When the Sick Rule the World

by Dodie Bellamy

A moving meld of essay, memoir, and story, When the Sick Rule the World collects Dodie Bellamy's new and recent lyric prose. Taking on topics as eclectic as vomit, Kathy Acker's wardrobe, and Occupy Oakland, Bellamy here examines illness, health, and the body -- both the social body and the individual body -- in essays that glitter with wit even at their darkest moments.

In a safe house in Marin County, strangers allergic to the poisons of the world gather for an evening's solace. In Oakland, protesters dance an ecstatic bacchanal over the cancerous body of the city-state they love and hate. In the elegiac memoir, "Phone Home," Bellamy meditates on her dying mother's last days via the improbable cipher of Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Finally, Bellamy offers a piercing critique of the displacement and blight that have accompanied Twitter's move into her warehouse-district neighborhood, and the pitiless imperialism of tech consciousness.

A participant in the New Narrative movement and a powerful influence on younger writers, Bellamy views heteronormativity and capitalism as plagues, and celebrates the micro-revolts of those on the outskirts. In its deft blending of forms, When the Sick Rule the World resiliently and defiantly proclaims the "undeath of the author." In the realm of sickness, Bellamy asserts, subjectivity is not stable. "When the sick rule the world, mortality will be sexy," Bellamy prophesies. Those defined by society as sick may, in fact, be its saviors.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Memoir, Disability, Literature, Queer, Disability Studies

248 pages, Paperback

First published October 16, 2015

About the author

Dodie Bellamy is an American novelist, nonfiction author, journalist and editor. Her work is frequently associated with that of Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, and Eileen Myles. She is one of the originators in the New Narrative literary movement, which attempts to use the tools of experimental fiction and critical theory and apply them to narrative storytelling.

She ist married to Kevin Killian.

Reviews

[Joel Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

woulda given this a 5 if not for two things

- i've decided to start detracting points from books for having personal anecdotes about Kathy Acker. i mean, i like Kathy Acker, but is it like a prereq for getting published by semiotexte that you have to spend at least ten pages of your book doing a hagiography of her? this demeans all of us

-secondly, the last essay is a brutal, 60 page slog of selective white privilege denial re: the shocktrooper role of white bohemians in gentrification. like she basically says "boo hoo, my rent controlled home is precarious, i might have to move to the terra novo of oakland or brooklyn because of those bad google gentrifiers" several times. screw off.

otherwise there's so much good stuff in here. rascal guru and phone home especially are can't-miss pieces. new narrative: when it's good it's great, and when it isn't it sends me up the wall.

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the best of these essays, I never know where she's going to go next. And her style is such that she CAN go anywhere from anywhere. There's no slow build-up, no conventional progression, just sentences one after another driven by sound and sense and an unquenchable curious intellect. I love her voice. She's funny and she's not afraid to make Snow White and the seven dwarves into an all out no-holes-barred furry fuckfest.

"Whistle While you Dixie" - 5/5 I was hooked to her voice immediately, I mean, within the first few sentences. I love essays like this, ones that take a personal obsession or repulsion (in this case, whistling) and through curiosity alone keeps digging deeper and deeper to figure out where it is that this phenomenon occupies in the world at large and in the author's personal mythology. I love how you never know which direction she's going to take you, starting with the sexual innuendo of Snow White's dwarves and ending up hitchhiking across the country and baking a peach cobbler. I'm in capable hands. Dodie Bellamy can write, and command my attention with humor and shock and entertain and educate.

"When the Sick Rule the World" 4/5 - this one doesn't go as deep. There's a little personal scene setting, but then it goes into a poetic incantation, a mixture of a current reality of the sick, the allergic, the hypochondriac, a picture of those who are always avoiding everything because of potential toxicity instead of living, and a future she paints where these sick rule the world. It's interesting except I don't think she takes it far enough, and the essay ends before it reaches that next level.

