Mandell, Jonathan (January 4, 1990). "Cookie & Vittorio". New York Newsday. p.Part II/3 . Retrieved March 20, 2022– via Newspapers.com.

When she was 18, Mueller moved to San Francisco. There, she spent drug-fueled days bumping shoulders with the likes of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, and going on adventures that seem almost too insane to be true, as if Hunter S. Thompson had written Joan Didion’s seminal essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. 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.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. Mueller was an It Girl, discovered by John Waters for his film “ Multiple Maniacs” in 1970. When Mueller met Waters, she writes, “I felt like I was meeting my new family.” After learning the cult filmmaker was born prematurely, “I envisioned him as an infant, compact like a pound cake, lying in a clear plastic preemie life support box ... already rococo and bursting his bunting wrapper with his dreams and plans of film scenarios.” What these writers also have in common is an unfiltered, pre-internet relationship to the world. Widespread use of social media has created an intensified culture of social mirroring and self-consciousness that these writers didn't experience, and this immediacy with the world is reflected in their prose. While there can be a particular detachment and ambiguity found in contemporary fiction and nonfiction, there is a certain electricity in this work from the late 20th century that perhaps comes from the way the writing itself hews so closely to the intimacy of experience. The quips are brief, the humor is mordant, and the insights are sharp, clarifying flashes of light. There seems to be no distance between the thing which is felt and the crisp articulation of it. In advice to her lonely single girlfriends, Mueller writes: When Scarpati’s lungs collapsed, many blamed the particles (and the many cigarettes) he had inhaled as a sculptor and restorative artist. But it was AIDS. In one of her last columns for Details magazine, Mueller wrote that Scarpati had been finally driven to create his own art when he was in the hospital. “Did he need to be physically tied down to finally do his important work?” she asks. “Vittorio has learned that like a flood of sunlight, hope can vanquish gloom ... I hope he comes home soon.” Mueller was living on borrowed time too. While Scarpati was in the hospital, she and her friend, artist Scott Covert, went to Provincetown, Mass. “She had this card that I found,” Covert remembers in Chloe Griffin’s oral biography of Mueller, “Edgewise.” “It had something she would repeat to herself, for some kind of visualization, like a mantra: ‘I will live long enough to write my novel — one year, two years ... .’ I don’t know what the novel was about; maybe her life. She wanted to dedicate it to her son.”

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. MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology. Mueller, Cookie (1997). Scholder, Amy (ed.). Ask Dr. Mueller: The Writings of Cookie Mueller. New York: Serpent's Tail High Risk Books. ISBN 1-85242-331-5.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. 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.” Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-09-16 20:01:35 Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA40691410 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

Soderberg, Brandon (October 22, 2014). "Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller". The Baltimore Sun. p.T55 . Retrieved March 20, 2022– via Newspapers.com. You have to have opinions while looking for art or searching out the other forms of divinity in daily life.” Bonetti, David (November 23, 1992). "How I bought 2 Nan Goldins at auction". San Francisco Examiner. p.Part Z-B4 . Retrieved March 20, 2022– via Newspapers.com. I appreciated -- in fact, felt inspired by -- Cookie's lavishly dégagé attitude toward life. Hers is the kind of nonchalant style of describing ridiculous events that lesser writers, like myself, try to emulate but fail to even touch. She treats rape in several points in the book as a kind of fact of life -- something awful, yes, but also as something she can exploit to turn the tables on her rapists and abuse them in the best way she possibly could: through her writing, with sharp, eviscerating humor. The story of her road trip abduction in the South was the best one, and the funniest one, in my opinion. Overall, Cookie was empowered, drunk with empowerment even. It's upsetting how young she died. 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_editionNan 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] 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.

The reissue is a gift to Mueller’s longtime fans who have hungrily consumed every piece of her published writing to date, as well as newcomers looking for an entry point into her vast oeuvre. In an era dominated by the cult of personality that is often so hyper-curated it becomes sterile, Mueller’s refreshingly gritty and uncensored approach to documenting her life is more relevant than ever. “I started writing when I was six and have never stopped completely,” she writes. Mueller was married to Vittorio Scarpati, who died of AIDS in September 1989. [4] [5] Death and legacy [ edit ] The last of Mueller's quotes, an elegy of her intent and existence, was written shortly before her death: 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.Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller, an oral history of Mueller's life, was published in 2014. [8] Bibliography [ edit ] 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. Boch, Richard (2017). The Mudd Club. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House. pp.144–145. ISBN 978-1-62731-051-2. OCLC 972429558. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year ( link) Recounting the snarling pain of being in labor with no epidural, Mueller grumbles, “Even the usually silent plants on the windowsill, benevolently doing their miraculous carbon monoxide to oxygen exchange, were wheezing with asthmatic photosynthesis… If this was the way it was going to be, then it better be worth it.” (She decides the birth is worthwhile after the nurses give her son an Elvis pompadour in his hospital photos.)