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Doggy Bag
Doggy Bag is an outrageous Avant-Pop answer to T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." Don't waste recycle it, cut it up and snarf it down like a Naked Lunch. Doggy Bag is a net of hyperfictions about Americans in a spiritually exhausted Europe forced to recycle the trash of their own culture. Under the dictatorship of the consumer, ecology is freedom. Written in a person to person and often interactive style, Doggy Bag samples advertising, the entertainment industry and B-movie versions of ancient mythologies, splices in cryptograms, wierd graphic designs, humans infected with a computer virus, conspiracy projection studios, neural image fabrication by Total Control, Inc., and gives you characters like Jim Morrison, Federico Fellini, a bird named Edgar Allan Crow, a secret sect of White Voodoo Financial Wizards, the Iron Sphincters, and Bruno the sex dog. Hard core Porno, Doggy Bag surfs simulacra the way Kerouac cruised the Great American Highway. Recommended for punks, hackers, slackers, rappers, sex fiends, skate rats, metal mainiacs, troublemakers, pleasure junkies, buttonheads, disaffected students and other rabble addicted to good writing.
156 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
1 person is currently reading
58 people want to read
About the author
Ronald Sukenick
32 books32 followersRonald Sukenick was an American writer and literary theorist.
Sukenick studied at Cornell University, and wrote his doctoral thesis on Wallace Stevens, at Brandeis University.
After Roland Barthes announced the "death of the author", Sukenick carried the metaphor even further in "the death of the novel". He drew up a list of what is missing: reality doesn't exist, nor time or personality. He was widely recognized as a controversial writer who, frequently humorously, questioned and rejected the conventions of traditional fiction-writing. In novels, short stories, literary criticism and history, he often used himself, family members or friends as characters, sometimes quoting them in tape-recorded conversations. He did stints as writer in residence at Cornell University, the University of California, Irvine, and Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. But his books were never best-sellers. Sukenick once commented that he had “only forty fans, but they’re all fanatics.”
He referred to his career as a university professor as his "day job". He taught at Brandeis University, Hofstra University, City College of the City University of New York, Sarah Lawrence College, Cornell University, the State University of New York (Buffalo), and l'Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France. His most prolonged teaching career was at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he was professor of English from 1975-1999.
He was actively committed to publishing and promoting the writing of other unconventional writers. He was founder and publisher of American Book Review, and a founder of The Fiction Collective (now Fiction Collective Two). Sukenick was chairman of the Coordinating Council of Little magazines, and on the executive council of the Modern Language Association and the National Book Critics Circle.
Sukenick studied at Cornell University, and wrote his doctoral thesis on Wallace Stevens, at Brandeis University.
After Roland Barthes announced the "death of the author", Sukenick carried the metaphor even further in "the death of the novel". He drew up a list of what is missing: reality doesn't exist, nor time or personality. He was widely recognized as a controversial writer who, frequently humorously, questioned and rejected the conventions of traditional fiction-writing. In novels, short stories, literary criticism and history, he often used himself, family members or friends as characters, sometimes quoting them in tape-recorded conversations. He did stints as writer in residence at Cornell University, the University of California, Irvine, and Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. But his books were never best-sellers. Sukenick once commented that he had “only forty fans, but they’re all fanatics.”
He referred to his career as a university professor as his "day job". He taught at Brandeis University, Hofstra University, City College of the City University of New York, Sarah Lawrence College, Cornell University, the State University of New York (Buffalo), and l'Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France. His most prolonged teaching career was at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he was professor of English from 1975-1999.
He was actively committed to publishing and promoting the writing of other unconventional writers. He was founder and publisher of American Book Review, and a founder of The Fiction Collective (now Fiction Collective Two). Sukenick was chairman of the Coordinating Council of Little magazines, and on the executive council of the Modern Language Association and the National Book Critics Circle.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
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December 2, 2014[...] many have asked why there is so much masturbating in my writing and my answer now can be told openly without shame because what I write is not a substitution (for whatever usually masturbation is a substitution) but a creative act an original act the act of self-discovery that is why what I write cannot pass for mere belles-lettres if you want a literature of fucking read Sukenick --Raymond Federman, “Why Is There So Much Masturbating In My Writing?” in Federman A to X X X X: A Recyclopedic Narrative.