"Rascal Guru" 3/5 - kind of a list poem, interesting to a degree

"Barf Manifesto" 5/5 - another amazing essay. She talks about an Eileen Myle's piece I have not read yet called "Everyday Barf" and relates it to a whole bunch of things, both personal experiences and artistic theory. She starts by saying that Eileen's piece is impossible to summarize, and so is this one here. It makes no sense yet it has its own logic, it goes around and around in circles building on tiny little things and themes that it created into some kind of as yet undiscovered meaning. I want to read Eileen's piece and re-read this.

"Girl Body" - 4/5 - another list-poem kinda deal, but this one much better, less predictable, as she said in Barf Manifesto, she does really well with the libidinal themes. I love how she connects the libidinal with nature in this almost storybook way, like in the first essay, and here with the bear familiar, dog familiar, cat familiar (I mean, what the fuck was that? But yeah!)

"Bandaged Girl" 5/5 - her pieces keep revolving and evolving, going around in circles yet going forward also. Probably like an inward or outward or downward spiral. I loved this one, which gives voice to the artwork that Tariq Alvi made of Dodie Bellamy and then gave to Bellamy. It is this artwork which is speaking, but it is not corny.

"Phone Home" 3.5/5 - her most conventional essay so far, but solidly so, talking about her mother's death and the parallels she forms with the movie ET.

"The Center of Gravity" 3 - about steel and the escapism of art. Could have been developed a bit more.

"Digging Through Kathy Acker's Stuff" 3.5/5 - would probably be more interesting if I had read Kathy Acker before.

"July 4, 2011" 4.5/5 - I really like this kind of juxtaposition-minus-exposition style she does here. This one's about screens and violence.

"The Beating of Our Hearts" - 3.5/5 Dodie Bellamy must hate small talk. She's so good at cutting right to the chase, again and again. No softly submerging the reader into her topics, you're dumped straight into the deep end, in media res motherfucker. I love it. This essay, in particular, is at first glance about political protest in art and poetry. Pretty much anything political written a few years ago (2015!!!) seems quaint now, with lines like "We didn't believe that George Bush could get elected. But he did." Ha ha. It's about Obama, Romney, and the Occupy movement, which in retrospect seems like an experiment in positive thinking--liberals think we're winning because of their positions, what they don't realize is that Obama is an exception, and overall we're losing quite badly. But wait, this piece isn't really about politics, it's about art: a faith I find quite misplaced considering how many people read poetry anymore, quoting Spahr and Clover, "that poetry has a role to play in the larger political and intellectual sphere of contemporary culture," (really? or wishful thinking by poets?). But wait, it's not really about art, it's about perception and time and awareness within the distorting lens of protest and art. Hmm, interesting angle, didn't think it'd end there.

"I Must Not Forget What I Already Know" - ??/5 - I don't know what I think of this.

"In the Shadow of Twitter Towers" - 2.5/5 - Good essay in theory about technology companies and their role in gentrification and homelessness and general shitty attitudes towards the homeless. A bit long winded, though, and I wasn't really into it by this time in the book.

[Madeleine · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5
oh HECK thank goodness for semiotexte this is one of the best books i read this year!! i knew i liked bellamy since i heard her complain about jonathan franzen <3
this is a handbook in many ways on how to tell what you are doing, as you do it (that whole form and content thing). beautiful anecdotes--provides a guide on how to notice things, how to value moments we want to ignore (leaving a poetry reading to vomit...) how to not take language for granted. as a whole the text boldly asserts that art is always politics (and that politics is worthless without emotion).

would highly recommend:
* first essay about whistling !!
* essay on E.T. and mom
* essay on Casey Anthony
* barf manifesto
*kathy acker's stuff

oops did i just list the whole collection?

[Readerwhy]

Vuoden rajattomin/överein/yllätyksellisin

Esseekokoelma, joka ei tunne mitään rajoja, vaan viipottaa menemään mihin ikinä haluaa, lähentää ja loitontaa, pistelee ja kutittaa. Välillä meno on täysin räävitöntä (Kathy Acker -tyylistä, josta Bellamy myös kirjoittaa), välillä niin herkkää ja lähelle tulevaa, että jouduin pitämään taukoja lukemisessa (Soittaa kotiin -teksti, jossa kuvataan Bellamyn äidin kuolemaa).

