I said, “It’s about a woman whose blood tried to kill her,” and my friend hunched over, like I’d thrown something at her head or someone had just punched her gut. Her eyes twisted at me.

“She was constantly getting blood transfusions and feeling like she was about to die,” I said, knowing that was a crude, inadequate description of a book I had been so attentive to. I read three times, compulsively going to the park each afternoon, as if I couldn’t see the words unless I was lying in the sun on soft grass.

“I can’t read about things like that,” my friend said.

“Why?”

She grimaced. “I don’t want to know about sickness, sick people,” she said.

“But this is what can happen to your body. Even if you do everything healthy that you can, things can happen. Decay is going to happen.”

“I don’t believe in that,” she said, or maybe she didn’t say exactly that, but this is the truth. Everything she eats is organic and nutrient dense and no animal anything and nothing with a wrapper. She is almost forty but her skin looks a healthy fourteen. Every effort possible is made to divide her from the world of hospitals and lost time that The Two Kinds of Decay explores so deeply.

She will probably never read it, but everyone else should. It will make you uncomfortable. You’ll have to think about things that you would probably rather not think about, like having a plastic tube sewn into your chest, having your ass wiped by a woman who was once a cheerleader at your high school, and having all your blood sucked out, cleaned and put back in your body. On each page Manguso asks the reader to be with her in that moment, however potent or brutal.

Manguso began writing the book eleven years after she was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease which disrupted her freshman year in college and so many years after. She remembers the experience in short, tightly woven chapters that are completely void of sentiment or self-pity. The images are so clear and intimate that I encountered each sentence as if it was a part of my own memory; these hot coals of her story burned my hands as I tried to hold them.

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When Kalup Linzy gave a short performance at a Manhattan club in a wig, sequined blouse and black hot pants I thought he was just an R&B singer who dressed in drag.

Even if that’s all Kalup was that wouldn’t have been so bad because I could have watched him perform a dozen more songs that night and been happy to do so. I usually don’t care for R&B music, but Kalup was at once funny, heart-felt and captivating.

Kalup sang a He-Did-Me-Wrong ballad with a chorus that was mostly the word “asshole” repeated a dozen accusatory times. He sang another about a oral-sex-challenged man going down on a woman who calls out his bad form out by repeating “this ain’t no chewing gum” four or five times until the lazy lover got the point.

As it turned out, I wasn’t watching Kalup Linzy, but rather one of the various characters he’s been using in his videos and performances over the past few years. I couldn’t get the infectious This-Ain’t-No-Chewing-Gum song out of my head for days, so I finally found it on Youtube which linked to his website and a dozen more songs, soap-opera spoofs and video narratives.

I watched a woman in a bubble bath (Kalup in character) singing a song to her 1-800-psychic. I watched two women (one played by Kalup) bitch at each other over their cell phones. My favorite was a 1940′s-themed scene of Kalup making a surprising confession to being gay.

Kalup does a great job of showing how pop music, slang, and television have had an effect on our perceptions of race, gender, sexuality & class. He constantly subverts the audience’s expectations while being, above all it seems, pure entertainment. No one is spared Kalup’s burlesque, not even himself.

But one odd thing I found about Kalup was a link to a documentary. Maybe it’s unfair to critique a preview for a forthcoming documentary, but there is something deeply strange about this video.

If this is an accurate representation of what the documentary will be like then you can expect Kalup to say barely word aside from those spoken in character in his work and a fleeting comment about wearing makeup for a specific performance. Worst of all, you can expect good-looking women with degrees in Art History to sit next to Kalup and passionlessly explain how they interpret his art as he stares back with a bored expression.

Does the art world have enough of a sense of humor for Kalup Linzy? Can they possible stand to be entertained by video art or are they dead-set on being bored by pretentious, heavy-handed reference-heavy art films?

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