Downtown Collection Sparks Up Is Up, But So Is Down and Three Other Books

By Barbara Jester

There was a time in the 1970s and 1980s before SoHo became Madison Avenue South and Starbucks and Duane Reade invaded Greenwich Village when a group of artists, writers, punk rockers, and activists — collectively known as the Downtown Scene — created new ways of thinking about art and literature, the creative process, and the effects of the marketplace on what is created.

In 1995, when the Fales Collection, the University’s major rare book and special collections repository in Bobst Library, first started gathering material documenting Downtown with the acquisition of the Ron Kolm Papers, perhaps no one but Marvin Taylor, the collection’s curator, and a few others knew what they were starting. In subsequent years, Fales got the papers of artist David Wojnarowicz and writer Dennis Cooper, the archives of the magazines Between C&D and Red Tape, the Judson Memorial Church, and those of punk rocker Richard Hell, among others, and the Downtown Collection, as it is known, became the largest and most important repository in the country for anyone interested in an era in which artists played ebulliently with form and content, sex, language, and images.

This year four books have been published that were inspired by the Downtown Collection and its material, including New York University Press’ just-published Up Is Up, but So Is Down, a compendium of literary and visual material documenting literary Downtown. In addition, Princeton University Press published The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984, edited by Taylor; Lust for Life: The Writings of Kathy Acker appeared from Verso, and Fairleigh Dickinson University Press weighed in with Enter at Your Own Risk: The Dangerous Writing of Dennis Cooper, the first scholarly anthology of criticism about a difficult and pioneering literary artist.

“Not many special collections of our size can generate so much scholarship, especially in so short a time period,” Taylor said. “I’m very pleased that this year has produced so much interesting and important scholarship from a collection whose home could not be anywhere but NYU.”

Up Is Up, edited by Brandon Stosuy with an Afterword by Dennis Cooper and Eileen Myles, is the first book to capture the vitality and uniqueness of the Downtown literary scene with over 125 images and more than 80 texts, 90 percent of which are in Fales’ Downtown Collection. The book grew out of an idea Taylor had while he was starting to work on his book on the visual aspects of the period; a literary companion piece was needed. Stosuy, who had done his graduate work on Cooper and been hired to process the Cooper papers at Fales, took on the project.

Stosuy read primary materials for the period and came up with a list of people he needed to contact. From there, it was networking all the way. “I had many conversations with some of the most important Downtown people to decide who should be included and how to find material. It became an obsessive hunt for all the missing pieces; this was not an era where things were anthologized and available. We’re talking about a time when poems and prose pieces were being published in ‘zines which existed for a few months and then disappeared. Sometimes I spent 14 hours a day tracking things down and speaking to people; it was pure detective work. I met people in cafés who brought in ‘zines, much out of print material, and posters; I read all the issues of the East Village Eye. I now have my own archive.”

Leora Lev’s book, Enter at Your Own Risk, grew out of both a conference that Fales held on Cooper and the Cooper papers at NYU. Lev, associate professor at the University of Bridgewater in Massachusetts, said, “Marvin [Taylor] helped me locate the previously unpublished William Burroughs prose poem in Fales, and that was important to what was being included in my book.” Cooper, whom teen readers have recently taken up, has long been censured as a very controversial writer; Stosuy says teens are blogging about Cooper and mentioning his book in the blogs.

Lust for Life, edited by Amy Scholder, Carla Harryman, and NYU Professor Avital Ronell, explores the work of one of the most original and subversive writers in the Downtown scene, post-modernist, post-feminist, and post-punk. Scholder, Harryman, Ronell, and Taylor organized a symposia on Acker at Fales, and this work grew naturally out of the event.

Up Is Up features work by most of the important creators of this extraordinary period including Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Laurie Anderson, Thurston Moore, Miguel Pinero (whose “A Lower East Side Poem” from 1980 is iconic to the period), Eric Bogosian, Karen Finley, Tama Janowitz, Lynne Tillman, Patrick McGrath, Max Blagg, and Gary Indiana.

The book is available at the NYU Book Centers; or visit www.nyupress.org for more information on this book and others published by NYU Press.