Lukiessani ajattelin: ”huh! että näinkin voi kirjoittaa.”

”Kun kaksi sairasta ruumista yhtyvät, heidän epätoivoiset sydämensä avautuvat ja se on ihanaa katseltavaa. Sairauden ohut, sateenkaaren väreissä kimaltava usva vyöryy heidän ihonsa yli – kahden sairaan ruumiin pannessa heidän utuiset sukuelimensä kimaltavat ja rätisevät. Sairaiden ja terveiden ei tulisi koskaan sekoittua.”

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kirkasta, upeaa, upeaa, upeaa

[flannery · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure I like this genre of memoir, idk what it's called: Goth crit? Kathy Acker fan club? Theory for freaks?? But I did find a lot in here I liked, like how the Greeks thought women were just two holes connected by one big dirty tube. What really blew my mind was the behind-the-scenes info on the movie "E.T.", most of which I guess is available on the collectors' edition DVD, but wow. I guess E.T. was played by a legless 9 year old boy, voiced by a chain smoker in her 60s with her dentures out, and his hands were performed by a mime chosen for her long, lithe fingers. I can't believe Dodie Bellamy did that much research about E.T. and still wrote that he ate M&Ms... he ate Reese's! Who's fact-checking here??? I'm being a little glib but that essay made me weep. The others idk.

[Alvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This heady conglomeration of belletristic personal essays is insightful and unpredictable. Bellamy weaves words into sculpture, bleeds ruby red onto the page, and leads readers down hidden paths in the beautiful garden of her mind.

[lee · Rating 2 out of 5]

girl this was NOT good. i wanted to believe, so bad that i finished it, which was my mistake, because the last essay is truly, truly, voyeuristic toneless garbage... legitimately upsetting, and not in the fun or productive way. at one point, bellamy asks herself how much information she has to consume about homelessness before she is "allowed" to speak about it. missing the point entirely, she concludes that the number is undefinable, and that all she can do is "blunder on". i wish she had someone around with the foresight and care enough to have told her she always has the option to BE QUIET!!!!!!!! one thing about semiotext(e) is they will let some white lady say fucking WHATEVER!!!!!!!!! to their own detriment!!!!!! i think anybody can live in the bay area and smoke weed & write bad essays; i know because i do it!!! inaction and self-exploration to the point of masturbation is not the same as resistance and speaking truth to power. BOOOOO TOMATO TOMATO

[Michael Dipietro · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was very uneven - I appreciated its wide experimentalism but some of the pieces just struck me as bad writing.. In several the content gets bogged down by Bellamy's structural conceits sabotaging what might otherwise be good ideas. "Rascal Guru" is a good example of this with its relentless repetition. The title essay and the "Shadow of Twitter Towers" piece are astonishingly un-self-aware in Bellamy's overly simple and damning judgements of whole big groups of people. Other essays are great - mostly the memoir entries about Bellamy's family roots, her mother's death, and her heyday in a feminist writers' collective.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

New favorite. Essays on ET, barfy writing, gentrification in SF, illness communities--each one a surge, a mad rush of images and ideas. [8/22/2016]
//edit 10/10/2018 -- recently reread and was again impressed and inspired, thoroughly and on every page. One of my favorite collections of writing.

[Maya · Rating 4 out of 5]

reading anything by dodie bellamy is a blessing tbh…every sentence i learn so much about what i want to be able to do in terms of wonkiness in form and word choice and mixing my life with fiction and The Real World!!

that being said i did not love this as much as the letters of mina harker or even the buddhist… perhaps it is bc i am not really an essay girl but dodie is very essay-y all the time so idk

fave parts were definitely her pettiness towards eileen myles and the section about her and kathy acker both stealing stuff from “anything and everything that crossed [their] path”

next dodie-inspired goal in writing is to write about people i know and just say their first names like everyone should know who they are and also to write very specifically and articulately about the way in which people make me feel and act in conversation and social situations — when dodie quotes kevin about kathy (lol) and says “she could be convincing…making you feel—not listened to exactly—but talked at in a most extraordinarily personal way”

[joe]

dedication to those on the outskirts of life, an homage to how they mark and influence things around them. particularly loved the essays that drifted into elements of experimentation with use of fictional narrative mixed into non-fiction; seems to be where dodie shines the most. ended on a bit of a damp squib with the final, overly long essay, could've been cut in half and still would've provided the same impact. my first bellamy book and i'm in awe at how vibrant and engaging the prose can be. dodie never allows for disinterest. any slight chance that you'll begin to switch off is met with a swift slap around the face in sentence form.

