Peter SotosCritiques

Sotos' use of collage gets more and more subtle, perhaps even more insidious or poignant depending on who you ask. Meaning that the line between weeping mother, dead girl, and Sotos himself blurs or disappears entirely because of how the words are folded. At the same time, the demarcations between the three are made ever more pronounced just because of how Sotos casts or reflects on each. In much of his work, Sotos will scorn the weeping mother and/or himself. SOmetimes he will show deep empathy for the dead and the hurt, sometimes jsut lurid fascination (or what masquerades as such). Here, he does all of these things to a degree, and that doesn't really happen in any of the other books.

The names he lingers on here, in relation to their images and stories, are particularly devastating and/or prurient (again, it's hard to pull apart here). Skyler Kauffmann being raped and buried alive, or the borderline urban legend of Thea Pumbroek. She only exists in a few grizzly details, and Sotos doesn't even give you those. You have to go hunt that context down. And you make it yours by doing so. By imbibing, in a way, these murdered and hurt lives, and Sotos forces us to do that in a way the news or a press release or muttered sympathy doesn't, a piece of that story becomes "ours."

I was talking with Anita Dalton as I read this book and she pointed out that the title of the book reflects this. It at once a descriptor of victim experience, parental clinging, perpetrator possessiveness, and the ownership Sotos creates for himself, whether it is mournful or caring or pornographic or lurid or something in between or wholly other. All the more, that "mine" is in the mouth of the reader now too. You are included. I am included. Maybe even in some more meaningful way than a hungry reporter or a lurid spectator we are mixed into the experience by reading about it and how it is interpreted. The "mine" lies in the mouth of the parent, the victim, the perpetrator, the writer, and at last the reader.

Sotos' printed transcriptions of the films of Jamie Gillis strip away image from word. Since the pornographic is formulated in terms of the visual, the jerk off material is pretty much non-existent here. What is left is the verbal exchange, and that exchange reveals as much about Gillis as it does about the women he's filming performing oral sex on random men in adult bookstores or eating their own puke be it for desperate need of money or for pleasure where pay off is almost secondary. In one of the transcripts, Jamie Gillis says that someone could find the tape in a hundred years and think he was the twentieth century Marquis de Sade, and The Humiliation of Heidi and the scene with Eve certainly make him a contender. On the other hand, the Africa interview wouldn't be out of place in a seminar alongside work by Dworkin and McKinnon, since its practically a case study in power dynamics, trauma, and the messiness of sexual need and desire. Sotos' introduction is among his more candid writing, in consideration of a wider audience, though it is no less provocative or unflinching for it. If you enjoy Jamie Gillis, Sotos, the theory of pornography, or, dare I say, feminist cultural theory, this is a valuable text.½

In this collaboration between Peter Sotos and photographer Michael Salerno, Sotos' text prefaces the photographs, and thus colors them if you go through the book from beginning to end. Text feeds into image and image feeds back into text. Sotos lingers in the particulars of the crimes of Joseph Duncan, picking at them like crusted scab, disrupting them with his own need and concentration. His text uses much less direct collage here, more an exercise of putting words and ideas into "other mouths," A more subtle and infectious juxtaposition without seams. Salerno's photographic collage work of sleeping boys blanketed by the wreckage of hurricanes is not able to be divorced, after reading the words, from Duncan as once a serenely sleeping boy, a long time ago, and how little that matters now, You see a the literal image of a broken home and contextualize that in term's of Shasta's lived experience. These boys are sleeping serenely, and what these images evoke, after everything, is the opposition between the curled serenity of her sleeping smallness and the wreckage in her mind that's not supposed to be there.

A logical progression after Selfish, Little and Comfort and Critique, which makes Predicate seem even more like a strange stylistic detour, or regression, for having immediately preceded this. Collage is still present, of course, and there is more talk of gloryholes and sad cocksucking here than perhaps in any other Sotos book outside of Index.

Here though, the facts of Sotos' slumming and his deviant queer experience are more closely linked to his obsessions with media portrayals of sex crimes. When talking about lamenting mothers, he says, "[h]ow dare you, cunt, think you're going to tell me what it's like not to understand your loss? You think I've never missed a fucking bus. Known someone with cancer and watched any number of loved ones die of it? Fuck, I've been to more hospital rooms than you, fucking het."

He puts himself, and in general the predator, at some level of human disadvantage, giving them some level of sympathy. The book is a literary Skinner Box experiment, evinced by the cover, which forces the reader to see the evident villains in at least the same light as sad and shudderring monkeys clutching cloth mothers, and maybe seeing Sotos' narrative voice to be a little more empathetic than even that. If he wants it. He gives it out. In Comfort and Critique, he humanizes parents more. In Selfish, Little, Lesley, thus the victim. Here the pigs aren't really dissected, but Sotos himself (at least as persona if not author, poetic speaker if not the man himself wholly) is revealed a little more here than before, and humanized. Through bar conversations, brief meditations on the fear of HIV/AIDS, and biting contrasts like the quote above.

