Naked Lunch

Lydia Lunch's new book, Paradoxia: A Predator's Diary, concerns her travails through the no-rent city life of gloriously depraved late-'70s, early-'80s New York. It captures the era nicely. The first words in Jerry Stahl's introduction are "Hubert Selby Jr." In his afterword, Thurston Moore manages only nine words before he pens "yr," which he needed for "She'll swallow yr boy psychosis and translate it into some ambi-sexual alchemy." As for the book, it's billed as a "confession," so there are reams of wanton sex, drugs, violence, and mentions of piss and shit. "The first few years spent in New York were a blur of alcohol, sex, and drugs," Lunch writes, then goes on to catalog dozens of meticulously recounted events. Her matter-of-fact prose style is way more understandable than you'd expect from a No-Wave and Cinema of Transgression doyenne, but she often slips into incantatory prose, especially during the dirty parts. She appears with Arthur Nersesian, a longtime N.Y. writer who started publishing books in the late '90s with The Fuck-Up. His latest is The Swing Voter of Staten Island.
Fri., Nov. 9, 7 p.m., 2007