[Oliver Shrouder · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really fantastic collection of short stories, and one of the only pieces of modern literature that feels like it uses technology and commercialism well - stories involving memes, Twitter, hypochondria, and everything in between. It is a real shame her work isn’t more accessible, i’ve not read a bad paragraph from her work yet

[Anastasia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Me, giving another New Narrative text a bad review? Who could have predicted this!

[A · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reminded me of a more lucid, nonfic Kathy acker (who she also talks about in here). Minimal white lady self flagellation. Genuine insights and empathies, last essay was touching, like an updated Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

[El · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best things about my insatiable search for different kinds of essay collections and memoirs is occasionally I come across books and authors I had never heard of before. That was certainly the case with Dodie Bellamy. Who dis?

The back of the cover calls her "one of the pioneers of the New Narrative movement and a powerful influence on younger writers" which, okay, New Narrative movement is just one different avenue of the rabbit hole I have to go down now. But also, I want to know who. I suppose the closest I can come up with (in my limited reading so far) would be Elissa Washuta or maybe even Alice Bolin. Bellamy, however, was/is friends with Kathy Acker and Eileen Myles so I'm not even sure if Washuta and Bolin really fit that crowd or not.

This collection is Bellamy's lyric prose, something I'm especially interested in these days. She covers a lot of different ground, including the Occupy movement of the somewhat recent past, as well as health and the body. One of the best essays in the collection is her mother's final days and this whole connection to the movie E.T. that sort of blew my socks off ("Phone Home").

Bellamy (and Acker and Myles) get away with things in their writing I don't think a lot of people do, and maybe that's why they are generally published in small and independent presses.

Kathy's [Acker] unwashed Gaultier dress sits on my dresser, exuding flakes of energy. I keep trying to figure out a way to talk about it. I compare the dress to a doll, I sexualize it, I have sex and think about it. I write: Kathy's Gaultier dress sits on my dress, me on my bed writing and grunting. It's as if the dress has consciousness, is waiting for something, as I come I hear something coming from the dresser, something faint, a rustle, a breath. I write: Kathy's dress sits atop my dresser, a dress that would fit a really small woman or a really big doll, we all want to turn the dead into dolls who do our bidding. I write: Kathy's dress sits atop my dresser and I want to turn this dress into a doll, it would resonate with voodoo, would resonate with Kathy's stolen doll fucking passage, but the dress refuses to budget in that direction - the dress has presence, an aura, it sits there haughty as a popular girl who refuses to talk to me - stubbornly inanimate. Then I find my notes from Alicia Cohen's talk on orphic poetry at Small Press Traffic. My journal is dated March 24, in green ink. Beneath that is written: Levinas - the philosopher never attempts to reveal/penetrate/grasp otherness. Then more fragments about how orphic poetry implies an openness to listening, to what speaks through you. The point is to greet rather than capture and contain the self. I write in the margin in black: This sounds so Kathy. At this point everything's starting to sound like Kathy. How stupid of me to try to push Kathy's dress into some clever "meaning" rather than allowing it to speak on its own terms. To enter the dream beneath the seeming concreteness of reality, one must be vigilant. It's like watching digital TV and waiting for those places where the image suddenly pixilates, disrupting the predictable narrative flow. You never know when it will happen.
(p142-3, "Digging Through Kathy Acker's Stuff")

This bit about re-writing the details of Kathy's dress reminds me of something I just quoted earlier in a review of Megan Stielstra's The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays, as suggested by Frank Kafka - about writing, re-writing, and re-writing numerous times until you get to the very heart of the matter. One of those things we think we know but whenever it comes up in exactly those words, it's eye-opening all over again.

