Böcker av David Wojnarowicz

Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is David Wojnarowicz's memoir of childhood and adolescence amidst the AIDS epidemic, saturated with the air of desperation and the specter of violence.Wojnarowicz appears here as an abused child, an adolescent prostitute, an adult living with HIV. The book is preoccupied with ruins and ruination; the impulse to make public different lives and desires; the insistence on pleasure, and the implication of politics in pleasure-the themes that contoured Wojnarowicz's life and work. What comes forth is language as desolate as a world that wanted him dead, and an insistence on life in spite of it.

From the author of Close to the Knives, a series of fictional monologues that create a visceral and carnivalesque mosaic of life at the fringes of late-80s America. The Waterfront Journals is a collection of monologues, each ventriloquising one of the many people whom Wojnarowicz met on his travels throughout America while he was sleeping rough. We meet these down and outs in unassuming locations - in truck stops, bus stations and parks - and taken together their voices form a poignant chorus that distils the desires, dreams and dangers of those people whose lives confined are to the margins.

Audio journals that document Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time.In these moments I hate language. I hate what words are like, I hate the idea of putting these preformed gestures on the tip of my tongue, or through my lips, or through the inside of my mouth, forming sounds to approximate something that's like a cyclone, or something that's like a flood, or something that's like a weather system that's out of control, that's dangerous, or alarming.... It just seems like sounds that have been uttered back and forth maybe now over centuries. And it always boils down to the same meaning within those sounds, unless you're more intense uttering them, or you precede them or accompany them with certain forms of violence.—from The Weight of the EarthArtist, writer, and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was an important figure in the downtown New York art scene. His art was preoccupied with sex, death, violence, and the limitations of language. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Wojnarowicz began keeping audio journals, returning to a practice he'd begun in his youth.The Weight of the Earth presents transcripts of these tapes, documenting Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time.In these taped diaries, Wojnarowicz talks about his frustrations with the art world, recounts his dreams, and describes his rage, fear, and confusion about his HIV diagnosis. Primarily spanning the years 1987 and 1989, recorded as Wojnarowicz took solitary road trips around the United States or ruminated in his New York loft, the audio journals are an intimate and affecting record of an artist facing death. By turns despairing, funny, exalted, and angry, this volume covers a period largely missing from Wojnarowicz's written journals, providing us with an essential new record of a singular American voice.