Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992

The poets and writers whose work is collected in UP IS UP BUT SO IS DOWN: NEW YORK'S UNDERGROUND LITERARY SCENE 1974 -- 1992 are not writers you will find between the pages of THE NEW YORKER or in tidy academic anthologies. The men and women who populated the now-legendary downtown scene of New York in the 70s and 80s wrote scabrous, violent, and often bitterly funny verse and prose with a force and irreverence that made their words jump off the page, or, in many cases, the stage. Editor Brandon Stosuy has done a remarkable job in assembling the messy strands of downtown writing -- culled from fanzines, underground journals, flyers, and photographs -- into a thorough and vibrant whole. An essential document and a guidepost for any budding literary avant-gardist. Michael Lindgren

Up Is Up But So Is Down is a book you have to turn over a lot, and I don't just mean in your head. You can see this already from the cover. Be careful reading it on the subway as you will inevitably hit someone with either the book or your elbow as you turn it round to read a particular zine cover or flyer or look at a picture or poster. This shifting and turning of the book makes you immediately aware of the fact that this is not just reading you are doing here. In a way, the words work a lot like the images and flyers and covers. You turn them over in order to see. Similarly, the images being related to print, you turn the images over in order to read. You are constantly reading and looking. The connection between text and image is palpable. In his introduction, editor Brandon Stosuy calls the book a "snapshot," and I recall the Eudora Welty quote "A good snapshot stops a moment from running away." Is this what the book sets out to do and does it succeed? On the one hand, there is a clear sense that the moment is gone. Much of the writing, Stosuy notes is out of print, overlooked, forgotten and never even known beyond its first publication. The introduction details how it could not be any other way. The book chronicles a literature that from its inception had been running away. From ad hoc performances to self-made, self distributed zines, permanency at no point seemed part of the consciousness of the scene. Time, however, is certainly in the consciousness of the book, and with the book, gets turned over a lot as well. Reading Edward Sanders' 1975 poem "The Age," one feels the tragic resonances with the present day ("criminals of the right will rise up...to chop up candidates in the name of some person-with-a-serotonin-imbalance's moan of national security"), and where Sanders' "Age" differs from ours ("this is the poets' era), that, too, is tragic. A conversation between Gerard Malanga, Lisa Falour, and Lynn Tillman makes you feel intimately part of a life you most likely never lived as you eavesdrop on conversations about bondage photography and Andy Warhol. As you eavesdrop, though, there are these peculiar moments, Tillman saying "I never lasted long enough to see that," Falour responding, "you missed a great scene." They are talking about a film, one written for Malanga but of which he does not have a copy, as it was borrowed and never returned. This little snapshot, if you will, already suggests the ephemerality, that the scene (downtown, not the movie) was already bound up with "never [lasting] long enough," "missed," lost and never returned, that it was already running way. If the scene is already conscious of its running away, the early to mid-80s run seems to say along with Spalding Gray, "why rush it?" The largest section of the book, here downtown writing seems to be basking in its self, for its limited time only. The beginning poem Miguel Pinero's Lower East Side poem, could not be more representative.

There are good books that you read, enjoy, and put back on the shelf; and then there are books like UP IS UP..., which you keep nearby to facilitate the frequent dips you know you'll need. Obsession is mandatory. Even the downtown agnostic will be won over by the energy, inventiveness, and humor of the selections; the book's terrific size and design (reproducing dozens of small-run journal pages, photos, handbills, and the like) make it totally addictive. This is hands down one of the strongest books of the year. To mangle the Velvets, down for me is up.