Document Zippo

By L.A. Ruocco

Art. Fiction. In an age where most artists blend in and sell themselves out for a quarter, Document Zippo is more than refreshing, it is shocking and exhilarating (John S. Hall, from the introduction). Document Zippo, like Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, is an onomasticon, hard at work in the fields of consumerism, language and dread. Sexual, authoritative, and probing, the mind of L.A. Ruocco is awfully alive in this book that is at once an artist's book, a flipbook, an intensely personal narrative, and a catalogue of the blemishes and scars on our late-20th-century culture. The numerous narrative threads in the book range from digestion to designer condoms, progressing through linguistic play, varied typefaces, and pictures.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1887128298
• ISBN13: 9781887128292
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press
• Length: 236 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.5" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

La Ruocco is Art Literary Masterpeice

you can't please all of the people all of the time, all the Neoist-revolutionaries, Christian-Bible-fundamentalist & the post-structuralist atheist xenomorphologists but Laruocco comes close in her Masterpiece. Laroque is an art of thinking outside the wig, once she calibrates the wig -to- contextual box ratio at 0. ref. Zippo p.159, & `Linguistics 101, meaning & proximity' p.116. if you can get past all the Ass, & "the crack in the constipated spine of the book," & sustain the Literal & metaphoric overlaps & the `Dantéfication' © 1999 of language into the trinity of the fat, protein & the carbohydrate -- into calorie & the identity complexity... it is an amazing & entertaining journey, written when La Ruocco used normal sentences & paragraphs which she diverges from in her later Work: "Xero, turn-of-the-millenia." Zippo is about compulsion, it starts out about an obsession w/ underwear, & bodily functions that includes sex, masturbation & coffee drinking, & writing in the café w/ Gabriel Lockwood who lets her use his typewriter & ends w/ the escape through the Bowels of the planet when she finally finds a flushing toilet in Morocco. Document Zippo is a glossy paged book filled with diagrams & drawings & photos that may keep enlightening & refreshing to a mind caught-up in decision & consumerism. [...]

The best bathroom reading ever

Like any great bathroom book, you can start at any point in the book and read as much as time allows. It could turn into a few hours though. Then, spend another hour looking at yourself naked in the mirror.

She's obsessed and scataological, and great!

Ruocco is obsessed with her rear end, to the point of mania. Quite a scatological book -- at least the first third. Recommeded for those interested in the 21st century wave of avant-pop, avant-porn, post-pos-post-modernist writing. Ruocco is the new Kathy Acker.

If you have a fetish for books this novel is for you

LA Ruocco is one of the greatest artists of the 20th century

its sarcasm burns your eyes and its wit chokes you.

not only did i read it through, the way the narrator suggested, i went back to it and skipped around the text. the reference section stands alone and as a fully-integrated piece. the book is densely layered but playfully written. the narrator is both a super-woman and pathetic. the prose is insightful, ridiculous, graphic, and academic. it is shakespearean in style and acker-esque in delivery. you will love it or you'll hate it, but for sure, you'll want to hold onto it. it's a document of a woman's sexuality in the late twentieth century-consumer driven, sex driven society--artful pornography graphic reality.