Tender Buttons Makes Bernadette Mayer's Utopia Available for Download

Tender Buttons has done all the non-collectors among us a favor, making Bernadette Mayer's Utopia (United Artists, 1984, OOP) available for PDF download. As Freud said of this work, “I wish I were still living to understand this book.” Nada Gordon wrote years ago about Utopia:

As are all of Mayer’s works, Utopia is indissolubly connected to the life and world in which it was made, and comes from an attempt to work through the conflicts and separations experienced in that life and that world. Humor and fancy help to pave the bridge its reader travels with a soft carpet; Mayer does achieve one of her foremost goals—to please. I wrote to her that I thought all utopias came out of a desperate impulse—out of a world whose conflicts could never be resolved. She responded: “I … always want to please, and that is the impulse of utopia, not desperation at all—to imitate or create some forms of perfection (though that’s against the avant garde rules).”4 Her maverick stance is surely admirable in a world as codified and codifying as ours.

Nick Sturm, in his playful intro to the download, writes:

The book fluctuates between the fantastic and the realistic as it maps out its utopia, a place/space that the book itself, with its permeable authorial borders and abundance of presence, comes to embody. There’s really not any other book like it, but it’s kind of like a cross between Edmund Berrigan’s Can It! and Stephanie Young’s Ursula or University, or imagine adapting Lisa Roberton’s Nillinginto an absurdist action movie in the late 70s. At one point there is this frenzied dialogue between a couple dozen characters where Plato walks in and talks about "wielding my cunt like the state.”

And Gordon quotes Mayer herself:

Bernadette Mayer: The painter Rackstraw Downes wrote in a letter the best criticism of Utopia in which he said that life without malice would be unendurable. And then later he said that perhaps he meant life without malice would be impossible. Let me read you part of it:

But Utopia is really not utopia at all, it is Bernadette’s anthology of pet beefs and phobias interspersed with some very jolly and altogether attainable picnics and moments of humanitarian-like concern, and a yearning for an extended (very extended!) family which would include, as it were, oceanic incest … However, I do not believe in humanitarianism, and I’m glad that the olive oil of endless goodwill and airborn sex will be cut with the vinegar of a plentiful population of landlords, psychiatrists, Nixons, and Watts! For life without malice would be unendurable.

If you haven't read it, here's your best chance. If you're concerned about the legality of such a thing, check out Mayer's utopian copyright:

Utopian Copyright :) by Bernadette Mayer
All rights unreserved under International & Pan-American no-copyright no-conventions. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio or television review, every part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from anyone. All rights remain unreserved and free including the right of reproduction in whole or part or in any form or way that seems pleasing or useful to you.

With this in mind, Bohinc encourages any publisher, press, or individual interested in making the download available to please do so! Tender Buttons is not sole owner of this copyright, as you can see.