sotos

Started by FreakAnimalFinland, March 04, 2010, 08:29:07 PM

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HongKongGoolagong

#240
Desistance is an incredible book which distils everything I've enjoyed about his writing over the last ten years very successfully. It's about D'Agata as much as Predicate was about Thomas Hamilton; while there are lengthy quotes from and conversations with the photographer, Sotos of course forces his art into his own usual preoccupations. In one exchange D'Agata tries to get him to explain what the connection is between his work, and the Bijou, and a famous crime victim. Yet the book does create connections in the mind, always around where art, deviant sex and crime blur.

Of the found voices, many deal with the history of gay pornography and its legal struggles. Sotos still feels uncomfortable describing himself as 'gay' and there's an unexpected and I think deliberately farcical autobiographical strand where he's having an affair with an overweight married woman to try and get at her husband. In his usual contorted paragraphs of internal monologue and argument the tone is now more confused than violent; he's upfront about suffering from something resembling a psychotic illness yet as sceptical as ever about psychiatry. It struck me that 'outsider writing' is a more suitable description for books as unusual as this rather than pornography or transgressive lit. The occasional neologisms would be treated as a symptom of schizophrenia by some. The casual sex with men he doesn't seem to like much is as repetitious as ever, and he throws in a final comic-cum-elegiac mention of how the Machine Shop and LV Sales closed.

At one point there's a conversation, either transcribed or imagined, in which Sotos tries to suggest how his work might prevent crimes of sexual abuse towards children. In one very memorable passage, he visits an old girlfriend hospitalised after domestic abuse: he blames himself for setting her on the road to this situation, the guilt about the sickness of confusing sex and violence seeming absolutely genuine. Then later in the book he visits her again. This time a car crash put her there. You almost miss it - hallucination and false memory and fear, like a Lodge Kerrigan film.

The book ends by addressing his audience directly, with humour and empathy. I'm sure he wouldn't want the book to be described as 'moving' but it is, as well as being as thought-provoking as ever and in parts stunningly written.

I found the layout and page size comfortable to read. The endpapers of poorly reproduced D'Agata images, a catalogue statement and the Joseph E Duncan prosecution's opening argument are, as usual in his books, a dispensable bonus to the meat of the text.

boorman

HongKongGoolagong -

Thanks for this thoughtful account.  I agree with a lot of your observations, with regards to MINE too, and that Sotos' unique output continues to accrue ever more nuance and artful complexity, despite and because of its repetition.  The more returns to the older books I make, the more the themes and arcs of his thought are clarified, and some slippery autobiography falls into place as you learn how to read them more thoroughly.  There's so much packed into these books, there's just nothing else like them.  I'm particularly looking forward to Desistance. 

Are the exchanges between him and d'Agata genuine? 

Also, I badly need all the editions of WAITRESS.  If anyone could see their way to making copies, scans, or loaning me originals so I can copy them myself and return them after, I'd be very grateful, and happy to pay whatever.  Sotos has such a small audience - I sometimes wish a dedicated and responsible fan would collect the harder to find material together and make it available through some portal or other..  Any takers? 

If anyone can help with WAITRESS though, please let me know

 

HongKongGoolagong

Quote from: boorman on October 23, 2014, 02:06:25 AM
Are the exchanges between him and d'Agata genuine? 

As ever, it's impossible to verify - Sotos is the very essence of 'unreliable narrator'. Anita Dalton's credited editorial assistance on this book may be one of the reasons it especially stands out. She's certainly the most perceptive literary critic who's written about him, and she's very unpretentious.

That interview with James Williamson is an excellent read. Glad to know someone else finds the USA's tipping culture degrading/creepy.

cantle

#243
Just finished my copy- got to agree with HongKongGoolagong it has be be his best work for a while, more rounded than his other work, a sense of resignation and tiredness seemed to permemate through the book to me too.

BTW- HongKongGoolagong any links to Dalton's comments on Sotos please?