Sometimes they ask me why I write this way when it would be so easy to give the audience a break and sell more books by using the kind of plot and character narrative they’re used to. I write this way because it’s a way of saying their whole system is bull. That’s why I write this way. To cut the bull.
They say that as Signor Cranio lay on the ground they started kicking him in the head and the balls, and they say that as they kicked him he kept singing in his gravelly baritone. They say he kept singing even after someone had put a dagger through his chest. They say that he was still singing when his girlfriends came, vindictive as jackals, as he lay dying, and that to shut him up one of them put a knife in his mouth and cut his tongue out and they say in the neighborhood that even after that, as they pulled off his pants and cut off his balls, even after that, he persisted with a wordless song, or was it a scream, but song or scream they say he persisted in his aria until his last breath. --Ron
So this is number three I’ve racked up in my Sukenick streak. Some streak right? But I’m trying, slowly. I’ve still not gotten that spark from Sukenick which I expect ought to be there somewhere. 98.6 was nice ; Out was nice. He’s buddies with Raymond Federman and Raymond Federman is the best thing since sliced cheese individually wrapped. There’s also Steve Katz. I met those three pretty much all at the same time in a collection of interviews assembled by that guy Larry McCaffery, whose orientation toward fiction is like just like mine own. Like I said, I’m totally convinced that Raymond Federman is the best thing since sliced cheese individually wrapped. Sukenick’s little collection of shorts from 1994 by an imprint of FC2, a collection which is modestly titled Doggy Bag, is a pretty good little collection of shorts, I do have to say. Something about the advantage of the short form that the experimenter can get away with an awful lot without the commitment to the length of a project that would turn it into a novel. With Katz I’ve only scratched the surface and I’m still unbelievably optimistic. But it’s far and away not over yet with me and Sukenick (I’m tempted to nick his name “Suki” or something (“Suck” is just plain crass, I mean crass without invention)). Still on deck is ::
Up because it’s on the McCaffery 100
The Death of the Novel and Other Stories because, well, just listen to that title! and because I think Ray once said something like, pointing at this collection, That is postmodern fiction!
Down and in: Life in the Underground because I picked it up at The Village Bookshop for US$2.50
And there’ll likely be a few more get thrown in there, but I’m having a hard time getting really excited about Ole Suki. Maybe he’s just a thing for people like me wrapped up in that 60’s and 70’s generation of postmodernists and unlike his buddy Federman there’s not a lot to recommend beyond that rather narrow literary milieu. Oh but just because I’m not jumping up and down and writing naked reviews about Ole Suki don’t mean you shouldn’t maybe give him a go. Like I said, this collection of shorts is pretty darn engaging and he gets up to some neat tricks. Here’s the ToC, typo’s and puncto’s are approx’d only ::
who are these people?}---------------------->
name of the dog}==================>
doggy bag}#########:::::::::::::------------->
a mummy’s curse}**************++++++===--->
50,010,008}}}}}}}}}}}))))))>>>>>>>>/////%%%%%%%%%%%:::::::====>
the wondering jew and the black widow murders, or the return of the planet of the apes}””””””””’’’’’~~~~~~~~~----->
the burial of count orgasm}!!!!!!!!!!!!:::::::::::......... . . . . .
death on the supply side}____________--------------~~~~~~~~~~
Q:
A: No, I didn’t reproduce the precise typography, but you get the picture.
Q:
A: No, it’s not really frustrating not having the pagination on the ToC. The book’s only 150 pages long and the stories segue into each other with neat little text & typo & puncto art.
Q:
A: It’s about ugly americans in europe. And occasionally how ugly europe can be. Ever been in Naples during a garbage strike? And since it’s all PO=MO, and since it’s ART, it’s probably about itself as well.
Q:
A: No, I’m just typing stuff to hear myself type.