Again, as the years progress, Sotos's becomes more reflective (if not necessarily accessible to a wider audience) and his most recent works are easily found. Sotos' rests beyond the perimeters of marketable "transgressive" literature, and more importantly, hinges at the edge of queer deviance. Without the fantasy of Cooper or the intersectional politics of Delany, Sotos' forces his readers to give thought to darkest edges of human contemplation and the formulation of desire. This book is emblematic of that, and makes interesting formal choices that differentiate it from its predecessors and makes it just as essential reading. Hopefully at some point Sotos' back catalog from this period will be reprinted. This book in particular is so scarce it's almost as if it was never written. It's lack of availability compared to those that are more available from Sotos' ouevre might be purposeful, probably because of its focus on Masha Allen, who was a widely discussed topic in the media at the time of the book's release.½

Sotos' frame here, Hamilton and his perpetration of the Dunblane Massacre, is not as intricately and intimately weaved through the narrative of Predicate as is the case with Lesley Ann Downey in Selfish, Little or Sarah Payne in Comfort and Critique. The careful collage, the ambiguously positioned explication, the gloryhole romps are all there; they aren't executed with quite the same depth. There is a distance here that blots out the emotional punch and cautious vulnerablilty of what are probably Sotos's two best books. The form is all there, even the content, but he's tired of having to explain himself maybe, and so the personal is sacrificed to the detriment of the work. The joke being that every book he writes is personal and any outside artistic judgment is inevitable but immediately pretentious. How many people have even read this in the whole world, seven?½

I finished reading this book at 3:00 in the morning and didn’t really sleep that night. I read it in one sitting and though it only took a few hours to read, when I was finished I felt hollowed out. Sick. Queasy. Not unlike how it feels when you crash after a speed bender. Jittery and empty yet all too aware that sleep is not coming. Parts of this book were like being flayed. I think anyone who was ever victimized finds Sotos a daunting read, but of all the books he has written that I have read thus far, this one was the most upsetting to me. And the reason I was so upset was because that which is wrong in this book is often wrong in me.

Of course we all know that I read upsetting books because I like being upset (or sickened or awakened or whatever happens to me when I read really difficult content). But even within that paradigm I take a beating when I read Sotos. Without engaging in too much self-analysis, I can only assume that at the end it was a beating I needed or truly wanted in some way. This is why I read Sotos. Because on some level we have similar thoughts – a book like this could only be devastating to a person who has already been down this road. To the unaffected reader, it might just come off as vulgarity or pointless obscenity. Despite being trained to analyze literature in an academic manner, I prefer to react in an emotional manner to the books I read. I don’t really care about the schools of thought and the tradition of transgression that many attempt to apply to Sotos’ work. When I read him I care only about my reaction, how he pokes at my own obsessions, how he knows so much more than anyone else about the will to harm and the will to survive harm.

I don’t know how this fact had not jumped out at me before, but in every book, keeping in mind every little bit of genuine autobiographical data he gives, Peter Sotos is playing different roles and channeling different people. He is exploring humanity by speculating about the worst things that go through the minds of the worst people. Because he is taking on the roles of other people, Sotos, in a very real sense, is engaging in psychodrama. And that is why I am so wrung out at the end of each book he writes. His psychodrama speaks to my own worries, neuroses, experiences and fears.

This is purely incidental. Peter Sotos is not writing for you or for me. Never forget that. Any meaning you take from Sotos’ words may have nothing to do with his intentions as he wrote the book. He’s not trying to relate to us. His psychodramas are his own. They are so deeply personal and unintended for purgation of others that it’s very interesting to me the extreme reactions his writing creates, especially in those who find themselves angry at what they consider Sotos’ wickedness.

That having been said, no matter how incidental any connection I have to this book may be, this book was a great emotional purge for me. Even in the extremity of another person’s psychodrama I found little pieces of my own experiences, most of them unpleasant. Clearly something in me is perverse enough to enjoy being poked psychically. It’s a useful pain, I think.

This is a very long discussion. You can read the rest of it here: http://ireadoddbooks.com/tool-by-peter-sotos/

When compared to all of the books that precede it, it is apparent that this is Sotos' greatest work. Though you probably need to read one or two of those earlier books to realize the magnitude of the shift. The structure here is intricately crafted, taking the reader down a maelstrom that slowly unfolds in reverse detailing the tragic murder of Sarah Payne. If Sotos' nineties work is percussive and bludgeoning, this is a maddening drone exacted with a high level of empathy, suspicion, and revelations of intent. This is a document that draws out the parallels and disconnects between public and private obsession. Sotos' articulates the messy divide between himself and his subject, which is always, rightfully, the victim.

