Walking Through Clear Water In a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories (Canons)

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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. Mandell, Jonathan (January 4, 1990). "Cookie & Vittorio". New York Newsday. p.Part II/4 . Retrieved March 20, 2022– via Newspapers.com. Goldin photographed Mueller standing in front of Vittorio’s casket. “I’d always believed that if I photographed anything or anyone enough, I would never lose them,” Goldin wrote in her 1998 book “Couples and Loneliness.” “With the death of seven or eight of my closest friends and dozens and dozens of my acquaintances, I realize there is so much the photograph doesn’t preserve. ... It doesn’t preserve a 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.

A lot of people got tattoos that summer. Some got hooked,” she wrote. “That following winter, in Provincetown, tattoo fever overtook the town… It was better than hanging in a bar, more sociable than Canasta, more exciting than Monopoly, as challenging as Scrabble, and cheaper than gambling at poker. In the old traditional New England way, it was an arty masochist’s version of a sewing bee.” We have Mueller to thank—or blame—for the cottage industry of Brooklyn handpoke artists. In 1969, Cookie Mueller suffered a fallopian tube infection she mistook to be her period. When she woke up in an unknown hospital bed, she felt disoriented but otherwise “great, clean, and very neat.” A nurse had done her hair up in tight braided pigtails, each one ending in a white surgical rubber band to prevent her hair from snapping off amid fever-induced agitation. As the narrator of her autobiographical story points out, no white girl or woman over the age of twelve can pull off pigtails or ponytails, so it is to be understood that Mueller looked “dumb.” On cue, film director John Waters walked in, accompanied by actress Mink Stole. 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 The new edition of Walking Through Clear Water is almost three times the size of the original, and includes unpublished work.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.” Her chronicles of the last days of American countercultural life New York’s downtown scene bursts with energy.” 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.Mandell, Jonathan (January 4, 1990). "Cookie & Vittorio". New York Newsday. p.Part II/5 . Retrieved March 20, 2022– via Newspapers.com. Before she joined the cast of Waters’ Dreamlanders (the name for recurring cast members of his films), and later New York’s downtown art scene, Mueller’s story began in the suburbs of Baltimore. She was born there in 1949, and grew up a self-proclaimed “alien” among her parents and childhood friends: an otherworldly child, destined to explore the world. “I was always leaving,” she writes early on. “It’s natural. It’s a biological urge. Like birds testing their wings. I can’t help myself.”

It’s not just the stories that are exciting, it’s the revelation they contain—that we might allow such wildness to stumble on to our own paths, even just for an afternoon. I love her for reminding me, with gentle pressure between the lines, to go out tonight, to see what happens, to live a little harder.”

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The smaller scale of personal visibility in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and even the 90s, produced a kind of alacrity toward the world that isn’t as common in contemporary writing. Mueller's appetite for life was impressive for any decade and her storytelling is as immersive and exciting as her life was. Through her writing, we travel with Mueller as she hitchhikes across the US, tries most of the drugs that come her way, and gallivants to far-flung locales with no plan. On one occasion, recounted in her essay “The Italian Remedy–1983,” she simply stayed with a man who worked at the train station of the train she came in on. Because of her writing style, we get to join Mueller in the way she fully occupied the present. In these moments with her, we get a taste of what it’s like to live in her embodied instant. We get to experience the unrestrained perspective of someone who, when she was a waitress, found the customers so miserable to deal with that she wound up throwing food at them. She looked for thrills and intrigue wherever she could find it, and took on hardship with a sense of grace. In one of her fables she wrote about a woman losing her toe, who after much inner turmoil acquiesces: “There is a great art to handling losses with nonchalance.” Mueller felt it all, processed her experiences, and kept moving. Baltimore doesn’t last long, as Mueller is “always leaving.” All she shares with her family of origin are “a few inherited chromosomes, the identical last name, and the same bathroom.” She finds her way to Haight-Ashbury in 1967, living not for the last time with upwards of ten people. There, a single day involves almost meeting Charles Manson, definitely meeting Anton LaVey, being harassed in a church, getting raped at gunpoint, and being on LSD for most of it—but her most acute complaint is that the recording of her amphetamine rap session sounds “foolishly cyclical” the day after. The last of Mueller's quotes, an elegy of her intent and existence, was written shortly before her death: