Walking Through Clear Water In a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories (Canons)

Product Information

Waters’ cool, collected manner, as well as his taste in depravity and melodrama, come into focus in his brief exchange with a bed-bound Mueller.

Mueller was living on borrowed time too. While Scarpati was in the hospital, she and her friend, artist Scott Covert, went to Provincetown, Mass. “She had this card that I found,” Covert remembers in Chloe Griffin’s oral biography of Mueller, “Edgewise.” “It had something she would repeat to herself, for some kind of visualization, like a mantra: ‘I will live long enough to write my novel — one year, two years ... .’ I don’t know what the novel was about; maybe her life. She wanted to dedicate it to her son.” In her art review column for Details, the independent downtown culture magazine, Mueller didn’t review art as much as she lamented about the state of the art world, and waxed poetic whenever she was moved to do so. “You have to have opinions while looking for art or searching out the other forms of divinity in daily life,” she succinctly says in her May 1987 essay as she rereads her most recent column.Nan Goldin created and widely exhibited The Cookie Portfolio 1976–1989, a series of 15 portraits, after Mueller's death. One photograph, "Cookie and Vittorio's Wedding" (1986), documents Mueller's wedding to Vittorio Scarpati, an Italian artist and jewelry designer from Naples who died of AIDS just seven weeks before Mueller. [6] Another of Goldin's photographs, "Cookie at Vittorio's Casket, NYC, September 1989," was called a "magnificent portrait ... a great image. Devastating but great," by the San Francisco Examiner's art critic David Bonetti. [7] Mueller is a compulsive chronicler of her times and a fond observer of whatever curved balls get sent her way. Not unlike the autobiographical stories of Hollywood raconteur Eve Babitz, hers put a whimsical spin on experiences that are no laughing matter (addiction, rape, the AIDS crisis). Mueller rarely focuses on her internalized experience of challenging or traumatic situations, and when she does, it’s parodic: “I was so wildly miserable I was projectile-vomiting at the very thought of facing another morning,” she writes of a fresh breakup in “The Stone of New Orleans.” In this story, which features a spontaneous trip to Louisiana with Nan Goldin, the pain of heartbreak becomes an excuse to try something new, in this case Haitian witchcraft (“some gris-gris stuff,” Goldin clarifies, as they enquire about love spells to Creole street dancers in the French Quarter of New Orleans). “Why not?” Mueller concludes. “I’d tried everything else.” Mueller, Cookie (1997). Scholder, Amy (ed.). Ask Dr. Mueller: The Writings of Cookie Mueller. New York: Serpent's Tail High Risk Books. ISBN 1-85242-331-5. Olivia Laing is the author of Crudo, To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring, and The Lonely City, which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and translated into fifteen languages.

Her chronicles of the last days of American countercultural life New York's downtown scene bursts with energy. Mueller’s unflappability, her refusal of stasis and self-pity, her hunger for beauty, her readiness to find it where few else would look—all of it adds up into a singular code for living, in which the worst thing a person could do is flinch.” What these writers also have in common is an unfiltered, pre-internet relationship to the world. Widespread use of social media has created an intensified culture of social mirroring and self-consciousness that these writers didn't experience, and this immediacy with the world is reflected in their prose. While there can be a particular detachment and ambiguity found in contemporary fiction and nonfiction, there is a certain electricity in this work from the late 20th century that perhaps comes from the way the writing itself hews so closely to the intimacy of experience. The quips are brief, the humor is mordant, and the insights are sharp, clarifying flashes of light. There seems to be no distance between the thing which is felt and the crisp articulation of it. In advice to her lonely single girlfriends, Mueller writes: After her underground film status had faded, she moved to New York and became a writer, journalist, and columnist. [2] [3] Author [ edit ]By the time the collection arrives at Mueller’s fiction, what’s true and what isn’t seems irrelevant. For Mueller, truth was in permanent parentheses. Mueller explores how to handle loss in “Valerie Losing 2,” a story about a woman who woke up one day to find one of her toes was mysteriously missing. Female trouble,” she responds, a catch-all phrase which she admits the film director finds “so funny it became the title for his next movie.” Established in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design. Mueller died from AIDS-related pneumonia on November 10, 1989, at Cabrini Medical Center in New York City, aged 40. [4] Her ashes are interred in multiple locations: on the beach near Provincetown; in the flowerbed of the Church of St. Luke in the Fields in Greenwich Village; alongside those of Vittorio and her dog Beauty in the Scarpati family crypt in Sorrento, Italy; under the statue of Christ the Redeemer atop Corcovado in Rio de Janeiro; in the South Bronx; and in the holy waters of the Ganges River. She was survived by her son, Max Wolfe Mueller, who appeared in Pink Flamingos. When she was 18, Mueller moved to San Francisco. There, she spent drug-fueled days bumping shoulders with the likes of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, and going on adventures that seem almost too insane to be true, as if Hunter S. Thompson had written Joan Didion’s seminal essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.