"How I Became a Downtown Writer"

"How I Became a Downtown Writer"

The literary insider explores downtown writing,

Samuel Beckett and the new Classical Hardcore

By Alexander Laurence

After having lived in busy New York City for a while, living in the decadent East Village, hanging out with brutal thugs, icy strippers and teddy bear junkies, and frequenting writers such as Bruce Benderson, Richard Hell, and Ursule Molinaro, I felt that my writing was subtly changing, and then noticed that many stories I wrote took place on Avenue A, usually describing the life of some down-and-out prostitute, involved heroin addiction and general impending decay.

I was aware that the writer Edward Dahlberg has said "We are too often reminded that many people have all of Baudelaire's abnormalities and are not artists but just hapless bores." I was becoming a downtown clone. In fact, if there was a software program that was both a generator of this end-of-the-world "downtown writing" and a surrealistic mad-lib, it would look something like this:

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The slimy rain was coming down on this muggy night, while I was standing on Avenue ___. I had been trying to get off _____ for a few weeks, while my girlfriend was having ____. I went over to the grimy apartment of _____ who wanted to get together to have sex or get high. We walked over to Avenue ___ where we tried to cop some drugs. We were jonesing for some ____. That's when we ran into ____ who was coming back from a bondage club. When we took a train to Times Square, we saw ____ who was now a prostitute and a ____ addict. Later we arrived at the small apartment of ____ where we had sex with ____ while getting high on ___. Then we brought out the ____. The urban sky was dark and people walked around the streets without hope.

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Words to choose from:

A--B--C--D--Heroin--Crack--LSD--Poppers--anal sex--withdrawals--an abortion--Richard Kern--Kathy Acker--Bruce Benderson--Lydia Lunch--Dee Dee Ramone--The Unbearables--a puerto rican prostitute--rubber gloves--lube--sex

What is "downtown writing?" There have been magazines like Between C & D, Cuz, The Portable Lower Side, and others, that have published this sort of decadent writing. The Low Rent and The Unbearables anthologies are other examples. "Downtown writing" has become the Kurt Cobain of today's literary scene (drugs, sex, success), and you know how Cobain dealt with success. Dahlberg spoke on the subject: "Man survives disease, paralysis, a thousand humiliations, almost any travail but success."

Since the 1970s, many of these writers have moved out of New York or have went uptown, but the "hard" writers like myself are still hanging out at Sin-é, looking for an angry fix and an un-angry woman. I remember what Dahlberg said on the subject: "After I discovered that Goethe, Heine, Beethoven and Nietzsche had all had syphillis, I thought I could not be a genius unless I found a woman who would be lenient enough to share this disease with me."

Actually the East Village has become too safe and yuppified for a delicate, hard, "downtown" writer like me, so I have moved to desperate Williamsburg, where the Downtown tradition is continuing and thriving on arty Bedford Avenue. If you want to be a Downtown writer, you can't live Downtown anymore, because you can't afford to.