1. GIVE HER DRUGS / LET HER GO

2. “Watching porn’s usually like watching a melancholy documentary to me, a documentary about sex as a failed utopia or something, I don’t know.” –Dennis Cooper

3. Similarly, identity becomes fluid: Weems is Ellen is Caden is Weems etc. –an excellent sound-guided review of Synecdoche, NY in a great all-sound issue of Reverse Shot

4. They pierced the envelope of the earth. Or at least found some exit. –from Thy Son Liveth

5. But here’s the real kicker: as Poplawski says, we may not be living in our universe at all; we might be living inside a rebounded black hole that exists in a different universe.

6. What we call deflation, an earlier culture might have called, “God abandoning the world.” –Sacred Economics, by Charles Eisenstein

(young Matt Pike of Sleep/High on Fire)

What novels actively feature metalheads and/or metal culture in their narratives? Period is the only one  that comes to my mind.

GIANT alum Drew Toal thoroughly enjoys Joshua Cohen’s Witz, and says so in Time Out New York. Also, look for some concise praise of Witz in the Briefly Noted section of this week’s New Yorker (5/10/10 issue). I think things are looking good for my man, and I believe that this is only the beginning. Stay tuned. And, duh, get yours.

Yesterday Dennis Cooper honored a request for a re-print of an old blog post of his from ‘06-- “Writer vs. Artist #2, Comte de Lautremont, Salvador Dali.” Also in Coop-news, DC’s blog turns five years old on 5/15. Happy birthday to one of my bar-none favorite places on the whole internet!

Peter Orner posts his introduction to Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives (McSweeney’s, 2008) at The Rumpus.

CBS censored/retracted/denied/something’d their story about the use of military spy planes in the capture of failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, but The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill is on it.

And last but not least, here’s Florida state senator Mike Bennett looking at pornography on his laptop on the floor of the senate while a debate about an anti-abortion bill which he favors is going on. Way to go, you hypocrite woman-hating fuck. Full story at Jezebel, but the video speaks for itself--and for the senator.

And hey, once you’re over at Jezebel, you might as well start “Rethinking Virginity--And Examining Our Assumptions About Sex.” It may also interest you to know that “American Apparel Lies about its ‘Real People’ Models.” And if you’re still not done, there’s “Miley Cyrus’s New Video: An Analysis.” I bet you’re done now, huh?

hotmanhokage i seen one before it was riding a bike disguised as a man and i saw his eyes.i think my cousin is a reptilian because her eyes look like it all that all the time

lescwilson I think u should consider that one of the qualities of these reptilians is known to be their cold hearted nature and that they’d kill u at the drop of a hat… for food…so don’t be so eager for their control lest u be farmed like veal or pork!

LadyWennor Draconians happen to be my favorite cataloged species. Don’t care about their plans of taking over earth if that is the case. I find Draconians hot but if you ask me I always fall for the extream.

“Wake Up!”: The Reptilian Shapeshifter Vidclip Festival is currently running at Coop’s place. Where else?

With a great hearty hat tip to Kate Ankofski- this interactive guide to finding your favorite Bob Dylan album.

At the Rumpus, Jami Attenberg interviews Teddy Wayne and David Goodwillie at the same time (!!!) about their new novels, terrorism, and the media.

And this one from the Almost Rhymes File: Christopher Hitchens on the Dark Side of Dickens.

Today at DC’s, more totally gorgeous production shots from Dennis Cooper’s production with Gisele, Stephen O’Malley, and many others, This Is How You Will Disappear:

Two from Dennis Cooper: Yesterday was “Neon Angel Day”, celebrating Cherie Currie of The Runaways and her new book Neon Angel: The Story of a Runaway, which is co-authored by one of our main men, Mr. Tony “O” O’Neill. the day before that, one of Dennis’s regular readers/community-members presented a list of 10 Graphic Novels “chosen…as recommendations to Mr. Cooper and his brilliant flock.” The list includes Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls, Derf’s My Friend Dahmer, and eight other fine titles besides, all with descriptions and excerpts. Also, Dennis, if you’re reading this, you were right about Return of the Grievous Angel–duh.

They’re talking about the James Franco Esquire story on Gawker, but here’s the interesting part- instead of burning the story themselves, they make light fun of it and then leave the real burning to us!

The litblog HMTLGIANT says of the story: “If it weren’t by James Franco, this 100% would not be in Esquire… Seems like a pretty typical ‘MFA story,’ if that’s even a type of story.” Burn? We are not literary critics, so let us just say this: James Franco is such a good actor!

