 2020
- 9781635901122
Tout au long des années 80 et 90 le photographe Reynaldo Riveira documenta le Los Angeles qui était le sien, celui des soirées underground, de la mode alternative, des bars latino gays et travestis fermés depuis longtemps. Ce livre témoigne en presque 200 photographies d'un monde révolu dont l'esthétique glamour ne servait qu'à oublier une réalité lugubre. Il inclue une histoire de Luis Bauz, "Tatiana", et un essai critique sur l'oeuvre de Reynaldo Riveira par l'écrivaine Chris Kraus.
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B>A memoir of lesbian identity and motherhood, and the societal pressures that place them in opposition./b>br>br>The daughter of an illustrious French family whose members include a former Prime Minister, a model, and a journalist, Constance Debré abandoned her marriage and legal career in 2015 to write full-time and begin a relationship with a woman. Her transformation from affluent career woman to broke single lesbian was chronicled in her 2018 novel Play boy, praised by Virginie Despentes for its writing that is at once flippant and consumed by anxiety.br>;br>In Love Me Tender, Debré goes on to further describe the consequences of that life-changing decision. Her husband, Laurent, seeks to permanently separate her from their eight-year old child. Vilified in divorce court by her ex, she loses custody of her son, allowed to see him only once every two weeks for a supervised hour. Deprived of her child, Debré gives up her two-bedroom apartment and bounces between borrowed apartments, hotel rooms, and a studio the size of a cell. She involves herself in brief affairs with numerous women who vary in age, body type, language, and lifestyle. But the closer she gets to them, the more distant she feels. Apart from cigarettes and sex, her life is completely ascetic: a regime of intense reading and writing, interrupted only by sleep and athletic swimming. She shuns any place where she might observe children, avoiding playgrounds and parks as if they were cluster bombs ready to explode, riddling her body with pieces of shrapnel. ;br>;br>Writing graphically about sex, rupture, longing, and despair in the first person, Debrés work is often compared with the punk-era writings of Guillaume Dustan and Herve Guibert, whose work she has championed. As she says of Guibert: I love him because he says I and hes a pornographer. That seems to be essential when you write. Otherwise you dont say anything. But in Love Me Tender, Debré speaks courageously of love in its many forms, reframing what it means to be a mother beyond conventional expectations.
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If you're a girl : selected stories 1985-2023
Ann Rower
- Semiotexte
- Native Agents
- 6 Août 2024
- 9781635902020
The trailblazing book that influenced a generation of writers, and proves that mature reflection needn't be lacking in attitude.
In the beginning when everything was very sexual we talked about our fantasies. She thought about having a guy for some of it. She thought about having a gun. I had gone through a lot to get away from guys so I admit that the thought of going back to them, even for a little adventure, was surprising and disconcerting ...
Ann Rower's first book, If You're a Girl, published by Semiotext(e)'s Native Agents series in 1991 in tandem with Cookie Mueller's Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, cemented her reputation as the Eve Babitz of lower Manhattan.
Rower was fifty-three years old at the time. Her stories-urtexts of female autofiction-had long been circulating within the poetry and postpunk music scenes. They were unlike anyone else's: disarming, embarrassing, psuedoconfessional tales of everyday life dizzily told and laced with dry humor. In If You're a Girl, she recounts her adventures as Timothy Leary's babysitter, her artistic romance with actor Ron Vawter, and her attempts to evade a schizophrenic stalker.
Rower went on to publish two novels: Armed Response (1995) and Lee & Elaine (2002). After the 2002 suicide of her partner, the writer Heather Lewis, Rower stopped writing for almost two decades. And then she picked up where If You're a Girl left off. No longer a girl, she produced dozens of stories from her life in New York as an octogenarian.
This new, expanded edition includes most of the original book, together with selections from both her novels and her recent writings. If You're a Girl is a trailblazing book that manifests Rower's influence on a generation of writers, and proves that mature reflection needn't be lacking in attitude. -
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Herve guibert selected stories written in invisible ink
Hervé Guibert
- Semiotexte
- 19 Mai 2020
- 9781635901191
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The new fuck you : adventures in lesbian reading
Myles Eileen
- Semiotexte
- Native Agents
- 1 Juin 1995
- 9781570270574
Borrowing its name from the notorious '60s Ed Sanders magazine, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, the editors have figured a way to rehone its countercultural and frictional stance with style and aplomb. A unique and provocative anthology of lesbian writing, guaranteed to soothe the soulful and savage the soulless. Includes Adele Bertei, Holly Hughes, Sapphire, Laurie Weeks, and many more.
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An erotic and darkly comic novel about female friendship, set at the intersection between counterculture and the multimillion dollar art industry.
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Weight of the earth : the tape journals of david wojnarowicz
David Wojnarowicz
- Semiotexte
- 17 Juillet 2018
- 9781635900170
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Publié par extraits pendant près de quatre décennies, ce roman légendaire de Jack Skelley est ici édité pour la première fois dans une version intégrale. L'histoire raconte le Los Angeles des années 1980, ses clubs punks et ses centres commerciaux, mais aussi Disneyland et le Doger Stadium dans un mélange littéraire de discipline et d'anarchie peuplé de personnages extravagants inspirés des amis de Jack Skelley mais aussi d'icone pop de l'époque comme Madonna ou Billy Idol.
