Walking Through Clear Water In a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories (Canons)

Product Information

The original version was published as a memoir in 1990 after Mueller died of AIDS-related complications, but subsequently fell out of print and became a hard-sought cult classic. The new edition of Walking Through Clear Water is almost three times the size of the original, and includes unpublished work. Divided up by the places she lived—Baltimore, Provincetown, and New York—the book chronicles Mueller’s life, her fiction, and the impact of her columns “Ask Dr. Mueller” and “Art and About.” Mueller died from AIDS-related pneumonia on November 10, 1989, at Cabrini Medical Center in New York City, aged 40. [4] Her ashes are interred in multiple locations: on the beach near Provincetown; in the flowerbed of the Church of St. Luke in the Fields in Greenwich Village; alongside those of Vittorio and her dog Beauty in the Scarpati family crypt in Sorrento, Italy; under the statue of Christ the Redeemer atop Corcovado in Rio de Janeiro; in the South Bronx; and in the holy waters of the Ganges River. She was survived by her son, Max Wolfe Mueller, who appeared in Pink Flamingos.

She was also prophetic. She featured Jean-Michel Basquiat in her very first column for the magazine, and accurately predicted that one day the East Village art scene would be studied in art history classes.

Collected Stories

Nan Goldin created and widely exhibited The Cookie Portfolio 1976–1989, a series of 15 portraits, after Mueller's death. One photograph, "Cookie and Vittorio's Wedding" (1986), documents Mueller's wedding to Vittorio Scarpati, an Italian artist and jewelry designer from Naples who died of AIDS just seven weeks before Mueller. [6] Another of Goldin's photographs, "Cookie at Vittorio's Casket, NYC, September 1989," was called a "magnificent portrait ... a great image. Devastating but great," by the San Francisco Examiner's art critic David Bonetti. [7] The first time I saw a photograph of Cookie Mueller, it was the portrait Nan Goldin had taken of her in her casket. Shimmering in gold, like a mosquito encased in amber, Mueller lay supine, arms crossed in front of her like an Egyptian pharaoh. Mueller was married to Vittorio Scarpati, who died of AIDS in September 1989. [4] [5] Death and legacy [ edit ] After several trips to Italy, Mueller fell in love with an artist named Vittorio Scarpati. The two were married in New York in 1986. At the time, she was writing “Ask Dr. Mueller” for the East Village Eye, offering health advice without any professional qualifications. The column begins with queries about cellulite and apple cider vinegar. Then, in a response to one correspondent who complains of a small penis, Mueller abruptly writes, “I’m not going to talk about AIDS ... I’ve had too many beloved friends die lately from diseases contracted when the immune system breaks down. I’m tired of going to wakes. I miss these people.” MIT Press Direct is a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide.

In her art review column for Details, the independent downtown culture magazine, Mueller didn’t review art as much as she lamented about the state of the art world, and waxed poetic whenever she was moved to do so. “You have to have opinions while looking for art or searching out the other forms of divinity in daily life,” she succinctly says in her May 1987 essay as she rereads her most recent column. Still, it’s hard to imagine where Mueller might fit in during this current era; she would be 73 if she hadn’t died of AIDS-related pneumonia at age 40. She likely would have had thoughts on the current health crisis. Prior to her own diagnosis, Mueller used her column–where she is illustrated as a bombshell with a stethoscope–to urge readers with AIDS to try homeopathic methods. “Like some bizarre sci-fi CIA plot the [American Medical Association] seems to be trying, albeit unwittingly, to obliterate the following groups: queers, voodooers, drug fiends, hemophiliacs who need transfusions often, and straights who share Sabrett hotdogs with gays,” she wrote. “I’m tired of going to wakes. I miss these people.”

Success!

With a swath of pivotal events in Mueller's life—including her brother's death at age 14, the result of climbing a dead tree, which collapsed on him in the woods near their home—she went on to pursue her writing, and in high school hung out with the hippie crowd. One of Mueller's idiosyncrasies as a teen was that she constantly dyed her hair: "'Whenever you're depressed, just change your hair color,' she [her mother] always told me, years later, when I was a teenager: I was never denied a bottle of hair bleach or dye. In my closet there weren't many clothes, but there were tons of bottles." Mandell, Jonathan (January 4, 1990). "Cookie & Vittorio". New York Newsday. p.Part II/4 . Retrieved March 20, 2022– via Newspapers.com.