Adrian Chen, if you are reading this, thanks for the link! I don’t know whether this is the first time we’ve been Gawker-linked, but it’s the first one I know of, and it made me feel great, even though that wasn’t even my post. According to the Tao Lin/Marty McFly reality-index, my hands are not see-through anymore, and I am allowed to make one facial expression of my own choosing–though obviously I’ll choose not to make one. But seriously, Adrian, I miss Foster Kamer. Also, from all of us to Nick Denton–feel free to start picking us off whenever. Imagine if instead of Ann Coulter, Peaches (naked) Geldof and Steve Jobs, the top stories on Gawker were about Harold Bloom, Natalie Lyalin, and probably Harold Bloom again. WHAT IF?

Lastly, the guy whose doppelganger I am, the other Justin Taylor (or JTO as I like to call him) has a short post called “On Scary Stories and the Moral Imagination.” It’s kind of the same argument Stephen King makes in Danse Macabre about horror as a fundamentally conservative genre, because it is founded on a fear of the other, except made by a believing Christian with a much narrower and more specific definition of “moral,” plus also it’s really short, and just quotes some other things, and so is not really very much like that at all. JTO, if you are reading this, sorry to have put words in your mouth kind of. It’s a big bridge between us, but I’m really committed to building it. What slowed me down, see, is that I can’t get my pdf copy of The Axioms of Religion by EY Mullins to print out properly–I’m trying to do it two-book-pages-to-the-printed-page–and so I haven’t been able to read it yet. But I WILL get there, and then we’ll have that to talk about. Anyway, my favorite part of your post was the Chesterton-opener, the note on which I will end-

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist.
Children already know that dragons exist.
Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

Dennis Cooper, James Greer, and Mark Gluth read at City Lights, March 16, 2010

Good news for West Coast kids: Dennis Cooper, Mark Gluth and James Greer will be touring on the west coast in the next few weeks, in support of the Little House on The Bowery. Don’t miss these underground new-post-avant-narrative visionaries or you’ll be catching the rehashed versions of them in 5 years!

Mon., March 15, 7pm
Book Soup
8818 Sunset Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA
*Featuring Mark Gluth, James Greer, and Dennis Cooper.

Tues., March 16, 7pm
City Lights
261 Columbus Ave
San Francisco, CA
*Featuring Mark Gluth, James Greer, and Dennis Cooper.

Thurs., March 18, 7:30pm
Powell’s
1005 W. Burnside
PORTLAND, OR
*Featuring Mark Gluth and James Greer

Fri., March 19, 7pm
Richard Hugo House, Cabaret Space
1634 11th Ave.
SEATTLE, WA
*Featuring Mark Gluth and James Greer

The new issue of Gigantic magazine now exists! UPDATED: Though I’m not seeing much evidence of #2 on the site right now. The launch party for #2, the “Gigantic America” issue will be at PPOW gallery in NYC on 2/27, and will feature readings by favorites-of-ours Deb Olin Unferth and Sasha Fletcher, among others. The issue itself has interviews with Sam Lipsyte and Lydia Millet, plus new fiction from Robert Coover and Leni Zumas, plus “collectible biographies of famous Americans” written by the likes of Michael Kimball and Clancy Martin. Holy awesome!

Also, check out their exclusive preview of Paul Willerton’s Little Big Cremaster 3.

Meehan Crist’s review of John D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay is now up at Powells.com. Crist, you may or may not know, is the reviews editor at The Believer. Her review originally ran in the February issue, to much acclaim, and was selected for publication on the Powell’s site by the NBCC. Cheers!

The Rumpus has an interview with the poet Gary Young. How often do you see a poet-interview at the very top of a general-interest culture website? Good God, I love these guys. While you’re over there, check out “Sexually, I’m More of a Denmark: A Highly Subjective Book Review” by Chelsea G. Summers, and then, if you like, get linked (via them) to Javier Marias’s KCRW Bookworm appearance, which went live yesterday.

It’s Derek Jarman Day at Coop’s Place. Re the photo above-

Jarman is also remembered for his famous shingle cottage-garden, created in the latter years of his life, in the shadow of the Dungeness power station. The house was built in tarred timber. Raised wooden text on the side of the cottage is the first stanza and the last five lines of the last stanza of John Donne’s poem, The Sun Rising. The cottage’s beach garden was made using local materials and has been the subject of several books

Speaking of which, do you know that Donne poem? It’s one of my favorites of his. Here are my favorite lines from it:

Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.