Nevermind- google worked

online prowler

Quote from: bitewerksMTB on November 16, 2014, 10:05:36 PM
There's some interesting nonsense here (good chance the link has already been posted):

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2011/06/480820.html?c=on

I like this quote from 'Not for Profit': "...you're WELCOME to call me a "coward" for not providing the name that would enable people like Peter Sotos and the Pure reader who (according to the Chicago Tribune) was a "suspect in a series of brutal child abductions, murders and grave robbings" to work out who I am and where me and my family live."

your welcome, yes.

RyanWreck

Quote from: bitewerksMTB on November 16, 2014, 10:05:36 PM
There's some interesting nonsense here (good chance the link has already been posted):

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2011/06/480820.html?c=on

I like this quote from 'Not for Profit': "...you're WELCOME to call me a "coward" for not providing the name that would enable people like Peter Sotos and the Pure reader who (according to the Chicago Tribune) was a "suspect in a series of brutal child abductions, murders and grave robbings" to work out who I am and where me and my family live."

I assume he is referring to the Scottish guy who stole a skull to stick on his microphone stand at shows?

RyanWreck

Quote from: bitewerksMTB on November 24, 2014, 11:14:01 PM
Quote from: RyanWreck on November 24, 2014, 04:59:58 PM
Quote from: bitewerksMTB on November 16, 2014, 10:05:36 PM
There's some interesting nonsense here (good chance the link has already been posted):

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2011/06/480820.html?c=on

I like this quote from 'Not for Profit': "...you're WELCOME to call me a "coward" for not providing the name that would enable people like Peter Sotos and the Pure reader who (according to the Chicago Tribune) was a "suspect in a series of brutal child abductions, murders and grave robbings" to work out who I am and where me and my family live."

I assume he is referring to the Scottish guy who stole a skull to stick on his microphone stand at shows?

Without going back & checking, I think N.F.P. is referring to the original articles about Peter's arrest.

Yea, I was thinking of the English guy, not Scottish (Scotland yard is probably what I was confusing), in Metgumbnerbone who Sotos mentioned in an older interview:


tiny_tove

weren't they connected to the new blockaders?
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RyanWreck

Quote from: tiny_tove on December 03, 2014, 09:42:38 AM
weren't they connected to the new blockaders?

Yea, both Philip and Richard did some work with him, but apparently Metgumbnerbone was John Mylotte's project with session and guest members rotating about so I assume John is who Sotos is probably referring to in that interview.

HongKongGoolagong

The Curfew Recordings is a good listen - released by Harbinger Sound last year and consisting of tapes made by members of Metgumbnerbone clandestinely while literally on a curfew over this long ago Satanic panic era case rooted in hysteria which should never have come to court. John Smith (Interchange) talks about the criminal proceedings in As Loud As Possible and still sounds disgusted. Typical of the class-riddled British justice system that the sentencing was lighter on the two who were university students.

That certainly is an embarrassing and jejune letter Sotos wrote.

Baglady

Yes, that is a very good album. And the mentioned thighbone comes to good use there. Beautiful stuff.

Harcamone

So I just finished Show Adult. Here are my thoughts and some bits from the text since it's so hard to obtain.

"The correct worth of pornography lies in the monsters that think it's important enough to pay it more attention than they'd like to. And better, yet again, when amped up by the understanding that the same fucking revelations happen every time they makes themselves cum. Read the critiques and the cocksuckers who explain what they do. As similarly flat, pervasive, and clearly evident as in absolutely every single relationship and tossed-off sentence ever entered into or uttered. Try again. But try hard to think love, rather than bitterness, or disgust, is what you're aiming at."

His fragments and syntax really annoy me sometimes but I think he does it intentionally to be disruptive ...

