This Young Monster E-Book

Charlie Fox

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

This Young Monster is a hallucinatory celebration of artists who raise hell, transform their bodies, anger their elders and show their audience dark, disturbing things. What does it mean to be a freak? Why might we be wise to think of the present as a time of monstrosity? And how does the concept of the monster irradiate our thinking about queerness, disability, children and adolescents? From Twin Peaks to Leigh Bowery, Harmony Korine to Alice in Wonderland, This Young Monster gets high on a whole range of riotous art as its voice and form shape-shift, all in the name of dealing with the strange wonders of what Nabokov once called 'monsterhood'. Ready or not, here they come...

Leseprobe

‘A Rimbaud-like moonbeam in written form.’

— Bruce Hainley, author of Under the Sign of [sic]

‘Charlie Fox writes about scary and fabulous monsters, but he really writes about culture, which is the monster’s best and only escape. He is a dazzling writer, unbelievably erudite, and this book is a pleasure to read. Fox’s essays spin out across galaxies of knowledge. Domesticating the difficult, he invites us as his readers to become monsters as well.’

— Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick

‘A performance as original and audacious as any of the characters within – it crackles off the page, roaring and clawing its way into the world, powered by a brilliant vagabond electricity.’

— Chloe Aridjis, author of Book of Clouds

‘Charlie Fox is a ferociously gifted critic, whose prose, like a punk Walter Pater’s, attains pure flame. Fox’s sentences, never ‘matchy-matchy’, clash with orthodoxy; I love how extravagantly he leaps between different cultural climes, and how intemperately – and with what impressive erudition! – he pledges allegiance to perversity. Take This Young Monster with you to a desert island; his bons mots will supply you with all the protein you need.’

— Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Humiliation

‘Charlie Fox has a cardsharp’s diamond-eye for cataloguing the shapeshifting face of the sublime. His essays slither through skins over the warm flesh where so many mythic worlds and realities connect, from that of Twin Peaks to Diane Arbus, Fassbinder to Columbine, which somehow in their amassment ventriloquise a tender, enchanted endnotes for our black present. Put on this mask and breathe.’

— Blake Butler, author of 300,000,000

THIS YOUNG MONSTER

CHARLIE FOX

For my brothers

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEDEDICATIONEPIGRAPHSELF-PORTRAIT AS A WEREWOLF‘THE LITTLE BOY WHO CAN’T BE DAMAGED!’UNTITLED (FREAK)HERR FASSBINDER’S TRIP TO HEAVEN‘I JUST ADORE EXTREMES’TRANSFORMERTHE DEAD-END KIDSSPOOK HOUSEFOR ARTHUR AND ALL THE OTHER MUTTSAPPENDIXILLUSTRATIONSMONSTER MATERIALSACKNOWLEDGEMENTSABOUT THE AUTHORCOPYRIGHT

‘I call “monster” every original inexhaustible beauty.’

— Alfred Jarry

‘With a terrifying roar

The house exploded again.’

— John Ashbery

SELF-PORTRAIT AS A WEREWOLF

‘Are there many little boys who think they are a monster?’

— Anne Carson

Hey Beast,

There’s a scary picture I want to show you: three kids outside their house, all wearing masks and grinning like devils. One has a crocodile head, another is a cartoon dog covered with funky spots and the last wears a deranged face drawn on a paper bag, eyes bugged, mouth crammed with jackal teeth. They’re dead now. They appear in this book called Haunted Air (2010) collecting old American pictures by anonymous photographers of folk in costume on Halloween. I’m guessing from the fuzziness of the picture that it must have been taken in the 1930s, roughly aligning with the time that Judy Garland crash-landed in Oz. There are tons of other pictures I could have fetched for you – David Bowie on the cover of Diamond Dogs (1974), half-alien, half-hound – or the Count’s shadow climbing the stairs from Nosferatu (1922), but beginning on Halloween seemed like the most potent clue to the festivities up ahead. Ghosts run amok, identities melt, everybody’s in costume, and reality is nowhere to be found. Think of it as an invitation asking you, as Captain Beefheart once howled, ‘to come out and meet the monster tonight!’

You’re one of the first monsters I remember meeting, both as a cartoon in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991) and in huge illustrated books where you were usually depicted with a touch of the owl or hog. Almost everybody, if they’re lucky, sees monsters for the first time in fairy tales where the traditional response to their appearance is astonishment. When the Evil Queen in Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs (1937) changes into a witch thanks to her psychotropic potion, even her beloved raven leaps back in fright and hides inside a skull by her cauldron until he’s just an eyeball, panicky, staring out of somebody else’s head.