#878 Haight Ashbury- Cookie Mueller

#878 Haight Ashbury- Cookie Mueller

This is an atmosphere memoir type story about San Francisco in the summer of 1967. It has all the drugs and hippie flair you would expect from such a story:

“The air was thick with the smell of marijuana, patchouli oil, jasmine incense and Eucalyptus trees. Black guys were playing congos and flutes; white guys were playing harmonicas and guitars. It was as crowded as Coney Island on the Fourth of July. Hippie Hill was like this every day of the week.”

Although fun for what it is, Mueller clumsily tries to show exactly how cool the scene is while also trying to show her disdain for it, and thus how much cooler she is than the whole thing. She name-drops all the regulars like Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison, Carmichael. Like the others from this collection, I see the value of her writing, clearly an edgy and important voice for her time, but one that loses its importance this far removed from the scene.

Rating: 6-7-7-5 Total= 25

#830 Two People- Cookie Mueller

#830 Two People- Cookie Mueller

Stories that are edgy and try to push envelopes don’t age that well. The archetypes that are dark and titillating often become cliché years later. However, if you know that going in, you can appreciate what that kind of story must have felt like when it was written.

Cookie Mueller was an off-beat writer pushing boundaries or at least having fun in the shadows. Her collection Walking Through Clear Water In a Pool Painted Black is a look at her work. By the time it was printed in 1990, many of the references she wrote about were already past their shock value. But they are fun none-the-less. 

The narrator is a teenage bisexual thriving in the drugs, sex, and violence of her youth. In 1964 this would not exactly be mainstream literature, but 50 years later a passage like the following sounds like a teenage writing student trying to copy Jack Kerouac:

“When Jack was in the hospital, we picked up guys together, smoked a lot of cigarettes, sniffed glue, and drank codeine terpenhydrate cough syrup for the buzz.”

Then again if you were reading this in 1964 you probably already knew Kerouac and this already might have felt derisive. Good writers can be both timeless and edgy. It’s a hard line to walk. This doesn’t get there, but it is fun to read.

Notable Passage: “He was sick, quite contagious, and looked ill, but sexy, like pictures of Proust on his deathbed. I was in love, and we were teenagers going steady.”

Rating: 7-5-6-5 Total= 23