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A document of New York from an author too close to the story to be a trustworthy eyewitness.
Composed of stories, fragmentary essays, and even press releases Stagg has been commissioned to write, Artless captures the media landscape lived and generated in New York during the past half decade. Since the 2016 publication of her debut novel Surveys, Stagg has positioned herself as an in-demand expert on-and critic of-the psychic experience of self-mythology within the cruelly optimistic metaverse of infinite branding. Part voyeur and part participant, Stagg continues her exploration of the branded identity and its elusive, bottomless desire for authenticity. -
Guillaume Dustan Nicolas Pages
Guillaume Dustan
- Semiotexte
- Native Agents
- 12 Décembre 2023
- 9781635901948
An ode to mad love, awarded the Prix de Flore in 1999.
Published in 1999 and awarded that year's Prix de Flore, Nicolas Pages marks a departure from the Sadean preoccupations of Guillaume Dustan's first three novels; it is, in essence, a love story. Inspired by a failed romance with the Swiss artist-writer Nicolas Pages and collaging texts that Dustan initially produced for a wide variety of other occasions (magazine articles, short stories, project notes, shopping lists, and more), the «auto-/bio-/porno-graphic» prose of Nicolas Pages is by turns trashy and encyclopedic, corporeal and philosophical. Here Dustan inaugurates a «gay literature» that is no longer painful or shameful, but epicurean and cheerful without ever lapsing into idealism. A vibrant plea for gay rights and a tapestried text that is more than the sum of its many styles, Nicolas Pages is a call to explore the body, sexuality, and writing in all their variety; it is a hymn to life, humanity, pleasure, and desire. -
The early essays of the most influential French film critic of the post-68 period.
The Footlights (1983) was the first book by Serge Daney, a film critic admired in his lifetime by Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Luc Godard and recognized since his premature death in 1992 as the most important French writer on film after André Bazin. The Footlights stands apart in Daney's body of work as the only collection of his essays he conceived of as a book, organizing his seminal pieces from Cahiers du Cinéma by theme and linking them with original texts that reflect in a personal voice on the doubts, battles, and illuminations of a generation of film lovers inspired by the explorations of Lacanian theory and roused by the collective aspirations of Maoist dogma. In pieces on fellow travelers Godard and Straub/Huillet, on films ranging from Pasolini's Saló to Spielberg's Jaws, and on the difference between film language and television discourse, Daney offers a definitive portrait of an era of radical hope and disappointment. -
Wayne Koestenbaum : Stubble archipelago /anglai
Wayne Koestenbaum
- Semiotexte
- Native Agents
- 12 Mars 2024
- 9781635902068
Wild new adventures in word-infatuated flânerie from a celebrated literary provocateur.
This book of thirty-six poetic bulletins by the humiliation-advice-giver Wayne Koestenbaum will teach you how to cruise, how to dream, how to decode a crowded consciousness, how to find nuggets of satisfaction in unaccustomed corners, and how to sew a language glove roomy enough to contain materials gathered while meandering. Koestenbaum wrote many of these poems while walking around New York City. He'd jot down phrases in a notebook or dictate them into his phone. At home, he'd incorporate these fragmented gleanings into overflowing quasi sonnets. Therefore each poem functions as a coded diary entry, including specific references to sidewalk events and peripatetic perceptions. Flirting, remembering, eavesdropping, gazing, squeezing, sequestering: Koestenbaum invents a novel way to cram dirty liberty into the tight yet commodious space of the sonnet, a fourteen-lined cruise ship that contains ample suites for behavior modification, libidinal experiment, aura-filled memory orgies, psychedelic Bildungsromane, lap dissolves, archival plunges, and other mental saunterings that conjure the unlikely marriage of Kenneth Anger and Marianne Moore. Carnal pudding, anyone? These engorged lyrics don't rhyme; and though each builds on a carapace of fourteen lines, many of the lines spawn additional, indented tributaries, like hoop earrings dangling from the stanzas' lobes. Koestenbaum's poems are comic, ribald, compressed, symphonic. They take liberties with ordinary language, and open up new pockets for sensation in the sorrowing overcoat of the «now.» Imagine: the training wheels have been removed from poetry's bicycle, and the wheeling flâneur is finally allowed a word pie equal to fantasy's appetite. Stubble-a libidinal detail-matters when you're stranded on the archipelago of your most unsanctioned yet tenaciously harbored impulses. -
What it means to be sexually promiscuous in contemporary American culture, edited by cult-favorite author Michelle Tea.
