GUILTY BUT INSANE

Brite at her most skanky and, yes, charming, in a set of 23 nonfiction squibs written for journals such as Cemetery Dance Magazine. Some pieces are more touristy and informative than lively, as in “Sur la Decádence,” a review of the literary sources of New Orleans’s beauty and decay, in Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Wilde, and other cursed poets. In “Mardis Gras,” the author clears up some of her fans’ misconceptions about her, such as her being “very young” when actually she’s “a cranky, boring geek” of 30—or her thinking that “unwanted children should be lobotomized and given to registered pedophiles,” when more accurately she thinks “unwanted children should be eaten.” She tells how she and her six-foot transsexual buddy are “Depraved in Dublin,” then defends “The Poetry of Violence” and “the visceral soup inside us,” which she finds “most beautiful” while she’s writing about it. In “R.I.P.,” going down on the corpse of William S. Burroughs, she gets “death’s sloppy seconds” and gives him the farewell, “Rest in perversion.” She prefers to be thought a fag, not a lesbian, although Larry Flynt pays her for a picture that “has me fingering my pussy in a graveyard.”

Ultraviolet venery.