"Andrea Dworkin created her body. Created her entire culturally desperate existence by writing directly at herself ... She pummels her books and herself with quotes from others and begins her life telling everyone how beautiful and important words are. Specifically a Sartre quote regarding his treatment under the Nazis. It's remarkable that idiots are still separating her body from her writing. And blaming food or make-up. The words are first and foremost. The thoughts are everything, are brutal, correct, sadistic agent. Her sentences are run-on, your own badly used words constantly repeated. Paragraphs are memories and stink into hysterical hermetic chapters. If she didn't hate it so much she'd be issuing travelers paperbacks. If she wasn't inviting you to debate, she'd be showing you the tattoo just above her ass. Dworkin is obsessed with sex and pummels herself when she sees it pummeling herself."

Sotos' is really invested in her work and how she personifies herself, as he has said in an interviews, so this was illuminating regarding his perspective on her.

Here's my review:

A logical progression after Selfish, Little and Comfort and Critique, which makes Predicate seem even more like a strange stylistic detour, or regression, for having immediately preceded this. Collage is still present, of course, and there is more talk of gloryholes and sad cocksucking here than perhaps in any other Sotos book outside of Index.

Here though, the facts of Sotos' slumming and his deviant queer experience are more closely linked to his obsessions with media portrayals of sex crimes. When talking about lamenting mothers, he says, "[h]ow dare you, cunt, think you're going to tell me what it's like not to understand your loss? You think I've never missed a fucking bus. Known someone with cancer and watched any number of loved ones die of it? Fuck, I've been to more hospital rooms than you, fucking het."

He puts himself, and in general the predator, at some level of human disadvantage, giving them some level of sympathy. The book is a literary Skinner Box experiment, evinced by the cover, which forces the reader to see the evident villains in at least the same light as sad and shudderring monkeys clutching cloth mothers, and maybe seeing Sotos' narrative voice to be a little more empathetic than even that. If he wants it. He gives it out. In Comfort and Critique, he humanizes parents more. In Selfish, Little, Lesley, thus the victim. Here the pigs aren't really dissected, but Sotos himself (at least as persona if not author, poetic speaker if not the man himself wholly) is revealed a little more here than before, and humanized. Through bar conversations, brief meditations on the fear of HIV/AIDS, and biting contrasts like the quote above.

Again, as the years progress, Sotos's becomes more reflective (if not necessarily accessible to a wider audience) and his most recent works are easily found. Sotos' rests beyond the perimeters of marketable "transgressive" literature, and more importantly, hinges at the edge of queer deviance. Without the fantasy of Cooper or the intersectional politics of Delany, Sotos' forces his readers to give thought to darkest edges of human contemplation and the formulation of desire. This book is emblematic of that, and makes interesting formal choices that differentiate it from its predecessors and makes it just as essential reading. Hopefully at some point Sotos' back catalog from this period will be reprinted. This book in particular is so scarce it's almost as if it was never written. It's lack of availability compared to those that are more available from Sotos' ouevre might be purposeful, probably because of its focus on Masha Allen, who was a widely discussed topic in the media at the time of the book's release.

F_c_O

Quote from: RyanWreck on December 31, 2014, 01:03:07 AM
There are people actually using Sotos quotes for their moments of facebook/tumblr "inspiration"...
I want to believe that its a joke by people who actually know who sotos is.

edit: lets remove those images. No need to have them here twice.

endors_toi

So, I see the new, expanded edition of "The Gates of Janus" has two texts by Sotos; an afterword and one called "Bait". Is "Bait" a new, special text for this edition?

Also -- is it worth reading (I mean, EVERYTHING by Sotos always is, but I'm talking about the "meat" of the book itself, by Ian Brady)? I had a period of time where I was obsessed with the Moors murders, but most people's review of the book claim Brady's narcissistic ramblings have no added value to them. What do you guys think?

tiny_tove

Quote from: endors_toi on May 22, 2015, 12:09:04 AM
but most people's review of the book claim Brady's narcissistic ramblings have no added value to them. What do you guys think?

I think the book was worth for Peter's text... the rest may be interesting but doesn't add anything to the subject... despite the excellent title :)
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