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Overview
"The briefest lives sometimes leave behind the strongest vibrations," the New York Times said of David Wojnarowicz, who, before his death in 1992, was established as a groundbreaking visual artist, writer, AIDS activist, and anticensorship advocate. He left behind a vast and varied - and incredibly moving - body of work. The Waterfront Journals is a collection of his early autobiographical fiction, much of which appears in print here for the first time. Written as short monologues, each is in the voice of one of the numerous people he encountered in his travels throughout America in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He stumbled across his characters in bus stations, hotels, coffee shops, truck stops, and back alleys, where their interactions are less than epic, but unnervingly intimate. They are street hustlers, hitchhikers, hoboes, truck drivers, drug addicts, and winos; each inhabited David Wojnarowicz's world at a time when he was living precariously on the streets, a time before AIDS. Wojnarowicz captures the humor and desperation and, perhaps most of all, the spirit of adventure they all shared as outsiders.Synopsis
"The briefest lives sometimes leave behind the strongest vibrations," the New York Times said of David Wojnarowicz, who, before his death in 1992, was established as a groundbreaking visual artist, writer, AIDS activist, and anticensorship advocate. He left behind a vast and varied - and incredibly moving - body of work. The Waterfront Journals is a collection of his early autobiographical fiction, much of which appears in print here for the first time. Written as short monologues, each is in the voice of one of the numerous people he encountered in his travels throughout America in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He stumbled across his characters in bus stations, hotels, coffee shops, truck stops, and back alleys, where their interactions are less than epic, but unnervingly intimate. They are street hustlers, hitchhikers, hoboes, truck drivers, drug addicts, and winos; each inhabited David Wojnarowicz's world at a time when he was living precariously on the streets, a time before AIDS. Wojnarowicz captures the humor and desperation and, perhaps most of all, the spirit of adventure they all shared as outsiders.
The New York Times
It seems likely that Wojnarowicz's most lasting legacy will be as a writer...Many who have encountered him on the page or on the wall can still admire the raw passion, intelligence and transforming energy with which he lived his life and met his fate.
Editorials
The New York Times
It seems likely that Wojnarowicz's most lasting legacy will be as a writer...Many who have encountered him on the page or on the wall can still admire the raw passion, intelligence and transforming energy with which he lived his life and met his fate.Publishers Weekly -
With a raw, empathic ventriloquism, Wojnarowicz (who died of AIDS in 1992) fashions monologues from his encounters with hobos, truckers, hustlers and junkies he met during his years of cross-country travel. Using a stream-of-consciousness first-person prose style, Wojnarowicz (Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration) deftly draws upon the vernacular and cadences of street life. "Guy on 2nd Avenue 1:00 a.m." is delivered in one extended sentence, capturing the breathless urgency of the speaker. In other cases, staggered punctuation emphasizes the rambling quality of verbal recall. Because these stories are told as though the narrators were speaking directly to the reader, the tales of desperation, degeneracy and unsavory circumstances often lack a context or any type of resolution. Only the last two entries in the collection, both told in the author's own first-person narrative, explore more fully the themes of alienation and physical loneliness just touched upon in the preceding monologues. Most of the pieces succeed more as snapshots-dark corners of society illuminated with a strobe light. (June)Kirkus Reviews
The late performance artist (Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, not reviewed), made famous by Jesse Helms, left these 40-plus short monologues—all of them written before his work became focused on his struggle with AIDS.Despite the argument advanced by Tony Kushner's politically hysterical introduction, these voices from the dark side needn't be "authentic" to have value as literature. Their similarity in syntax and design in fact suggest the controlling medium of Wojnarowicz, who romanticizes the down and out: the boy hustlers, junkies, alcoholics, crazies, whores, truckers, and hobos who relate their anecdotes of infamy in these relentlessly seedy narratives. The sex is mostly gay and anonymous. One man finds purity in such encounters by the Hudson River; another describes sex with a legless Vietnam vet; yet another takes advantage of a sick teenager who had previously resisted anal sex; a runner meets two drug-taking priests who talk about the size of various men they've had; a boy fades in and out of consciousness as he's being brutally raped by a sadist; another boy entertains a masochist; and a fellow describes the joys of naked boxing. The boys "hustlin the Square" describe the changes in Times Square johns; the whores tell of violent customers and corrupt cops. Winos and junkies, meanwhile, babble about all sorts of things, and a night watchman records his sad marital history. Truckers remember the golden age of hoboes, and a hobo talks of using trickery to commit his wife to an insane asylum. Many of these figures spin swift tales of deceit and deception, such as the boy who discovers that his movie-balcony pick-up is really a pre-op transsexual. Little attention is paid to place in these quick takes, and the speakers don't have much time to develop individuality, creating a certain flattening effect overall.
If Studs Terkel covered the Jean Genet beat, the result might be something like these oral snippets, more sad than shocking.