My throat opens and I cry out, “Master, oh, Master!” I can’t bear to live without him. Love spills from my mouth for him, love spills from my ears for him, love belches from my heart for him, love seeps from my nipples and cunt and armpits for him, stickly red love flows from my nose, spills over my lower lip and down my chin. Master, I don’t care what you did come back please please please. Come. Back. When your world falls apart, pain opens to a marvel so tender, beautiful and ugly merge. Meaning is beaten away like dust from an exquisitely imperfect Persian rug.
The TV Sutras
Dodie Bellamy
May 2014
An international treasure
Wayne Koestenbaum
Inspired by visionaries like Moses, William Blake, and Joseph Smith, Bellamy spent five months in 2009 receiving transmissions from her television set and writing brief commentaries on each. The sutras and commentaries in the present volume are the beginning of an intensive investigation into the nature of religious experience. What are cults? Are they limited to wacko marginal communities, or do we enter one every time we go to work or step into a polling place? What is charisma and why are we addicted to it? Bellamy speaks candidly and intimately to her own experience as a woman, a writer, and former cult member. This commingling of memoir, fiction, collage and essay makes room for horny gurus, visitors from outer space, the tenderness of group life, and maybe the beginnings of a hard-won individualism.
About the Author
Dodie Bellamy’s writing focuses on sexuality, politics, and narrative experimentation, challenging the distinctions between fiction, essay, and poetry. She is the 2018-19 subject of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s On Our Mind program, a year-long series of public events, commissioned essays, and reading group meetings inspired by an artist’s writing and lifework. She has published The TV Sutras and Barf Manifesto, both with UDP, and When the Sick Rule the World (Semiotext(e)). Her essay, “The Beating of Our Hearts,” was presented at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. With Kevin Killlian, she also edited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997 (Nightboat Books).
Praise
Dodie Bellamy is a national treasure. (I’ll go further: Dodie Bellamy is an international treasure.) Her sentences—like water from a prelapsarian spring—have amazing purity and tonal accuracy; they hold themselves accountable to the highest standards of candor. In The TV Sutras she is in top form, hilarious and enlightening as an anarchist bodhisattva moonlighting as a performance artist. I gorge on Bellamy’s genius.
Wayne Koestenbaum
Part porno, part memoir (maybe), part spiritual teaching (probably not ), part fiction, The TV Sutras is a page turner. Bellamy’s writing is, line by line, literally exciting, driving, flowing, churning, so disarmingly, so sincerely, confessional, it’s got to be fake, and probably is, but you can’t tell it’s so hyper-believable— and so serious in its love for and skepticism about zany and banal spiritual teachings and the cults that convey them. Her writing about the sexual energies that swirl around the guru figure — from the point of view of a woman thrilled by them - is all too convincing. By the time you get to the transcendent final page it hits you that you have always been in.
Norman Fisher
In the News
Links
Other UDP titles from Dodie Bellamy here
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-937027-39-1
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 240 pp, 6 x 8 in
Publication Date: May 01 2014
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)
Series: Dossier