Or maybe I'm just making connections now where there weren't connections to be made.

This was a pleasant surprise. I enjoyed reading the rough-and-tumble of Bellamy's words. She reminded me that essays can be whatever we want them to be. I keep waiting for permission but I need to pay more attention to the writers who wait for no one.

[Zoe · Rating 5 out of 5]

ok so i read this awhile ago but because i am doing reviews now lets talk about it again. things i remember and adore from it:

-WRITING AS BARFING. GENIUS &AWESOME!!!!!! sooo illuminating on new narrative as a whole but also thats how i feel abt my writing too!! a gr8 reframe on my food poisoning from last week as well
-that little vignette about pumping eileen myles' toilet
-the dys/utopia of the sick ruling the world she creates in the title essay. a rlly interesting and new for me look at sickness and the ableist ways ppl who are considered "healthy" structure everything
-the essay on gentrification in sf, and her tender & tense & pragmatic relationships with the houseless people in her neighborhood. sometimes made me feel weird but mostly i rlly appreciated her acts of witnessing
-just alll the namedropping and gossip, & the way her personal life is so deeply entangled with the thinking & theorizing she does

[D.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal. Yet another reason why Dodie Bellamy is one of the most brilliant prose writers on the planet.

[Morgan M. Page · Rating 4 out of 5]

In When the Sick Rule the World, Dodie Bellamy attacks the essay form as she dips into and out of topics around death and the body - whether literally as she writes about the curse of the film E.T. killing her mother, or more expansively as she writes about the slow death by tech gentrification of the body of San Francisco. Three essays stand out for particular attention: her Barf Manifesto about Eileen Myles, the long and juicy essay on the clothes and withcraft of Kathy Acker, and the final extended piece on the deleterious effect of the Twitter Towers on the city and people of San Francisco. A couple of the pieces aren't as memorable, but overall this collection is solid.

[Brook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely preferred some stories/essays to others - standouts were the Barf Manifesto, Phone Home, and In the Shadow of Twitter Towers. Truly epic works. This is my first time reading Dodie Bellamy, but now I'll be seeking out the rest of her writing. She's phenomenal.

[Casey Robertson · Rating 4 out of 5]

We were assigned "The Feminist Writers Guild" for a class. The title of the collection it came from was enough to convince me to buy the book and take advantage of my first two-day weekend in a while.

From sexually-corrupt "gurus," to the rapid development of San Fransisco (home to many "enlightened" Silicon Valley programmers with pseudo-zen lifestyles as they turn every aspect of life into extractable data), to a tour of memories vis-à-vis objects belonging to the late Kathy Acker, When the Sick Rule the World is a fascinating collection of essays, albeit a bit inconsistent in their quality.

The title essay, in which Bellamy visits a safe community for the sick, is perhaps the strongest piece. After altering her self-care regiment to one without any fragrances (i.e., allergens), Bellamy visits the community and witnesses a very different structure of life that puts our "normal" conventions into question. "When the sick rule the world roses, gardenias, freesias, and other fragrant flowers will no longer be grown. On Valentine's Day the sick will give one another dahlias and daisies to say I Love You." Alongside other texts I've been reading (Convenience Store Woman, Foucault's lectures on "abnormality," Judith Butler's writing on the "constitutive outside,") "When the Sick Rule the World" stands as another great example of what it means to come to terms with a world order that could in fact be ordered differently. If the sick do one day rule the world, will the category of "sick" maintain purchase? Or will those who are "well" and "normal" become the bodies within this category, thus continuing a process of exclusion perpetuated by classification systems?

"Phone Home" was another standout piece, as Bellamy finds a way to route an essay on familial grief through an analysis of Spielberg's E.T. the Extra Terrestrial. Bellamy comes out of the New Narrative scene, a queer experimental literary movement from which the function of autobiography and memoir went beyond the conventions of objective account and towards the slippery, unreliable and often playful uses of the self in writing - qualities that certainly have their fingerprints on so much writing today. While Bellamy's projection onto the Hollywood film may not seem so novel to today's reader, it nevertheless showcases a great example of the kinds of possibility that Bellamy and her contemporaries created for future writers.

