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Pink Steam
a collection
by Dodie Bellamy
Praise for Pink Steam
"Dodie Bellamy sows poetic bedlam in Pink Steam, an introspective collection of bits of fictionalized memoir and reflection that explore everything from sexual desire to the temptations of shoplifting. Bellamy deconstructs Barbie's Dream House, recounts a run-in with "Venus" and reports from "the field" (read: her mother's couch in Indiana) on the 2000 Republican National Convention. Her offbeat, flirtatiously subversive prose puts a fresh spin on countercultural life in San Francisco and the Midwest from the 1970s to the present."
—Publishers Weekly, Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information
Don't fence me in
Bellamy's inventive memoir traces her label-defying loves and identities
"There's a big difference between Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi," not so much between a Sauvignon Blanc and a Chardonnay. Or so one of Dodie Bellamy's thinly disguised alter-egos wants to believe in one of the many fibers of epiphany that thread this work of memoir turned fiction turned essay turned memoir again. The quote is not her own, but that of a displaced young New York poet she meets at a literary party and comes to envy for her vernal lack of self-censorship. But here in California they grow grapes, they bottle the stuff. It's like… "I don't know anything about wine," the poet quips.
"What if a writer or artist in the course of their life never happens upon their particular set? If Fitzgerald and Hemmingway or Stein and Picasso hadn't crossed paths, done their time in postbellum Paris, or if Dorothy Parker had never come to her vicious circle? Would they have been what they were, what they became for history? What happens when the set a writer finds herself associated with becomes creatively oppressive, too intellectually abstract? Or she wakes up one morning branded with the label "transgressive," feeling compelled to stymie a natural voice in order to hold down the fort against narrative urges--just to assuage fellow San Francisco language poets? And what if beyond all of that, none of the broader labels fit either? She is neither mid-western, Californian, urban, rural, blue collar, an aesthete, gay or straight. Or try being a gay-turned-bisexual woman married to a gay-turned-bisexual man? And even then, in the big scheme of things, what if that lens (not the relationship) is itself a footnote in the wider iris of discovery?
"In Bellamy's newest work, all bets and expectations of her work as known to date have folded. The experimental author of The Letters of Mina Harker and Cunt Ups, the natural heir of Kathy Acker--and as one critic has written (rightfully), Roland Barthes--finds herself in a green room of painfully honest, hilarious, and for the most part, narrative reflection. Of course her poetic and critical skills seep through, and the answers to these questions (and more) emerge through a complex structure that crisscrosses back and forth across geographical, metaphysical and sexual lay lines.
"The story that unfolds is that of the modern pioneer, as quintessentially American as Abe Lincoln's rise from the log cabin, or Steinbeck's Okies migrating west for the unforeseen promises of the golden state. Bellamy's explorations mirror the varying fads of California's hippy gold rush and on during the latter decades of the last millennium. She begins in the present, reflecting on visions of Barbie in her premiere Dream House. It's Barbie in 1962, when Dodie was still a precocious tomboy pre-teen in the working class suburbs of Chicago, the same year nuclear war loomed in Cuba and Timothy Leary discovered LSD. It's also Barbie via photographer David Levinthal's modern studies--close ups in which all sense of scale is lost. It seems like someone could fit in there, but once inside, the visitor becomes a drugged out Lewis Carroll-ized giant, bumping limbs, tripping out on their own reflection in the warbled aluminum mirrors.
"From there, memories jot from relationship to relationship--from her early experimentations with a neighborhood girlfriend (under the sheets, mom in denial) to the later frustrations of falling for self obsessed artists, writers and new age demagogues, both real and stylized. Although she enters these relationships the seeming naif, what she comes away with is startling in detail and insight. These are memoirs that read like the diaries of a spy, of a KGV special agent posing as a dumb blonde in a tight hip huggers, Cardigan and bullet bra--or like the guilty reflections of the anthropologic chronicles of Maya Dern (a ghost that, along with the sad hunchback Quasimodo, hovers throughout Pink Steam). When later she becomes more experienced, and falls in love with KK (hmmm…who could that be?--google it if you don't know), she finds that "sometimes cozy and domestic are all I want in the world, a privacy that's private just because it's too dull to tell anybody about." Curling up with some good tea, an old horror movie or a cheesy episode of Family Ties on TV.
