It is not enough to break your heart;
I must break your jaw as well.
Say
that, and you’ll probably scare away your lover. Do that, and
you’ll most likely get locked up. Blog it, and you might
find yourself a home in
Userlands (Akashic, $16.95), a collection of
transgressions from the dark side of the blogosphere, and a
place where a caress goes better with a fist.
Or a
knife, or a bottle, or a boot. These are the tales that try
love’s soul, then they try it some more. Unsheathed, broken
and stomped. And even on the odd occasion when someone
doesn’t actually end up in traction, there’s still fracture,
lots and lots of fracture.
But
this book is beyond any breaking point most ever hear of,
let alone face, which, er, is just the point: to push and to
push and to shove, over every hump and into every gutter,
until the break makes you one with your pieces.
Assembled with dare by Dennis Cooper, he of Frisk and
Closer and The Sluts, Userlands,
subtitled New Fiction From the
Blogging Underground,
is the urgings of a new crop of flagellants brought out of
the closet and into the cyber fire, where scars are not so
much a badge of honor, but a sign of feel.
|
Even on the odd
occasion when someone doesn’t actually end up in
traction, there’s still fracture, lots and lots of
fracture. |
And
feel doesn’t even begin to describe what these folk are out
for, nor does it start to represent what they get — a black
eye for every held hand, a fat lip for every shared smile, a
pummeling for their thoughts. But that’s what brings ’em
closer to life. Is it ironic that it takes the
impersonalness of the Internet to unnumb these scribes? You
betcha. What isn’t ironic is that these scribblers have
taken to the task to reveal a feel that reaches to their
very marrow.
Like
the queer zine diddlings Cooper collected in 1994’s
Discontents, Userlands is heavy on same-sex
awakenings. That, after all, is his oeuvre. And his
prerogative. But the yin and the yang of yearn isn’t belted
in sexual orientation, even if it does so very often occur
below the belt. Or below the belted.
Here
the belted delve and delve deep, into the abscesses of some
very dark places, where the need of a knuckle, the want of a
bleed, the draw of a last gasp means never having to say
you’re lonely. And though most of the best hurt does take
place in the home, this is not your HG variety domestic
violence. No, in this hothouse bad things grow good, despite
the stifling suffocation.
Of
course groping for breath in a sea of dead air isn’t a new
phenomenon — the line of slights stretches from de Sade through
Céline and on to Selby and Welsh — yet never before have
such gropes been given such room to breathe heavy. These
days everyone gets a voice, even the most muzzled among us,
and we all get a chance to crack into a beautiful bruise.
Comments? E-mail
letters@miamisunpost.com
