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132nd out of 158 books
—
24 voters
Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration
In Close to the Knives, David Wojnarowicz gives us an important and timely document: a collection of creative essays -- a scathing, sexy, sublimely humorous and honest personal testimony to the "Fear of Diversity in America." From the author's violent childhood in suburbia to eventual homelessness on the streets and piers of New York City, to recognition as one of the most...more
Paperback, 288 pages
Published
May 7th 1991
by Vintage
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this abrasive, masterfully written, self-eviscerating, entirely unsentimental memoir is one that is practically boiling over with anger and lust and menace. it was an influential book in its own place and time... much like wojnarowicz's equally visceral yet haunting art. the free-flowing, stream of conscious writing recounts the author's life, his dreams, ambitions, failures, life on the streets, life with men, and - quite memorably - his dark and vindictive fantasies of vengeance on those who w...more
This book is so important to my understanding of the queer 80's and 90's, in a way I am not even sure is entirely fair. His prose poetry, brilliant conspiracy cum political philosophy, and precious/violent take on sexuality and the body relating to other bodies is a vibrant echo of what was, an what is still vibrating through the haunted house of modern gay history in the US. I love the way he speaks about the Queer who was the bane of the assimilationist gay America that all but won the 90's, b...more
Wojnarowicz's story is a story we all need to read. A friend of mine put it succinctly "his book is about love and rage". The way he writes is really visceral, taking you back in time to cruising at the New York piers in the 70's and early 80's and what it was like to lose those you love to AIDS in a time when society completely turned their backs.
His essays about living as a gay man and an artist with HIV in the 80's is heartwrenching and inspiring. I appreciated the way he called out the li...more
I really didn't know what to expect with this book, but found it unsettling for many reasons. It is primarily a memoir of Wojnarowicz's life in the 80s during the height of the onset of the AIDS crisis. It is set in NYC and mostly in the East Village. I lived there too then and Wojnarowicz and I ran in the same circles. I recognized some of the people that he was talking about even though he had changed the names. It is powerfully written for the most part and there is no question that it brough...more
My thoughts on it from February 2009:
Stunning, soul breaking and thought reforming writing, that I decided to read again, because I wanted to get authentic views on gay prostitution as survival in earlier decades for my punk novel. In a way I felt a profound disconnection from the material when I started it, despite the beautiful writing-as a middle class white gay guy who's never been denied the essentials of life, I felt my sometimes naive eyes almost widening at the blunt truth of a white gay...more
Stunning, soul breaking and thought reforming writing, that I decided to read again, because I wanted to get authentic views on gay prostitution as survival in earlier decades for my punk novel. In a way I felt a profound disconnection from the material when I started it, despite the beautiful writing-as a middle class white gay guy who's never been denied the essentials of life, I felt my sometimes naive eyes almost widening at the blunt truth of a white gay...more
"Of course, those in power count on the fact that we are stuck inside these gravity vehicles called bodies. The pressure that gravity sustains on our bodies keeps us crawling around in this preinvented existence with the neighbors split-rail fencing preventing us from crawling out. The pressure for escape has led us from our tadpole ancestors through time till now to develop an appetite for speed. Speed of consumption, speed of physical movement, speed of transmitting and receiving information....more
“I want to throw up because we're supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our own slow murder and I'm amazed we're not running amok in the streets, and that we can still be capable of gestures of loving after lifetimes of all this.”
― David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration
― David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration
Close to the Knives is not a typical memoir. Wojnarowicz's stream-of-conscious style is reminiscent of Burroughs (whose blurb graces the cover of this book). His writing transports you to the gay scene of the 70s and 80s; a time filled with rage, lust and a feeling of invisibility. The AIDs epidemic was tearing the community apart and the outside world was doing nothing to help, and in fact often viewed the disease as their due. Wojnarowicz writes about watching his friends die of AIDs and his o...more
Jun 27, 2009
Kimbert
rated it
5 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
Weirdos, Politicos,
Shelves:
favorites
One of my favorite books of all time. A memoir by the New York artist David Wojnarowicz. This book single-handedly jump-started my love of the memoir as well as non-fiction. David writes a personal and poetic story about sex, AIDS and homophobia in America. The shit that he writes about a "one-tribe nation" is spot on...
This is a serious document. My memory of it is fading except for a few images, so I need to read it again. It was assigned to me in my college course on the history of the AIDS epidemic. It's not just a memoir of having AIDS, it's also about New York and anger and survival.
