Downtown Lit

Olson continuedfrom previous page JUKTJgR1 REVIEW no awareness of, that he had little or no conscious contact with them." McClure's essay describes the envious, bitter , and difficult insides of Brautigan and compares them to the lighter fictional worlds he created. While McClure's essay stands out, all of the contributions are worth reading. Not only is the timeline filled out in immense detail in the more than thirty contributions , but there are brilliant suggestions for ways in which to reread Brautigan's work—notonly the major early novels and stories but the poems as well. There are drawings ofBrautigan from the earliest period by relative unknowns, reminiscences by rock musicians, descriptions from early publishers who put together his first chapbooks, testimonials from Joanne Kyger and Robert Creeley, as well as reminiscences from Montana friends from the final period. This is a complex and thorough response to a writer who has often been dismissed as part ofa vanished subculture. Brautigan is considered a major writer within the Japanese literary world, as well as within the French literary world. It is perhaps a measure of his success and the esteem with which he should be held that his writing has transcended national boundaries and found a permanent home in two of the world's most sensitive literary civilizations. Kirby Olson 's most recent novel Temping is about a humor scholar in Finland (Black Heron Press, 2006). Downtown Lit Matt Briggs Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 Edited by Brandon Stosuy Afterword by Dennis Cooper and Eileen Myles New York University Press http://www.nyupress.org 500 pages; cloth, $90.00; paper, $29.95 Brandon Stosuy, a writer for Pitchfork, the online music magazine, and frequent contributor to The Believer, has compiled a mammoth and graphically rich retrospective of underground writing from New York's downtown during the heyday of photocopiers , 1974 to 1992. The collection includes dozens of selections from writers such as Sharon Mesmer, Thurston Moore, David Byrne, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray, Kathy Acker, Lynne Tillman, and Dennis Cooper. Stosuy defines downtown literature within geographical boundaries, production limitations, and a specific aesthetic. The work was produced by poets, writers, and performance artists living below 14th Street, from Tribeca to die Lower East Side. The work was generally self-financed and often produced with accessible technology such as photocopy machines. "[K]eeping eyes firmly focused on the muck," downtown writers created works that "breathed freely and remained connected significantly to fhe everyday." The work presented in the anthology was often composed, published, distributed, and often read within Stosuy's defined boundaries. It's fresh to have an anthology organized around such a tight geographical ring. Work produced in Brooklyn or Hoboken isn't found here, nor is work produced within the demarcation lines that bleed over into the wider world through the traditional channels ofNew York publishing. Pawing through the phonebook-sized volume, there are numerous spreads and reproductions of handbills, posters, and limited-edition chapbooks. The flood of handmade publications followed the rise of punk in New York alongside the already entrenched visual art and poetry scenes, which had already experienced connections with literary practice during movements such as Fluxus orAndy Warhol's Interview magazine. Cross-discipline collaboration had also been a long part of New York's art world. With punk, though, came a sense that merely creating an object or a manuscript wasn't enough, but that this creation must also involve getting the work in front ofa willing (or unwilling) audience. Simultaneously, photocopy machines became widespread, allowing cheap production. For a generation of self-publishers , the Xerox machine became a gateway drug. Using a photocopy machine, a poet could produce a reasonably professional looking copy without the fuss or smell ofa mimeograph machine with its caustic ink and stencils. A photocopy machine is just a piece of glass that transforms anything pressed against it into a stark, black-and-white image. Reproduction legitimizes scrawls, handwriting, typewriting, and collage. After a few Xeroxed chapbooks, a DIY novelist or poet could begin to consider the more expensive proposition of producing an offset book. Up Is Up...