Some time in past times I provided the following serieses of textes ::
____________________
"Doggy Bag is an outrageous Avant-Pop answer to T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land.' Don't waste anything: recycle it, cut it up and snarf it down like a Naked Lunch. Doggy Bag is a net of hyperfictions about Americans in a spiritually exhausted Europe forced to recycle the trash of their own culture. Under the dictatorship of the consumer, ecology is freedom. Written in a person to person and often interactive style, Doggy Bag samples advertising, the entertainment industry and B-movie versions of ancient mythologies, splices in cryptograms, wierd graphic designs, humans infected with a computer virus, conspiracy projection studios, neural image fabrication by Total Control, Inc., and gives you characters like Jim Morrison, Federico Fellini, a bird named Edgar Allan Crow, a secret sect of White Voodoo Financial Wizards, the Iron Sphincters, and Bruno the sex dog. Hard core Porno, Doggy Bag surfs simulacra the way Kerouac cruised the Great American Highway. Recommended for punks, hackers, slackers, rappers, sex fiends, skate rats, metal mainiacs, troublemakers, pleasure junkies, buttonheads, disaffected students and other rabble addicted to good writing."
About Ronald Sukenick's writing:
"Sukenick's prose style is fast, nervy, exciting, like Mailer and even Kerouac at their best." -- Southern Humanities Review
"A kind of cross between the Sterne of Tristram Shandy and the Thomas Pynchon of V (and for my money more readable than Pynchon), Sukenick combines fantasy and parody and satire brilliantly." -- Houston Post
"A rolling energy, pouring information and serious ideas on this information with the abundance of a good working shower head." -- Larry Rivers, The New York Times Book Review
"A skilled novelist, author among others of the remarkable Up and Out ... Down and In brims with life." -- Andrei Codrescu, National Public Radio
"Quick now, read him before he invents again!" -- The New York Times Book Review
Ronald Sukenick, one of the acknowledged Postmodern masters and (with Larry McCaffery) impressario of Avant-Pop, is the author of ten books, Publisher of American Book Review and the litzine Black Ice, and Co-director of Fiction collective Two, which brought Mark Leyner, Cris Mazza, and Russell Banks.
March 26, 2025
HOUSEKEEPING 2025
I so dug Sukenick's Up and Out. They just tickled a lot of delightful spots for me. I tried to continue, honest. This may have been where I admitted that, sadly, the Sukenick did quickly Suck.
Fuck it; that's two more amazing books than we'll ever write, hey...
I so dug Sukenick's Up and Out. They just tickled a lot of delightful spots for me. I tried to continue, honest. This may have been where I admitted that, sadly, the Sukenick did quickly Suck.
Fuck it; that's two more amazing books than we'll ever write, hey...
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June 20, 2018hmm on the one hand this features a zombie epidemic brought about by "white voodoo financial wizards," which, nothing in endless short story is quite as fun (or as trenchant w/r/t the geopolitical sitch)... on the other, no amt of random elisions was ever gonna make the bestiality story at the very end (whoops, spoiler alert) interesting or palatable. for better or worse, this one's got a heckuva apt title
March 1, 2020
Experimental fiction in the vein of Naked Lunch. Cool presentation, a few wonderful lines, and many format ideas worth exploring. Unfortunately the stories themselves didn't do much for me, from the Jerry Cornelius-style espionage adventure to the cut-up Marquis de Sade eroticism.
Definitely an interesting book, one I'm surprised I didn't love. But if I'd read this when it came out in 1994, it would have blown my mind. If you dig bizarre fiction or experimental movies, this is probably worth your time at a quick 150 pages.
Definitely an interesting book, one I'm surprised I didn't love. But if I'd read this when it came out in 1994, it would have blown my mind. If you dig bizarre fiction or experimental movies, this is probably worth your time at a quick 150 pages.
July 29, 2012
Some friends and I owned a small bookstore in Athens, GA in the mid 90's. Sukenick came from Colorado to do something at UGA and wanted to speak at the store. But I didn't really believe in advertising and thus no one came (...though how many would have had I dropped the ad cash?). But we spent a pleasant evening together drinking and I tried to amuse him with introductions to lovely young girls.
One of my more pathetic "tales of beatnik glory"...
One of my more pathetic "tales of beatnik glory"...
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews