ROBERT M. SELTZER is Professor of History at Hunter College, Chair of the Hunter Jewish Social Studies Program, and the author of Jewish People, Jewish Thought. NORMAN J. COHEN is Dean of the Hebrew Union College--Jewish Institute of Religion, New York, and Professor of Midrash.
""Up Is Up" is a remarkable monument to the vibrancy of the
Downtown scene. There are moments of romantic myth-making,
dysfunctional beauty and hilarious profundity. It documents a
now-gone era when lower Manhattan was an affordable oasis for
artists, writers and musicians, when poetry and prose rubbed up
against punk and visual art before drunkenly stumbling into an
endless pansexual orgy."
-"New York Press",
"Exhilarating. . . . "Up Is Up" reproduces flyers and pages from
lit mags to convey downtown's heady DIY ethos. The writing itself
displays sensibilities that are at once fiery and cool. Cookie
Mueller, Dennis Cooper, Wojnarowicz and many others merge crackling
prose and a matter-of-fact tone to burrow into disturbing corners
of sexual desire. AIDS takes a serious toll in the '80s, and
becomes the haunting focus in amazing selections by novelist Gary
Indiana and poet Tim Dlugos. Even as the scene begins to wind down,
the book nails the deep thrills of talk and collaboration,
especially in novelist Lynne Tillman's complex rendering of two
friends' bar-set conversation. That gift for gab lives on in the
epilogue, a spirited conversation between Eileen Myles and Cooper,
who resist mythologizing but invoke the scene's glory
nonetheless."
-"Time Out New York",
"Some of us like our angels with dirty faces; witness the lovingly
reproduced artifacts of "Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York's
Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992", a comprehensive compendium of
below-14th Street literary productions by everyone from Laurie
Anderson to Nick Zedd, focusing on the output of small magazines of
the era like Koff, Bomb, and Between C and D...[the] stories meld
dry satire with heart-churningly desperate transmissions of damaged
humanity."
-"Village Voice",
"This is a kind of three-decade book celebrating the possibilities
of a self-sufficient writing community right under the nose of the
decaying, increasingly irrelevant, empire of New York
publishing."
-"American Book Review",
"Up Is Up itself has a scrapbook feel. It gathers poems, excerpts
and short stories as well as handmade magazine covers, pamphlets
and posters that capture the collaborative, on-the-fly spirit of
the period. . . . What is most arresting about UP IS UP is not its
discovery of any individual genius but its invocation of an
electrifying social energy that helped blast out an intellectual
space for then-'transgressive' female and gay writers."
-"New York Times Book Review",
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