Peter Sotos: Kee McFarlane (Nine-Banded Books, 2024)
Just got round to reading this after buying it aeons ago - that's how big my book backlog is baby!
OK so brevi manu, this is basically a short and mordant critique of Vanessa Place, who as we all know is not only an artist but a lawyer who has spent years dealing face to face with criminal sex cases, i.e. the actual people and situations that most "transgressive" artists can keep at a nice safe intellectual distance whilst they wiggle in their sheepskin armchairs.
It may just be me, but I get a vibe of intellectual one-upmanship going on here. I think PS recognises something of himself in Place and is attracted to and irritated by that. There is a genuine affinity here, and that's clear through the book, but I think PS has a very strong desire to show that he can see through her better than she can explain herself. As an aside, this reminded me of reading Danny Devos's correspondence with John Wayne Gacy, where Gacy called DDV out for being "condescending" because he was suggesting artists are like serial killers in some way. Hehe. There is something similar here, I think, in the situation of one person saying to another, you think you're the one who understands this, but actually I understand you better than you understand yourself.
He does make some pretty strong points about her book 'You Had To Be There: Rape Jokes'. Sotos keeps pushing at the gap between the joke, the person telling it, the person hearing it and the thing being joked about, rather than allowing "it's only a joke" to settle the matter.
Overall, the word "mastery" kept coming back to me while reading it. Place talks about our "enthralment to mastery" and Sotos spends a good chunk of the book demonstrating his own mastery, of the material, of obscenity, of the law, of the reader, of Place's intentions yadda yadda. There is a constant sense of "I know what you're really doing, and you don't." Did I already say that? So I started wondering whether the book isn't partly Sotos competing with Place over who gets to occupy the position of the person who has really looked at this stuff "the best".
One other thing is that his rhetorical shtick starts bordering on self-parody here. Made me think of Gide's reaction to Céline's 'Bagatelles Pour Un Massacre', basically "this is so extreme I can't believe he's not joking." It's like Sotos putting on an enormous Peter Sotos performance. But the ending made me rethink this a bit. The book ends with (sorry to spoil it for you troops): "Done. Chip (the publisher), I'd rather you not publish this." Which is a hoot after everything that has gone before, i.e. a hundred pages of Sotos throwing his intellectual weight around (hehe).
On the whole I was more interested in this than a lot of his other books, partly because I've read quite a bit of Vanessa Place's work and so had more of a dog in the fight. Conversely, I also find Sotos's ping-ponging is what makes it a good book, going from flat-out abuse to elaborate intellectual dovetailing and back again. One minute he's hurling shit through the letterbox, the next he's making a rather recondite (posh word for obscure) point about the mechanics of a joke. That combination of invective (posh word for abuse) and intellectual sharpness is what kept me reading, despite the "I'm even tougher and more sick than Frank Booth" OTT rhetoric.
