the freaky-deaky cookie mueller fan club
+ a special guest rec from Welcome to Provincetown's Mitra Kaboli !
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Cookie Mueller's Walking Through Clear Water in Pool Painted Black is 4.5 x 7 x 0.31 inches & 160 pages.
Now this whole project— the entire Purse Book conceit— is about quick volumes. And, of course, it’s much easier to keep a fast pace over a short period of time, but no one does it like Cookie Mueller. She simply erupts onto every page, in a smear of eyeliner and a flash of skin. Every chapter of Cookie Mueller’s memoir Walking Through Clear Water in Pool Painted Black contains enough action for the climax of an entire book. And Cookie dashes them off! Blithe and crabby! She cavorts absolutely the whole time.
I was reminded of Walking Through Clear Water while listening to the deeply queer podcast Welcome to Provincetown (it came out this summer, but I recommend it as winter solstice programming; it brings the hot sunshine). In many ways, it’s an investigation about how community makes characters, vice versa. Cookie Mueller was a classic Provincetown character, known (apocryphally) for walking up to strangers at bars and shaving her pubic hair in front of them. I’d love to be known (apocryphally) for something. In the description of the episode “Keep Ptown Weird,” Mitra Kaboli says she’s “searching for that Cookie Mueller experience.” As Kaboli puts it, Cookie Mueller brought the freaky-deaky to the party.
Cookie Mueller also seems like she was “searching for that Cookie Mueller experience,” so we’re all in good company there. She went everywhere, did everything. She writes with the same gusto about working with John Waters, about the birth of her son Max, about melting into the underbrush “like Bambi” to escape violent creeps while hitch-hiking, about burning a friend’s house down. While she’s working as a go-go dancer, a serial murderer confesses his crimes to her! In 1982 Berlin, she sneaks out a hotel and scales the Berlin wall rather than foot a hotel bill! On nearly every page, there are piles of pills, powders, small scams, huge bottles of whiskey. At some point, I believe, she dates a blonde woman named Shaggy.
But Cookie’s not a show-off about adventure. She’s not telling swashbuckling sea stories to prove herself. She’s just an extrovert, an actual bon vivant. She doesn’t make herself look good, she doesn’t glamorize anything. There’s a good stink on this book. She shows herself sloppy and frayed.
Walking Through Clear Water in Pool Painted Black was recently republished. I have the original edition, which is cool of me, but it also means I know that I’m missing some of freaky-deaky stories. Which sucks! And I don’t even know the expanded edition would meet the perimeters of an Official Purse Book! I still want it! There is so much in this little edition already, I feel like I’m just being insatiable and impossible to please. But that was the Cookie Mueller effect for me: if nothing else, Walking Through Clear Water in Pool Painted Black just made me greedy for experience.
And very exciting! Welcome to Provincetown host Mitra Kaboli has recommended not one but two books for this edition of Purse Book!
R. E. Katz’s And Then The Gray Heaven: “This short novel took me on an incredible journey of queer love, grief and adventure. I must disclose that the author is a good friend of mine but the book is incredibly captivating regardless, prompting me to ask my friend if they are genius.”
Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day: “Bernadette is an iconic poet who passed a few weeks ago, losing her battle to cancer. The book is an epic, waxing poem that centers this time of the year. Her language is beautiful and it's hard not to feel moved by it whether you like poetry or not.”