"But then she still can cull the extraordinary from the mundane, as when she goes home to cover (razz) the Republican convention and bonds with her family. Though she grows more mature and confident later in the book, she retains the urge to rage against the dying of the light of excitement. In the segment "In Dutch," she is both a student and a teacher of creative writing daunted with the task of coming up with a "Vermeer poem." She can't understand the task, gets sidetracked when one of her studly students comes to call. And through her avoidance of writing the poem, with her careful eye trained on the outlines of her pupil and fantasies about his cock, pens a story as exquisite as the Dutch master's own "Milkmaid."
"Like Mann's Von Achenbach when he finds his sailor-suited object of obsession at the end of his own cycle, the tables have turned. She becomes the experienced one, the artist who knows what she wants. And yet, unlike Mann's old and sickly voyeur, the real Dodie, I expect, if her latest writing is any indication, is just revving up for a lot more umph to come. So wine, Coke, who cares. This book deserves the bubbly."
Casey McKinney, San Francisco Chronicle
"In Pink Steam, one sentence eviscerates another the way Regan cried for help on the surface of Linda Blair's skin. Bounding from autobiography to Oscar Wilde to King Kong to the booze-addled body of Judy Garland, Dodie Bellamy's anarchic imagination sends the cozy pieties of linguistic form through a blender, suturing the results into something perversely original. Pink Steam consists of stories and nonfiction essays where truth and false merge inextricably, blurring distinctions between memoir and mythology. 'The Debbies I Have Known' recites the Gospel According to Debbie, an acquaintance of the narrator, who might or might not be Dodie Bellamy as we know her. Rule number 2: 'At all times be mysterious.' In between such sage bits of wisdom, Oscar Wilde discusses photographs of the title figure as if deciphering code. 'She looks coarse,' he concludes. 'Do you mean her as a person,' asks his interlocutor, 'or the way she looks?' to which Wilde snaps: 'They're one and the same.' Debbie, whose sweet smile looks 'practiced,' is followed through a succession of well-rehearsed guises---weight fluctuations, a revolving cast of domineering boyfriends, name changes, fads and fancies. Souvenirs are examined, memories exhumed, in an effort to read her--serviceably, if not definitively. For Bellamy, no person, no relationship is fixed.
"'Barbie's Dream House' gazes upon the living doll as a whirligig of historical impressions, none of which can be isolated and contemplated separately. Props shift in the periphery. A mirror on the wall 'reflects and distorts, reflects and distorts.' 'Details accrue to suggest a life,' Bellamy writes, touring the house in Barbie's shoes. 'But whose?' Appearances deceive--and yet: 'Barbie's name is on the box, so it must be hers.' Bellamy has a uniquely deadpan sense of the absurd, which is to say a masterful grip on the disjunctions of identity. Elsewhere: 'Two lesbians sit on my left, two gay men on my right. A table on either side separates me from both couples. I spread my thighs and drink Dos Equis, trying to pull off Independent Woman.' I don't belong in the normal world whose name is sanity, she says. 'I was raised in Hammond, a working class suburb of Chicago. In the industrial Midwest of my youth strong lines were drawn between inside/outside, normal/abnormal, natural/freak--and those lines were brutally enforced. In high school, I was a lesbian, i.e., on the wrong side of all those slashes.'
"Figuring out a doll is one thing. Figuring out yourself is another. Bellamy's narrator comes across like the Bride of Frankenstein cut loose. Stitched together from disparate sources, she tries to navigate the contradictions between what she's been told about herself, what she feels, and what she sees in the mirror. 'The Mayonnaise Jar' is a play on Plath, in which a mother, a husband, and even a series of grade school teachers weigh in on the heroine's character. Her consciousness cobbled together by the demands and impressions of other people and her own often distorted projections about herself, the bride speaks in the scrambled syntax of a being just waking up to her world. She keeps switching pronouns, as if she's lost the ability to distinguish between 'I' and 'she,' 'me' and 'her.' Are we ourselves or reflections of external influences? What if identity is an out of body experience? Can we define who we are based on someone else's language, or can we beg, borrow, and steal from this vocabulary to build a personalized grammar of self-expression? What the hell is an authentic self, anyway?
"Bellamy's prose tackles major subjects but moves along with the stylized economy of a good sci-fi movie. Her text is constantly under duress. It shifts with Jeckyll and Hide-like interjections and strange, unsettling asides. Time shrinks, space expands, the horizon slants, spewing, gurgling, bursting forth in fractured outbursts and orderly intrusions. Layers of perception and emotional propaganda are ripped back to reveal ever deeper, ever complicated realms of contradiction. Bellamy views things through the prismatic, compound lens of the fly, and her stories defy plot synopsis. What these pieces are about lurks in the corners, sneaking up on you like Dracula's shadow climbing the wall. This is stimulating, entertaining stuff, formally inventive and ambitious--and infinitely rewarding. Bellamy happens to be one of the funniest, most inventive writers in San Francisco, and one of the more representative of the city's mercurial moods. Hands down, she's one of the best writers in the country. If anyone can drag the sleeping giant of contemporary literature into the future, she can.
"If anyone can see that far ahead, it must be Suspect Thoughts. Owned and operated by Ian Philips and Greg Wharton, the press recalls the auspicious beginnings of Soft Skull, which was started out of Kinko's by Sander Hicks. Suspect Thoughts has that kind of enthusiasm, unflagging drive, and nerve, a devoted, even obsessive fan's passion for the material they send out into the world. If what Doug Messerli said is true, that commercial publishers care only about giving their readers what they want, then Philips and Wharton, like Soft Skull, Clear Cut, and Akashic, understand what these dunderheads seem to have lost sight of, the fact that someone who's never heard the Velvet Underground might very well like them, if not love them--passionately, with fierce loyalty, forever and ever. Good writing, like good music, is a deeply personal experience, and those who feel its tug, like Philips and Wharton, want desperately to pass it on. What could be queerer than people who still care this fearlessly about fantastic writing? Different and odd are alive and well, burrowing under the surface of things."
—Brian Pera, San Francisco Bay Guardian
"Bellamy's innovative novel/memoir offers a wicked cocktail of gender theory, class politics, contemporary poetics, and the perverse pleasure of B-movies. From sex to shoplifting to voyeurism, this dirty book solidifies Bellamy's cult status among readers who like thier art dressed in designer knockoffs from the Salvation Army's $2 rack."
—Julia Bloch, Curve
"What motivates Dodie bellamy to write? Judging from her most recent collection of autobiographical stories: shoplifting, sex (with men and women), horror films, high trash, Sylvia Plath, and Barbie. Pink Steam is an intoxicating, wicked journey through the mind of an artist at the height of her creative powers. Departing from an acid trip in Barbie's dream house, we're suddenly listening to Judy Garland's thoughts on a Henry Darger exhibition (!) while Bowie's "Space Oddity" drones on in the background and George Bush wins a million hearts through the televised Republican Convention which the author watches while visiting her working-class family in the Midwest...
"Bellamy's brilliance is rooted in her keen ability to attack her subjects from many different angles, employing a different mode of writing for each--yet managing to nail it in a way that entertains rather than distracts--engineering a style that is daring in its experimental forays off the language radar as it snakes its way through an encyclopedic maze of pop cultural references. With her sly post-feminist hijinx, Bellamy is one fo the few writers left who is hell-bent on transforming delinquency into an art form, and certainly sophisticated enough to crossover into the European intelligentsia: as Steven Shapiro has written, she may well be America's answer to Roland Barthes."
—Travis Jeppesen, think again
"For me, it's Selsun Blue shampoo, that weirdly-acrid anti-dandruff smell that's left behind, days after rinsing. In the middle of a shopping mall, one sniff of a pimply teenager's dried-out locks, and I'm 16 again, wanking in the same bed as my best friend sleeps too close and too far away. For the narrator of 'Can You Hear Me, Major Tom?', we recall, 'He was twenty-one, two years younger than me. In my tiny bedroom he rubbed my back with coconut scented lotion, and to this day whenever I smell coconut, I get all sentimental, overcome with an ambient eroticism I don't know what to do with.' Bowie may have been right, and the stars do look very different today, but the passing scents that make sense still are righteous in their power.
"As are Bellamy's words (stories would be too coherent, tales not nearly as fragmentary, narrations only doing so much because objectivity was burnt at the stake long ago), magnificent in their corporeality, fragrant in their hyper-reality. She's pulled up the corpses of Acker and Burroughs, fucked them twice over and washed Bill's mouth out with pussy juice for good measure, then injected the goop that remained after the bodies were reverently placed back in their capsules. 'The underpants are ripped in front, as if someone has slashed them with a knife. My pubic hair shows through, it is red, and I play with it, absently, like a person clicking a ballpoint.' Ordinary. Quotidian. Beautifully fucked.
"If you're looking for closure or continuity, poke your eyes out. Here remain positions, reactions, 'I, in my very pale very stainable shirt, curl away to the left like a disjointed comma longing for its clause.' You want nasty? 'Eventually the [high-school] girls go pregnant--their cunts were made of bubble gum, sperm blew inside them swell their bellies enormous. The boyfriends took back their rings.' The Rules are raped, one by one. Literally. Figuratively. Fantastically.
"'Shit is the oxygen of your literary atmosphere.' And so... it is written."
—Geoff Parkes, Logged Off
"San Francisco writer Dodie Bellamy's new collection Pink Steam is billed as 'fiction/essay/memoir' on the back jacket, but the copyright page states 'This book is a work of fiction.' Which is it? Who cares! Whatever it is, it's a blast. Bellamy, whose mind-bending 1998 novel, The Letters of Mina Harker, landed her on the sexy, pomo edge of the literary map, calls the book a 'fractured autobiography.' Its 22 previously published pieces, mostly set in San Francisco and Chicago (and Hammond, Indiana, where Bellamy grew up), include everything from erotic prose poems and reflections on failed relationships to cockeyed commentary on popular movies. Her characters are often outsiders looking for a place to fit in, looking for friends. But though sometimes sad or tragic, Pink Steam isn't a downer. Bellamy has a great sense of humor, and it's fun to sit in on her jaunts around Chicago: the hookers at the Golden Nugget, Carson Pirie Scott (the only place to buy White Shoulders perfume), the New Town porn shops, and films at Facets. My favorite piece is 'Spew Forth,' a hilarious story with scenes involving an 'enlightened soul' from Venus, a holistic therapist, and some raunchy demon sex. That one's fiction for sure--I hope."
—Jerome Ludwig, Chicago Reader
"A 'fragmented autobiography,' says Bellamy of this collection of blazing anarchy and brilliant perception. And, also, 'about the ridiculousness of the categories of truth versus fiction.' Somewhere between the truth of life and the lies of fiction--that's where the essence of Pink Steam cavorts. Bellamy's selection of a decade's worth of essays and stories and fragments and fantasies and letters is light reading and heavy thinking, defying gender and defining the exhilaration of sexual, artistic, and emotional freedoms. And. It's. Really. Really. Fun. To. Read! Perhaps not a book for most every fan of easy mysteries and jaunty raunch--but books like this, happily and smartly, expand the spectrum of queer reading."
—Richard Labonte, Books to Watch Out For
"It is curious that Dodie Bellamy's Pink Steam and Bill Clinton's My Life were published in such proximity. Both chronicle distinct 'American journeys' (respectively from Hammond, Indiana to San Francisco, and Hope, Arkansas to the White House). Both also work with expectations of narrative, stories that promise to reveal and confess the relationship of bodies and sexuality. While the presidential memoir speaks 'for the record,' Bellamy's collection of essays plays with these expectations, twinning fiction and memoir. In the end, it is a body's confession at the center of sex, letters, junk food, and Republicans.
"At stake here is the question of the creation of a uniquely American voice in memoir, how a writer takes ownership of that voice or how that voice ultimately takes ownership of the writer (and her body). The presidential memoir attempts to reconstruct the events, places, and individuals that pass for history, gathering its 'authoritative' voice along the way from our expectations of such stories. Bellamy's memoir is a kind of time capsule, though one that is not governed by narrative restraint, authorial voice, or escape velocity. It gathers pieces of things, rock and roll lyrics, passages from slasher movies, and childhood toys, questioning how each offers itself as a distinct confession. Posing 'Barbie's Dream House,' Bellamy writes, 'Details accrue to suggest a life. But whose? Barbie's name is on the box, so it must be hers. But what kind of life does Barbie lead? Sophisticated, suburban, vapid?…The longer you stare at it the tenser the Dream House makes you feel.' This collection is one long stare, a phenomenology in the sense that it gathers one object after another, asking how this 'YIKES!,' this collection of gray suits, this plastic fork and knife explain America.