May 08, 2008
Skidmarquez
rated it
4 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
Anyone
Recommended to Skidmarquez by:
five
Wojnarowicz, for being a self taught writer and artist has rich, thick descriptions of the encounters with men in bathrooms, the incursion of the illness of the american landscape into his psyche, the political determinations of his moment, strung-out drug episodes, the AIDS crisis where he witnesses friend after friend succumb to the disease. Written about a really repressive and oft forgotten moment in American history where queers were not only being blamed for the AIDS crisis but also being...more
Jan 25, 2008
Luke Dani
rated it
5 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
lovers & fighters
Recommended to Luke Dani by:
devon haynes
this book changed my life, actually.
i spent a lot of time while reading it grieving david wojnarowicz' death...he writes like thoughts rapid clip but also words feel exquisite. it's like reading the view out of a moving car, like not how language is told to be used, but how it is, something in motion. an anger out of love most familiar in the writing of james baldwin, this book is smoke from a rage-fire looking down into the heart of the fire. it makes me want to be near the heat of the body beh...more
i spent a lot of time while reading it grieving david wojnarowicz' death...he writes like thoughts rapid clip but also words feel exquisite. it's like reading the view out of a moving car, like not how language is told to be used, but how it is, something in motion. an anger out of love most familiar in the writing of james baldwin, this book is smoke from a rage-fire looking down into the heart of the fire. it makes me want to be near the heat of the body beh...more
Explicit, candid, and honest essays that articulate anger: Wojnarowicz's words live on, vividly, and they expose the hypocracy and deceit in a world where redemption is neither acheived nor promised.
--Jamie Dela Cruz 04.15.08
--Jamie Dela Cruz 04.15.08
Dec 16, 2011
Michael Dipietro
rated it
5 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
beautiful-misanthropy
I am almost without words for this book. It was incredibly dark and painful to read, and yet extremely seductive. Drilling the same points home over and over about evil people in state and religious drag, effecting a quiet holocaust with their mishandling of AIDS and with constant efforts to make queer people, queer lives and identities invisible.... I began to feel the same desolation and ennui that Wojnarowicz describes in his own experience, so eloquently. The ending is extremely visceral; I...more
Stunning and shattering. Rage and grief condensed until they left me shaking. Not an easy read, but once I got into it it cracked my world right open.
One of the best books I've read, only excepting the beginning and end, which don't seem to match the rest of the book in their approach.
Finally read this beautiful, exhilarated, & terribly sad book. The story about Peter Hujar's death is heartbreaking.
One of the most heart-rending, meaningful books I've ever read. Wojnarowicz was a national treasure.
Maybe the best book i've ever read.
fucking and magic
and nihilism.
It's dark.
and so good.
fucking and magic
and nihilism.
It's dark.
and so good.
This book is a fucking saga! The young David W must have seemed near autistic being so intelligent in such an unsympathetic America. Close to the Knives reveals how he made his own world through an emergent sexuality predicated on casual encounters and a group of artists operating in the Lower East Side as if they are exploring the moon or something, the destitution seems that desperate. Makes me wanna tell all my friends to take care of themselves: half of this book contains the hearbreaking en...more
LOVE this book - as an activist, as a homo, and as an artist. REQUIRED READING.
Powerful and poetic indictment of government and society by the artist/activist.
Changed my life when I met this inspirational artist. David we miss you!
May 10, 2012
nathan
added it
Tried to embed, but no go: Fire in My Belly
Interesting writings. I much prefer his paintings.
Reading it once is just not enough.
Jun 06, 2012
Chimene
added it
Dark, heavy, but fabulous.
Boringly solipsistic. Like Kerouac on a very bad day, or the poetry a friend might show you with the caveat: "I was high when I wrote this."
re-read.
Jul 06, 2009
Joe
rated it
5 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
Rising number of unemployed citizens.
Recommended to Joe by:
Cardinal John O'Connor & Edward Koch
Shelves:
poetry
Precision and excess; the excess of precision, precisely abundant.
AIDS as politics: an issue which helps to define the ideologies still with us today, the political machine which specifically suppresses significant issues in an effort to propel itself and its limited perspectives indefinitely into the future.
How the voice of the outsider continues to be necessary and all the more identifiable. Once we're all outsiders, what exactly are we outside of?
AIDS as politics: an issue which helps to define the ideologies still with us today, the political machine which specifically suppresses significant issues in an effort to propel itself and its limited perspectives indefinitely into the future.
How the voice of the outsider continues to be necessary and all the more identifiable. Once we're all outsiders, what exactly are we outside of?
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David Wojnarowicz was a gay painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and activist who was prominent in the New York City art world of the 1980s.
He was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, and later lived with his mother in New York City, where he attended the High School of Performing Arts for a brief period. From 1970 until 1973, after dropping out of school, he for a time lived on...more
More about David Wojnarowicz...
He was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, and later lived with his mother in New York City, where he attended the High School of Performing Arts for a brief period. From 1970 until 1973, after dropping out of school, he for a time lived on...more
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“I want to throw up because we're supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our own slow murder and I'm amazed we're not running amok in the streets, and that we can still be capable of gestures of loving after lifetimes of all this.”
—
18 people liked it
“Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.”
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14 people liked it
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