The Well-Dressed Wound (Semiotext(E)) (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)
Product ID: 66374066
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A gleeful grotesquerie and savage satire, featuring Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln and the Devil, along with Civil War dead, deconstructed couture, and gay ghosts. The Well-Dressed Wound is Derek McCormack's play script "seance": a fashion show by the dead for the living. In the depths of the Civil War, in a theater in P. T. Barnum's American Museum on Broadway, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln participate in a staged spiritualistic rite. But the medium conducting them has invited along another being: the Devil, disguised as twentieth-century French fashionista Martin Margiela (aka "King Faggot"). What follows is the most fiendish runway show ever mounted, complete with war dead, deconstructed couture, and gay ghosts infected with all manner of infectious agents, including oozy AIDS. While his previous fictions have explored the darker corners of country music, high fashion, and camp, The Well-Dressed Wound is McCormack's most radical work yet, occultishly evoking the evil-twin muses of transgressive literature, Kathy Acker and Pierre Guyotat. The creation thus conjured is a gleeful grotesquerie, a savage satire not so much of fashion as of death, a work that, as Bruce Hainley observes in Artforum, puts "the 'pus' back in opus." Here death and life spin on a viral double helix of contamination and couture, blistering and bandages, history and hysteria, semen and seams. "Being dead is so very now," Hainley opines. "This tiny tome (a time bomb, a tomb) is to die for and radically alive." Review: Loved it. - I love this book. A laughing knife to stick you where the sun don't shine. Review: THIS IS OFFENSIVE - to anyone who respects Martin Margiela and his legacy, this is disgusting! the narrative lacks sense and purpose, it is just offensive
| Best Sellers Rank | 1,375,708 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) 739 in Horror Parodies & Satires 3,033 in Contemporary Horror 3,234 in Satires |
| Customer Reviews | 3.7 out of 5 stars 11 Reviews |
J**U
Loved it.
I love this book. A laughing knife to stick you where the sun don't shine.
L**O
THIS IS OFFENSIVE
to anyone who respects Martin Margiela and his legacy, this is disgusting! the narrative lacks sense and purpose, it is just offensive
B**C
Five Stars
Incredible read. Everyone should read everything by Derek McCormack. Entertaining beyond belief.
J**Y
Well Dressed Waste
Blake Butler called this 'refreshing' and 'long overdue.' The only thing I learned from this 'text', and I even use that word loosely, is not to trust the tastes of the whole HTML Giant crowd. I don't get it. Blake Butler is a talented writer who writes garbled prose that somehow ends up transcending the babble and being profound. This babble is nothing like Blake Butler's babble. There are three things going on in this vomitous mess: Pages and pages of people saying the word ****** in association with everything, everyone who ever existed dying of AIDS and lots of pages that are blank except for exclamation marks spaced far apart like this: ! ! ! !!!!! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !! all the way down the page. It is not clever, insightful, groundbreaking or even readable really. There's literally nothing worthwhile here. I'd love to see the premise of a seance held by Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln in the hands of a capable writer. McCormack is not that writer. Worst of all, there are two author assistance programs listed on the acknowledgements page, the Ontario Arts council and the Writers' Trust of Canada, which means he got grants to write this seventy one page word salad that should really be about fifteen to twenty tops. Congratulations, Mr. McCormack on fleecing academia and reaping the financial benefits. I'm going to go read Escape From Dinosauria and I guarantee it will be more intelligent than this literary offal.
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