What do You think about The Waterfront Journals (1996)?
I love to read gorgeous books I've failed the gall to write. Oh well. This book is so sweet and breaking in that desolation angel faggot hustler way. Oh.But so much better. It has this hard truth to it. It isn't fiction, but that's not why. It is because he is so used to it that he can't but fail to fetishize-idealize-exoticize these subjects--unlike everyone else. Name someone else, please, so that I will read all of their books and love you. I don't know much about Genet, but I wonder, in light of Wojnarowicz, how Genet is able fetishize his faggot criminals to the point of marbleizing them. It makes me think he wasn't really there-there. That he was there, but only as a writer is anywhere, a parasite sucking all the life out of his environs for later, not living it. "Let's avoid life by taking this picture in order to be able to look back on it later and feel that we were living, that we were beautiful--ect." This what I am saying is not a theory and is uninformed. I imagine Genet must have been there-there, had to have been. I just don't know how the high classicalism, of Querelle at least, can be extracted from the kind of experience that wears away a person's fantasies and replaces them with less interesting realities. Querelle was written by Plato. There are cops and gamblers and sailors who fuck eachother, many of them with homophobic rage, yes. And, regarding the ones I've met and the ones friends have told me about--I can't imagine us extracting a kind of dead trope from those entirely specific, un-ideal moments in physics. But fetishes are incalculable, and clearly, they survive their consummation and fulfillment.But Wojnarowicz's kind of worn factuality pushes up against his young (totally fetishizable!) James-Dean-of-Sodom passion with a delectable irreconcilability that could only be elegant coexistence. The fat is burned off--entirely--whether that burning approaches burlesque in the final paragraphs. But its counterweight, a thing Susan Faludi or Henry Miller would never understand--to say nothing of Kerouac or Ginseberg--that is, real actual desperate homeless poverty, makes the book more true than any slum-tourist manifesto ever was, and more urgent than all the stack of Beat cunt and road visions.
—Alan
I wasn't originally all that impressed with the book. It seemed like lots of interviews, like he was a queer Studs Terkel or something. They were all other people's stories, so the only parts of him in them were the editing, the transcribing and the kinds of people he hung out with. So, impressive, but it felt like a kind of catalog of different personalities.In the end, though, when he writes two stories that i presume are his own experiences, that's when his real gifts shine through. The stories are just as fantastic as those he's collected from other people, with the anonymous sex, weightlessness and longing. He balances the easy romance of urban exploration and love questing with the hardness of desperation, random violence and banality. I'm left with the impression that anything and everything is tolerable as long as you put up a fight."I lean back and tilt my head so all I see are the clouds in the sky. I'm looking back inside my head with my eyes wide open. I still don't know where I'm going; I decided I'm not crazy or alien. It's just that I'm more like one of those kids they find in remote jungles or forests []. A wolf child. And they've dragged me into this fucking schizo-culture, snarling and spitting and walking around on curled knuckles."
—Daniel