Looking forward to reading more - especially excited to check out The Letters of Mina Harker.

[Ellen Shay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow- I hadn't read anything by Dodie for awhile, and I now want to hunt down everything I missed and reread the ones I've already read. She gives us all the details of what happened and where her mind went, and I admire her ability to not yield to any internalized pressure to pretty things up. The title piece is about her development of symptoms of environmental sensitivity and her experiences with people already in that category, and her conflicting reactions to it all. It simultaneously elevated my paranoia about what I call "micropollutants" and my skepticism about people making a career of talking about and treating environmental sensitivity. I think I would select Dodie for my Fantasy Dinner Party, along with Captain Beefheart and Balzac.

[Courtney · Rating 1 out of 5]

After reading the blurb and various reviews of Bellamy's writing, I was so excited for this book. And then I was immediately, deeply disappointed.

The title essay, "When the Sick Rule the World," reads as an uncomfortable, somewhat voyueristic, victim-blaming, gross perspective on makeshift communities of "the sick." All of the essays betray Bellamy's obsession with herself and her friends at the expense of true compassion or connection to the wider world, taking her privileges and frivolities for granted, making her writing experimental for the sake of style and clout rather than to actually reflect, examine, or push her content. All of the essays share the same awful tone. I simply couldn't keep reading.

[Caitlin Francis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I once again have mixed feelings about this collection. Some of the essays are phenomenal, Phone Home, Barf Manifesto, Digging Through Kathy Acker's Stuff, and The Feminist Writer's Guild. Others are interesting in the moment, but didn't stick for me. Whilst I find New Narrative fairly difficult to read, it is precisely the insight it gives you into the writers psyche and the opportunity to explore someone's mind that excites me about New Narrative - and this collection certainly gave me the opportunity to do that with Dodie Bellamy.

[Priscilla · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe I'm just getting tired of a certain kind of essay. But, I don't think that's it. I've been simultaneously reading Inferno by Eileen Myles (I've read most of Myles) and I love it. It's non-fiction/fiction. The thing I've appreciated most in the Bellamy is a description of Myles and Bellamy having a ta-doo over a "challenge" with Myles's San Diego toilet (back in the day). Yes, the paper towels were the problem. It got complicated. But I do think Bellamy captured an intensiveness of Myles perfectly.

[Zhiliang Zhao · Rating 5 out of 5]

My second Bellamy. Started off light, easy and funny. The titular essay, "When the Sick Rule the World" strikes me almost as Didion-esuqe in its ambiguous sarcasm; so does Barf Manifesto, if only Didion had more lesbian sex. The middle of the book moved some what slowly for me, but the closing chapter, "In the Shadow of Twitter Towers" floored me. Petty, witty, and morally steadfast- Bellamy snaps at San Francisco's Tech boom with some of the most elegantly crafted scatological scenes I've read.

[sasha]

honestly only like 2 essays i liked in this. the one about the sick but that’s just cause i have a perverse amount of baggage w/hypochondria. and i liked the one about ET but that’s just cause im also terrified of my mother dying. Kathy acker one was okay but that’s just bc i have a little obsession with kathy acker. last one about SF was uncomfortable— not good. so not many that i even actually liked.

[AudWad · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's been a busy month, but I found this book of essays that works for me. This way, I could pause in between!

I like her writing style a lot! I agree with another reader's review (Joel) about the last essay (which, unfortunately, was the longest).

Certain parts of the book reference people and writers I have never heard of, and I wasn’t prepared for it to be such a niche, but the essays where she doesn’t do that are phenomenal.

[Jared Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

On his website my Vietnam vet boyfriend writes, "Please don't ask me what war is like. I can't tell you. If I could truly relate the experience I would be the greatest artist of all time. I know of no one who has done it. If they had, there would be no war." Because of its linguistic complexity, the average reader would find the Declaration of Independence more difficult to read than a novel

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gets better every time I read it (3x now). Dodie has an uncanny ability to zoom in on a detail within a scene to bring texture and depth to her larger narrative. Her voice and phrasing are impeccable.