"Along the way, memoir itself becomes one of the objects present for examination. The situation is posed: '(there is) no way I can stand in front of an audience reading this stuff and maintain the abstraction the 'author' really, it is I who have invaded my own privacy.' How does the memoir explain America? As one person asks, 'Doesn't the word 'complicity' sound like a woman's name?' Pink Steam spins out of a woman's experience in this situation, her body along for the ride. Memoir itself is traditionally connected with notions of authenticity and individual experience. Language is struck from the dualities of self and world. The traditional American memoir constructs a narrative of failure and triumph, the ordered construction of bodies in place. We read the presidential memoir to find how his narrative locates itself within other narratives of bodies and time--i.e. to see "what really happened." Such reconstructions of the facts work to peel desire from sex. In Pink Steam, the body and its desire reenter the equation with all its awkward variables. Working between Bowie's lyrics, Bellamy writes, 'My life was a blur, but sometimes the blur would crystallize into lucid, amazing moments. Michael's body was one of those moments, his cock in such sharp focus it cut me.' With stunning precision, the writing here carves these experiences from their context. It works to, as she puts it, 'champion the vulnerable, the fractured, the disenfranchised, the sexually fucked-up. A female body who has sex writing about sex.' What this requires for her is the abandonment of any attempt to locate this work in any kind of a linear relationship. What results is a constant relocation within the body, physically and artistically, the image broken loose from the expectations of experience and consequent memoir. In her estimation, work that fights the predominant tendency to 'hermetically seal content in aesthetics.' Her brilliant (and bodily) confession: 'Dodie, you are so full of shit.'
"Pink Steam subverts any notion that tries to locate memoir in an 'authentic narrative experience,' one where memoir is simply what is confessed or withheld. Instead, it establishes a new set of dualities, body and experience, sex and authenticity, writing and one's sense of location within lived, cultural experience whether that is lived through a pilfered diary or a horror film. The presidential 'I' is one thing; Bellamy's 'I' is clamorous, prose with hooks, a voice under the skin. Pink Steam uses memoir as an exoskeleton--not getting to the heart of things, nor the surface, but unpeeling the form to see what's just below it. In the end, it is a phenomenology of the diary, the love note, and the confession--one that is uniquely located in experiences of dissembled corporations and marketplace censorship, one where the borders have supposedly been drawn between what works in writing and what is possible, what is experienced and what is 'allowed.'"
—Garin Cycholl, Court Green
"Bellamy is David Lynch in print, teen porn under fluorescent lights, a sandpaper jumpsuit sandy side in. She drops casual, humble, hysterical hints for the less pop-culturally literate. She demystifies romance like studying poop up close in the toilet. She loves ugly. Bodily juices, death, class, and hopelessness, all magnified under her snarky, so-fucked-it's-funny, post-feminist glare. This is the Punk Aesthetic."
—Lynn Breedlove, author of Godspeed: A Novel
"Dodie Bellamy's newest book is now available at
Wal-Mart. Stacked near Americana cookbooks and
respectable old-fashioned fiction sits The Letters of
Mina Harker, a promiscuous horror-pop journey against
the backdrop of the early AIDS crisis told through the
voice of a surviving character of Bram Stoker's
Dracula. Originally published in 1998, it was
re-released last year by University of Wisconsin Press
and touted by writer Dennis Cooper as 'one of the most
important novels of our time.'
"How the nation's largest family-friendly retail chain
came to carry one of the most influential experimental
voices from the sexual underground remains a bit of a
mystery, though critics have for years complained that
the title has not received its due.
"But how Bellamy became a literary and queer icon--as
a married woman who often writes about sex with gay
men--makes perfect sense, at least to anyone living
in San Francisco.
"Bellamy's career beginnings can be traced to the new
narrative movement of the 1980s, a radical group that
included the likes of writers Kathy Acker, Bob Gluck,
and Kevin Killian.
"'The queer writing we envisioned would collapse the
boundaries between literary forms and confound the
categories of sexuality,' Bellamy wrote in the 2000
Village Voice Pride issue about these early days.
"It was in Gluck's workshop that she met Killian, a gay
man who seemed an unlikely match for a woman whose
romantic relationships began with a 15-year lesbian
affair. Their identities and histories intact, Bellamy
and Killian fell in love, and were married at San
Francisco's City Hall in 1986. Others have been trying
to redefine them ever since.
"'I get called 'straight' all the time,' said Bellamy,
54, of her interactions outside the Bay Area bubble. A
recent Canadian documentary that features her marriage
is titled Fag Hags, and reviews of the film have
suggested that its subjects live in comedic
arrangements or have abandoned their gay identities.