SLUTS, the first publication from vulgarian queer publisher DOPAMINE BOOKS, is an exploration of what it means to be sexually promiscuous in contemporary American culture. Featuring personal essays, spilled secrets, fiction, memoir, and experimental works, SLUTS asks writers and readers to investigate the many ways the notion of the slut impacts our inner and outer lives, as a threat or an identity, a punishment or an aspiration, a lifestyle, an aesthetic, a philosophy and rallying cry. From hideous and terrifying first encounters to postapocalyptic polyamory, from unionizing sex workers to backstage tableaux of sex and drugs and rock and roll, SLUTS's stories probe the liberating highs and abject lows of physical abandon. Featuring work from performer Miguel Gutierrez, hailed by the New York Times as «an artist of ordered excess»; former Nylon magazine editor in chief Gabrielle Korn; award-winning author Brontez Purnell; Whore of New York author Liara Roux; National Book Critics Circle Award winner Jeremy Atherton Lin; and a host of additional artists and writers, SLUTS reveals the knowledges provoked by a dalliance with desire.
Contributors
DL Alvarez, Vera Blossom, Chloe Caldwell, Cristy Road Carrera, Sam Cohen, Tom Cole, Lydia Conklin, jimmy cooper, Lyn Corelle, Jenny Fran Davis, Cyrus Dunham, Hedi El Kholti, Robert Gluck, Miguel Gutierrez, Gary Indiana, Taleen Kali, Cheryl Klein, Gabrielle Korn, Jeremy Atherton Lin, Nate Lippens, Meredith Maran, Carta Monir, Amanda Montell, Carely Moore, Bradford Nordeen, Baruch Porras-Hernandez, Kamala Puligandla, Brontez Purnell, Liara Roux, Andrea Sands, Daviel Shy, Jen Silverman, Anna Joy Springer, Laurie Stone, McKenzie Wark, Zoe Whittal -
I could not believe it : The 1979 teenage diaries of sean delear
Sean DeLear, Brontez Purnell
- Semiotexte
- 25 Mai 2023
- 9781635901832
A remarkable time capsule of Simi Valley, 1979, written before the author would become one of LA's most influential artists of subsequent decades.
When Sean DeLear died prematurely in Vienna in 2017, his friends discovered--among other treasures--an extensive diary kept at the age of fourteen. Still living with his Christian parents in the notoriously racist Los Angeles suburb of Simi Valley, Sean wrote almost every day about crushes and hustling, waterbeds, blackmail, Donna Summer, gloryholes, racism, and shoplifting gay porn.
DeLear would go on to become the frontman for the Los Angeles punk/powerpop band Glue. He was a punk musician, visual artist, intercontinental scenester, video vixen, party host, marijuana farmer, and sometime-collaborator of artists such as Kembra Pfahler and Vaginal Davis.
DeLear's forgotten diaries capture a moment in Los Angeles underground and queer history when, as his friend the writer Cesar Padilla notes, "It wasn't cool at all to be trans, gay, queer or whatever. Those words weren't even in the vocabulary." I Could Not Believe It, Padilla continues, "is a raw fearless innocent gay Black kid's journey coming out into life at an incredible pre-AIDS period. It's not cognizant of being literature. It's as naïve and forthcoming as it gets. It wasn't written with the desire to be published so Sean didn't hold back. Sean's goal was to be true to himself." -
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Cookie Mueller : walking through clear water in a pool painted black
Cookie Mueller
- Semiotexte
- 12 Avril 2022
- 9781635901665
The first collected edition of legendary writer, actress, and adventurer Cookie Mueller's stories, featuring the entire contents of her 1990 book Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, alongside more than two dozen others, some previously unpublished.
Legendary as an underground actress, female adventurer, and East Village raconteur, Cookie Mueller's first calling was to the written word: I started writing when I was six and have never stopped completely, she once confessed. Muellerís 1990 Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, the first volume of the Semiotext(e) Native Agents series, was the largest collection of stories she compiled during her life. But it presented only a slice of Mueller's prolific work as a writer. This new, landmark volume collects all of Mueller's stories: from the original contents of Clear Water, to additional stories discovered by Amy Scholder for the posthumous anthology Ask Dr. Mueller, to selections from Mueller's art and advice columns for Details and the East Village Eye, to still new stories collected and published here for the first time. Olivia Laing's new introduction situates Mueller's writing within the context of her life--and our times.
Thanks to recent documentaries like Mallory Curley's A Cookie Mueller Encyclopedia and Chloé Griffin's oral biography Edgewise, Mueller's life and work have been discovered by a new generation of readers. Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories returns essential source material to these readers, the archive of Mueller's writing itself. Mueller's many mise en scènes--the Baltimore of John Waters, post-Stonewall Provincetown, avant-garde Italy, 1980s New York, an America enduring Reagan and AIDS--patches together a singular personal history and a primer for others. As Laing writes in her introduction, Collected Stories amounts to a how-to manual for a life ricocheting joyously off the rails . . . a live corrective to conformity, conservatism, and cruelty.
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Felix guattari chaosophy : texts & interviews, 1972-1977 (new ed)
Félix Guattari
- Semiotexte
- 14 Novembre 2008
- 9781584350606
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Herve guibert to the friend who did not save my life
Hervé Guibert
- Semiotexte
- 19 Mai 2020
- 9781635901238