Will Work for Drugs
Praise for
Paradoxia
(Akashic Books, 2007)
“Lunch's headlong plunge into manic devastation and corruption at times recalls the better work of William S. Burroughs ⦠Strangely honest rantings from a modern-day Genet.”
âKirkus Reviews
“A lurid, profane account of downtown living ⦔
â
Newsday,
“Our Favorites of 2007”
“Beyond the book's chronicling of Lunch's desires, it serves an over-arching, exhibitionist desire to perform, and it brings a decrepit, vanished New York to life ⦠It recreates its time and place with vivid authenticity.”
â
Publishers Weekly
“Paradoxia
is compelling, exhilarating, and infinitely readable.”
â
Paper
“Paradoxia
is very much a cultural documentâa glimpse of the warts-and-all attitude of someone who strove to be transgressive and often succeeded. Through streaming open-mike cadences, staccato scorn, and a highly attuned olfactory memory, Lunch captures the swoony, viscous downtown of yesteryear, when sex and the city meant something else entirely.”
â
Time Out New York
(4 stars)
“Hubert Selby, Jr. famously said that he grew up feeling like a scream without a mouth. Lydia Lunch, one of his most celebratedâand most uncompromisingâliterary progeny, delivered scream, mouth, teeth, blood, hair, sperm, knife, and adrenaline in her purgatorial masterpiece
Paradoxia
.”
âJerry Stahl, author of
Permanent Midnight
“Intoxicating. Dirty. Erotic. Damn, Lydia Lunch's
Paradoxia
intrigues and resonates with every word ⦠[It] is a seductive and redemptive story of lustâlust for satisfaction, for power, for solitude, and for understanding how to live.”
â
Feminist Review
“Paradoxia
reveals that Lunch is at her best when she's at her worst ⦠and gives voice to her sometimes scary, frequently funny, always canny, never sentimental siren song.”
âBarbara Kruger,
Artforum
“A gritty, autobiographical tale of hedonistic excess through three decades.”
â
Los Angeles Times
“[
Paradoxia
] is real noir in a declamatory and clear voice ⦠In a culture where the âtrue' has been denatured, Lunch reclaims its bestial power.”
â
Eye Weekly
(Toronto)
“Lydia Lunch often is compared to Hubert Selby, Jr. and Jean Genet. Reading
Paradoxia
, I see some Dostoevsky in her shattered protagonist and her unforgettable, murderous opening line â¦
Paradoxia
has a place in the literature of depravity, and like the good work in that genre, it's intentionally funny.”
â
Bookslut
“Within the body of her blunt bullet point prose ⦠Lunch can be brutally original. Or originally brutal.”
â
Harp
“
Paradoxia
is at once a moving confessional of an irredeemably abused girl and a steely-eyed account of that girl's coming to womanhood by meticulously, soberly reclaiming that abuse.”
âBust
“Lunch's direct and visceral prose and her skill in shaping exciting narratives make
Paradoxia
a compelling page-turner.”
âHipster Book Club
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher.
Published by Akashic Books
©2009 by Lydia Lunch
Foreword ©2009 by Karen Finley
eISBN-13: 978-1-617-75004-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-73-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008937351
Some of the stories in this volume originally appeared in an earlier form in the following publications:
Sex and Guts
: “Death Defied by a Thousand Cuts”;
The Wire
: “1967”;
Inappropriate Behavior: Prada Sucks! and other Demented Descants
edited by Jessica Berens and Kerri Sharp (Serpent's Tail, 2002): “Motherhood: It's Not Compulsory”;
Your Flesh Magazine
: “Assume the Position”;
Another Man Magazine
: “âIn Times of Universal Deceit â¦'”;
Incriminating Evidence
by Lydia Lunch (Last Gasp, 1992): “The Beast”;
Storie
: “Johnny behind the Deuce”;
Dirt
: “Hubert Selby Jr.: The Man Who Refused to Die”;
Sex and Guts
: “Nick Tosches: Squalor and Splendor”;
Crave
: “Jerry Stahl: The Living Perv”;
Sex and Guts
: “The Violent Disbelief of Ron Athey.”
Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction:
Will Work for Drugs
Death Defied by a Thousand Cuts
Motherhood: It's Not Compulsory
“In Times of Universal Deceit ⦔
The Devil's Racetrack: Ray Trailer
Hubert Selby Jr.: The Man Who Refused to Die
Nick Tosches: Squalor and Splendor
L
ydia Lunch is a contemporary renaissance poetess, musician, artist, and provocateur. Her career has spanned three decades and has influenced a range of styles and content, through genres of music, spoken word, performance, film, gender and sexuality, humor and politics. She is also a cultural critic and has been a major pioneer in the international art scene. One of Lydia's most powerful contributions to the art world has been her unique skill at transforming her traumatic childhood ordeals into daring and illuminating expressions that enforce and inspire creative responses rather than eliciting destructive ones.