The local scene, for all its emerging sexual and
gender fluidity, is generally more accepting, but it
took people like Bellamy to blaze that trail and to
continuously assert a queer identity no matter how
inconvenient.
"As a female writer, Bellamy found early role models to
be scarce. It was writing and socializing in gay male
circles, she said, that gave her a vocabulary for her
expressions.
"'I really learned an active, rather than a reactive
sexuality,' she said. 'I learned how to use sex as a
state of being, as the way you take in the world.'
"Doing this intelligently, and through a structure that
challenges the boundaries of essay, fiction, and
memoir, is the difference between Bellamy and other
writers known for their explicit material. Publishers
known for their thought-provoking books have been
clamoring for her work; Suspect Thoughts Press
released her collection Pink Steam last year, and her
forthcoming book Academonia is due soon from Factory
School Publications.
"The irony of Bellamy's writing career is that the more
success she garnered, the less employable she seemed
to become. Universities that have been interested in
hiring her to teach full-time have expressed concerns
over some of her content. Gay male writers are almost
required to have a sexual aesthetic, but sexuality in
women's work can be seen by academia as simple
perversion without merit.
"Not to worry, though. Bellamy has been a regular
writing teacher at institutions like San Francisco
State University, Antioch College in Los Angeles, and
Allen Ginsberg's writing program at the Naropa
University in Boulder, Colorado. She also teaches
regularly out of her home, fostering an environment
that offers smart input and regular community to a
predominately queer workshop with high artistic
standards.
"'It's hard to find a space to get serious feedback on
sexual writing,' she said. 'I wanted to have a space
where having sexual writing could be just like any
other topic.'
"Bellamy's 10-week workshops are offered every few
months, and from these she often solicits work from
her students for readings and publications, providing
them with opportunities for getting their own work out
into the world.
"What she gives to the community she has received in
return from younger queer circles, she said, and she
credits writers like Michelle Tea--author of Valencia
and The Chelsea Whistle--for creating a strong queer
female culture for writers and performers of all ages,
backgrounds, and abilities.
"'It's been so healing for me to know the younger queer
community. Any residual issues I've had about being a
woman in this society have been wiped away,' said
Bellamy, who has read with the famous Sister Spit tour
created by Tea and fellow wordsmith Sini Anderson, and
at Kvetch, the longest-running queer open mike in San
Francisco hosted by Lynn Breedlove and Tara Jepsen.
'It has radicalized me in a way that's really
empowering, particularly around issues like the body,
and sex and gender fluidity. I wish all this stuff was
around when I was younger.'
"Tea said she feels similarly inspired by Bellamy. 'Dodie is a writer I like to read before sitting down
to write my own stuff,' said Tea. 'Her prose is
liberating and inspiring the way she talks both
plainly and lushly about desire and the body and
femaleness, the way she takes daredevil chances with
form and structure, it's like the intellectual
equivalent of doing pilates.'
—Zak Szymanski, Bay Area Reporter
"Pink Steam is a compulsive read. This expert collection of essays qua fictions walks a vertiginous border between individual experience and the sadistic force of the accepted 'norm.' There is truth on one side, lying on the other. Then they switch, the inanimate become the animate, the fiction reality, and what seemed peaceful and clean suddenly becomes monstrous. Barbie's Dream House turns gothic, Judy Garland sadly ponders Henry Darger, a woman in Florida turns into a reptile, demons are exorcised via bulimia, and so on. No weird world this, but rather the vanishing middlebrow America of Montgomery Ward's, Filter Queen vacuums, all beef franks, and King Kong. Yet for all that Pink Steam is not kitschy, it is a culturally astute document of the real written by a master at the height of her powers."
—Jennifer Moxley, author of Imagination Verses and The Sense Record
"In Pink Steam, one sentence eviscerates another the way Regan cried for help on the surface of Linda Blair's skin. Bounding from autobiography to Oscar Wilde to King Kong to the booze-addled body of Judy Garland, Dodie Bellamy's anarchic imagination sends the cozy pieties of linguistic form through a blender, suturing the results into something perversely original. If anyone can drag the sleeping, stagnant beast of contemporary literature into the future, she can."
—Brian Pera, author of Troublemaker
"Dodie Bellamy may well be America's answer to Roland Barthes."
—Steven Shapiro, Washington Review of Books
release: June 2004
fiction/memoir/essay
softcover, 5X8
192 pages
$16.95
0-9746388-0-3
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