Distinctions are made between the narrator who talks about these children, the men who have hurt them, and the parents who mourn them in such a questionably public manner. The fascinating thing here is how all three are treated with specifically unique feelings of disgust. After reading the short text, around one hundred and fifty pages, the photo portion hits you like a blast. The gaze that their careful presentation forces you to adopt makes you meditate on the author's personal obsession, the media's public and exploitative fascination, and on the victims themselves. You have a desire to try and see who they really are, beyond the text and beyond the image, and you realize tragically that these children are unable to be divorced from the grizzly reality of their end, and that their end is all they signify to everybody involved.

A book detailing sundry subjects of pedophilia and graphic violence, with particularly nuanced detail to the abduction and murder of Lesley Ann Downey. Much of Sotos' earlier work alternates between anecdotes of glory hole escapades and newspaper excerpts of child murder cases through the vehicle of a spiteful voice. Those elements are also found here, but there is a more particular structure with a large amount of focus on the titular subject that leads to a more reflective narrative voice, one might even say a compassionate voice. That same voice later wishes for opportunities to view increasingly graphic depictions of children being abused and murdered, and to rip apart large animals. A reader has a hard time reconciling the regret or remorse or transformation earlier in the book with these desires. It is even harder to comprehend in terms of a first person, potentially semi-autobiographical narrative.

We might want Sotos to come out and unwrite his own output, to counter it and cast everything previously written into some sort of inverse moralizing or cultural criticism. Is that fair? We don't ask repentance or transformation from the voice of Maldoror, or the narrator of Cooper's Frisk. Perhaps is it because we see some part of Sotos himself in the voice here. Which part? Even the most deranged and hateful voice can reflect or fluctuate, and even the average individual contains some form of violent desire. This is, if nothing else, a study in the abject position. It contains a great amount of ugliness, but there are surprising glimpses of beauty here too.½

Peter Sotos' writing is truly and unabashedly transgressive, obsessively delving into details of child sexual abuse and murder interspersed with scenes of glory hole trolling. This anthology of his early work is non-chronological. Tool, His earliest works after his notorious fanzines Pure and Parasite, continue his utilization of a mocking and universally spiteful Sadean voice with the odd coda of a heartfelt sympathy letter. Special utilizes the same voice albeit less effectively. Lazy and Tick are works from the turn of the century that employ the same voice and similar content with interesting utilization of pastiche and more developed writing, though these texts are significantly messier. Perhaps this is the intention. Index falls in between these periods formally as well as chronologically, and is probably the strongest work in the collection.

Sotos' work of this period is deafeningly percussive, often caustic, provoking a physical response in the reader. The writing here is the textual equivalent of a noise record. This is not surprising since Sotos was a longtime member of the group Whitehouse.

Where does the author begin and the character end? Where does the voice on the page end and the reader's eyes begin? By exposing us to these details, these obsessions, he makes the reader implicit within the images. For all that, Sotos is more honest than the deluge of saccharine media exploitation surrounding the subject. Later, from what I have read, his writing becomes stronger and more powerful, his voice more reflective. We could say he is exposing cultural hypocrisy or revealing a darker side of human nature, or just being provocative. Maybe he is, but maybe not. Either way, it is doubtful that he cares.

As for this particular collection, it is now years out of print and can cost some fraction of your rent check through third party sellers and auction sites. If you want a glimpse at Sotos' oeuvre, grab a copy of Index, also out of print, for considerably less. Maybe Tick as well. If you're not revolted or bored by then, read Selfish, Little; supposed to function as a sort of skeleton key to these earlier works. I feel like I will appreciate it more having trudged through this difficult but absorbing terrain.½

Sotos is hard for me to read. He is relentless. I have to put him down and come back to him. I can never read him in one go. He upsets me. He makes me sick. At times, I do not understand him and when I do, it bothers me because it makes me wonder about the sickness that lurks in my own soul. But I comfort myself that what is happening to me is that Sotos is provoking a reaction, not a realization, which is why I think this book exists.

I expose myself to Peter Sotos for the same reasons I expose myself to any number of artistic darknesses: I have to. It is a compulsion and one I gave up fighting years ago. Sotos leaves me bewildered, unsure about what I just read. Parts of the book are unclear. Was it truth, a remembrance of actual sexual couplings? Fantasy? Is he describing himself or is it a fiction? And would knowing the truth make any difference?

I don't know. Read the rest of the review here: http://ireadoddbooks.com/?p=500