In this collection of personal essays, short fiction, and interviews
,
Lydia presents her own life for reflection to once and for all void the diary as a self-indulgent exercise or tool of pity. Her generosity with her own life experiences provides the reader an opportunity to glimpse the creative potential as outlet. Alice Miller writes about the relationship of trauma and the imagination in
The Drama of the Gifted Child
. And here, in
Will Work for Drugs,
Lydia gives evidence of redirecting her traumas by how she escapes through the lens of the imagination. We enter her commitment to (and love of) the imagination, and exit with the knowledge of the power of that creative sphere.
Lydia refuses to be subservient to the destructive acts she has witnessed, and instead develops sacred space in the intimacy of this book and nurtures the
collective
sacred space with the activation of her life as art, her words and deeds as the illumination of art.
When in doubt, her faith kicks in and she continues creating, transformingâdespite the odds and circumstancesâamidst the fragility of human existence. Lydia survives with swift humor which uncomfortably wraps and soothes the anger with a bitchy wit and sardonic word-tailoring that continues a long tradition of jester, comedienne, and political humorist.
Although her point of departure is usually the experience of self, she maps her territory for us as a community organizer for the disenfranchised. Lydia positions herself as an outside/inside agitator, inciting to chaos, breaking the depressive calm as she threatens the community to wake up and take action. Wear and utilize your emotional soul burden as artistic pride.
At times we see her analyzeâand reanalyzeâhistorical and emotional events with intellectual passion and rigor while she deconstructs theories of complacency and political ideologies. She plays a cat-and-mouse game in her skill as a master debater. The cat never lets up. But she will let the mouse roar.
Lydia volunteers her own emotional life to become our mirror, to judge and learn from, laugh from; and then we can gaze upon our own hearts and heads. This generosity mesmerizes me, for Lydia does it with her twinkling assertive
je m'en fous
,
joie de vivre,
and heavy breathing. Her insistence on our acceptance of her gift is probably the only authentically aggressive part of her.
If we don't see or hear her words, the now of emotional destruction is within reach.
Lydia presents the symbols and standards of power such as obedience, rules, punishment, and authority as true myths of the American Dream. She allows us a viewing from the underbelly, the shadow of our American lifeâor, rather, the American Nightmare. We understand our own versions and boundaries of morality. Lydia creates for us a disturbance by giving us her truth, though not with scientific methods. Consider, for example, her essay “1967,” in which the outside political authority and the father authority break down and abuse their pathetic power over her.
Her courageâto be Lydia, to find Lydia, and to express Lydiaâis the spiritual centerpiece and moral of the story. Through trial and error, she believes, the great human insistence of soul will eventually become an individuated self that will heal and give sustenance, guidance for those beginning the journey. The courage to not just witness but to take action with authority is an expression of love, beauty, truth, grace, and sensitivityâthe stuff real art is made from. Lydia offers rage with attendant tenderness to the gentle palms holding her book, to the personal encounter of reading.
Will Work for Drugs
provides the soul search in the written word. What nurtures the soul of the artist? With Lydia Lunch it would never be the complacency of good intentions, or the inaction of thought and deeds.
It is a privilege and honor to introduce you to Lydia Lunch's
Will Work for Drugs.
I am certain you will be enthralled, moved, and riveted as you turn these pages written by one of America's National Treasures. You are in for quite a ride!
Karen Finley
March 2009
Y
eah, right. I wish they made enough good drugs to reward the blood and brain matter I have splattered over these pages, countless stages, celluloid, vinyl, acetate, and compact disc. The fuel that propels me is more likely to be a grotesque imbalance of testosterone and estrogen polluted by multiple dioxins conveniently dumped in the Love Canal near Niagara Falls by the Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation for decades before my birth in Upstate New York.
It takes a master alchemist to create a functional stability between the contamination of genetic mutation, environmental hazards, moral pollution, hormonal imbalance, and toxic emotions from which I struggle. My daily existence is a battlecade of extreme fluctuations where chaos clobbers apathy which beats the shit out of depression which follows irritability which slams into anger which eclipses ecstasy which slips through my fingers far too often. I'm still searching for the drug that can trigger the switch which will allow euphoria its rightful position as a top contender in the war of my emotions.
I had my first mood swing while still in the womb when the the bliss of non-being was shattered by the bullrun of my father's bloodline brutally crashing through my fragile endocranial cast. The inside of my head has been punching the shit out of itself since I was a child. Migraines rebel against my internal landscape, that sewer of muscle, meat, sinew, and blood which stinks of sulfur and rose water. My brainpan overflows with ancient memories which have fractured into splintered obsidian only to be melted into tiny hammers whose thunder eventually roars out of my mouth. This collection commits to the page a sampling of the cries and whispers which batter the inside of my head like fevered ghosts ghoulishly intoxicated by the primordial essence which has poisoned my very existence. Enjoyâ
Lydia Lunch
April 2009