In a recent post at the LA Times, book critic David L. Ulin writes about Bernard Cooper’s forthcoming memoir, “My Avant-Garde Education.” Ulin also gives a remarkable portrait of Cooper as an artist.
If you don’t think that’s radical, you might want to think again. Along with Waldie, Wanda Coleman, Susan Straight, Eloise Klein Healy and a handful of others, Cooper is one of the writers responsible for developing a Southern California aesthetic, in which what’s most vivid about the place is everything we might take for granted somewhere else. Work, family, education, sexual and personal identity: This is the substance of his writing, along with a fine-grained eye for observation, a way of seeing situations as they are, not as he wishes they might be.
