About the Book
An elegy to four critical and poetic minds—Bill Berkson, Douglas Crimp, Kevin Killian, Sam Miller—Quartet is also a meditation on ancestors, on how those who are no longer here affect our way of being, of writing, of moving through the world. Poet, novelist, writer of and on performance Claudia La Rocco weaves fragile threads of acquaintanceship and intimacy into a chamber piece of voices, attitudes, and gestures of attention, spurred on by the restless interplay of present, past, and page. Quartet’s motifs run unpredictably along our sociality’s frayed edges, seeking connections in the questions we’re left with after the passing of lives and eras, inescapably edged by legacies of privileged belonging.
This pamphlet is part of UDP’s 2020 Pamphlet Series: twenty commissioned essays on collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing. The pamphlets are available for individual purchase and as a subscription. Each offers a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present, an engagement at once sustained and ephemeral. To view a full list of pamphlets, click here
Author
Claudia La Rocco
Claudia La Rocco is the author of the selected writings The Best Most Useless Dress (Badlands Unlimited), the chapbook I am trying to do the assignment ([2nd Floor Projects]), and the sf novel petit cadeau (published by the Chocolate Factory Theater in print, performance, and digital editions). Her work frequently involves interdisciplinary projects; collaborators include the visual artist Anne Walsh, the choreographer Michelle Ellsworth, and the musician/composer Phillip Greenlief, with whom she is animals & giraffes, an ongoing experiment in improvisation. She has received grants and residencies from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, and Headlands Center for the Arts, among others, and has writing in numerous publications and anthologies, including The New York Times, where she was a critic and reporter from 2005-2015. La Rocco is Editorial Director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s live and online commissioning platform Open Space.
Praise
Praise for Previous Work
Excerpt
In the dream it’s a ballet festival or a symposium. I have very fragmented memories but—there were lots of pieces that we saw, I think premieres and, I was at a bar or somewhere with, like, [crow calling], one of those restaurants that isn’t very satisfying where you end up between performances. Even now I might be editorializing. But. I do remember very clearly that Christopher … Wheeldon was [crow] I almost called him Christopher Walken [slight laughter] I was eating with Christopher and Douglas Crimp was at a nearby table and I just remember, “Oh, Douglas can, Douglas saw it, Douglas can explain it to me or he can explain myself to me if I am writing something [crow] doesn’t make sense that I need help with.” I woke up missing him terribly. He’s not somebody I was good friends with but that sort of intimacy that develops when you go to see the same type of[sand crunching] over and over again, year after year, and you see the same people in the audience, and often they’re not the people that you, you know, are closest to in the world, your partners, your best friends, your relatives. They’re the people who also love this thing that you love. So, it is this sort of parallel intimacy and closeness, because you also can’t sometimes share these things fully with the people you are intimate with in other ways. If you’re lucky you can. Or maybe not if you’re lucky, maybe you don’t want to, maybe it’s delicious to have this other world and place. And anyway. Yeah … Douglas and Bill and Sam. Well, Douglas and Sam were that. Bill and Kevin were something else [wind]don’t know, is there any frame for these four men, except that they all died in the span of three years?