In 1959, with eyes the same size, I got to see some of America traveling in the old green Plymouth with my parents, who couldn't stand each other, and my brother and sister, who loved everyone. [Cookie's brother Michael actually died in an accident on March 20, 1955.] I remember the Erie Canal on a dismal day, the Maine coastline in a storm, Georgia willow trees in the rain, and the Luray Caverns in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia where the stalagmites and -tites were poorly lit.Mandell, Jonathan (January 4, 1990). "Cookie & Vittorio". New York Newsday. p.Part II/20 . Retrieved March 20, 2022– via Newspapers.com. urn:lcp:walkingthroughcl0000muel:epub:9e90a343-9d21-41c1-9434-fcd5a9c3720e Foldoutcount 0 Identifier walkingthroughcl0000muel Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s23d0m23p09 Invoice 1652 Isbn 0936756616 Lccn 2002514450 Ocr tesseract 5.2.0-1-gc42a Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9181 Ocr_module_version 0.0.18 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA403203 Openlibrary_edition Piecing her stories together, readers will be hard-pressed to solve the riddle of her character, when most of her time, from Baltimore to Berlin, is spent in conducting “socio-behavioral studies,” a pastime she shared with Waters. Among the many things she has seen are Vogue cover models queueing in line with the down-and-low for a heroin fix, the night crowds that make the Berlin Film Festival “much more fun” than Cannes, the fuss that one anonymous but incredibly well-connected MFA graduate will make by OD’ing at his own birthday party. Her stories exemplify what creative writing lecturers may be at pains to teach about the link between point of view and characterization: If you want to evoke the idea of who someone really is, start by showing us what they see. Mueller's unflappability, her refusal of stasis and self-pity, her hunger for beauty, her readiness to find it where few else would look—all of it adds up into a singular code for living, in which the worst thing a person could do is flinch. A lot of people got tattoos that summer. Some got hooked,” she wrote. “That following winter, in Provincetown, tattoo fever overtook the town… It was better than hanging in a bar, more sociable than Canasta, more exciting than Monopoly, as challenging as Scrabble, and cheaper than gambling at poker. In the old traditional New England way, it was an arty masochist’s version of a sewing bee.” We have Mueller to thank—or blame—for the cottage industry of Brooklyn handpoke artists.

Goldin photographed Mueller standing in front of Vittorio’s casket. “I’d always believed that if I photographed anything or anyone enough, I would never lose them,” Goldin wrote in her 1998 book “Couples and Loneliness.” “With the death of seven or eight of my closest friends and dozens and dozens of my acquaintances, I realize there is so much the photograph doesn’t preserve. ... It doesn’t preserve a life.” Cookie Mueller wrote like a lunatic Uncle Remus—spinning little stories from Hell that will make any reader laugh out loud. She was a writer, a mother, an outlaw, an actress, a fashion designer, a go-go dancer, a witch doctor, an art-hag, and above all, a goddess. Boy, do I miss that girl. Waters’ cool, collected manner, as well as his taste in depravity and melodrama, come into focus in his brief exchange with a bed-bound Mueller.By the time the collection arrives at Mueller’s fiction, what’s true and what isn’t seems irrelevant. For Mueller, truth was in permanent parentheses. Mueller explores how to handle loss in “Valerie Losing 2,” a story about a woman who woke up one day to find one of her toes was mysteriously missing. a b "Cookie Mueller Dead; Actress and Writer, 40". The New York Times. November 15, 1989. p.B 28. ProQuest 110155682 . Retrieved November 8, 2020– via ProQuest. After months of thinking the loss over very carefully she came to know why she had lost this part of her body,” she writes. “In the last fifteen years she had lost a lot, beginning with her virginity. She had lost two husbands, countless girlfriends, passports, bank books, wallets, one apartment, plants, a car, a dog, valuable jewelry; there were so many things. This was nothing new, only slightly different. She had lost so much it was just something else to mourn over for a bit. She took it in stride. There is a great art to handling losses with nonchalance.”