But you really should read the whole thing. Happy Friday!

Dennis Cooper’s blog today: “Four Books I’ve Loved Recently: The Ask by Sam Lipsyte, Marsupial by Derek White, A Common Pornography by Kevin Sampsell, and Stories II by Scott McClanahan.” Also, don’t miss yesterday’s “17 examples of how musicians conflate the terms ‘mawkish’ and ‘arch’ with varying degrees of success.”

From Salon, an article on Bloomsbury’s newest case of the white-outs. “Publishers whitens another heroine of color.” (You might remember that we bugged out about this the last time it happened too.)

Here’s an introduction to “The Secret History of Typography in the Oxford English Dictionary.”

From Jeremy Schmall- Rick Steves on Haiti.

Check out this rad new feature/series at Portland-based Wieden+Kennedy called Story Time, which produces “recorded readings of short stories by published young authors set to soundscapes.” Trinie Dalton is episode #1, Kevin Sampsell’s #2, and that’s all that there is so far, but we’ll be (duh) keeping an eye on these guys, and one hardly doubts that there’s more great stuff ahead.  And what is Wieden+Kennedy exactly? They say: “We are an arts and culture digital content delivery platform, a subsidiary of advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy. Our goal is to renegotiate the relationship between art, media, advertising and the consumer.” Ahh, okay then. To help further advance negotiations, you might also check out their other series, Don’t Move Here: Inside Portland’s Music Scene.

When I lashed out at the shallow, willfully ignorant, and overwhelmingly useless NYT review of Jerk, some commenters–in particular a very nice guy named Sean Carman–challenged me to go beyond merely pillorying Neil Genzlinger for the miserable job he did*, and articulate some sort of affirmative vision of the piece and of Dennis Cooper’s work in general–what it means to me, a study of how it functions, and so on. I’m on-record any number of places about my admiration, respect, and enthusiasm for Dennis’s work–so that information is out there if people want it. With regard to Jerk in particular, I want to point people to this review by Kareem Estefan, published yesterday at the BOMB site, which I think says all the things I might have said, only better than I probably would have said them.

Vienne’s Jerk traces a receding path of voices, as scenes of traumatic memory play in the hands of the audience, on Capdeville’s knees, and finally, within the actor’s body. Do we get closer to understanding trauma as we follow this progression? Are we more or less capable of empathizing with the abused, repentant murderer as we read, watch, and listen to such disfiguring acts? Vienne, Capdeville, and their collaborators dismantle the psychic space of the subject much as Cooper jerks from fragment to fragment of an event that cannot be represented.

Estefan seems to be more or less all the things one hopes a critic will be–attentive, perceptive, engaged, and smart. His essay considers the work in all of its nuance: the adaptation of the short story into a performance-piece, the staging of the work in the very basement-y PS122 theater-space, and of course the performance itself. His goal is not to force an up or down vote, as thought the work were an American Idol contestant; he endeavors rather to understand the work on its own terms, and to communicate that understanding for the benefit of his reader. This is the best piece of criticism of Jerk I’ve read yet, and I encourage all of you to read it. This is the first time I’ve read anything by Kareem Estefan, but he’s on the radar now, so hopefully we’ll be hearing from him again soon.

Also, for those of you who expressed an interest in learning more about Cooper’s poetics, you should let him tell you in his own words. This conversation between Blake Butler and Dennis Cooper, conducted by Alec Niedenthal at a cafe in the East Village and posted to our site late last night, is phenomenal. I was sitting at the table, in delighted silence, for an hour while these guys talked shop–it was magic, and that feeling seems to have survived transcription.

*[UPDATE: that post has been removed from this site. A lot of people thought I shouldn't have posted it in the first place, and still others urged me to take it down. While my position on the review hasn't changed at all, I've decided that everyone was better off without that ugliness in the world.]

Dennis Cooper and I met outside of PS122–the East Village-ish space for his glorious Jerk–and stood in the cold and talked for a while. Eventually, Blake Butler and Justin Taylor showed up (he’d be listening–a conversation between him and Josh Cohen is forthcoming). We were in no little rush, since Dennis had to be back at the theater in forty-five minutes. I wanted to do the interview in a Subway. No one thought that was funny. Eventually we ended up in some ill-lit restaurant chosen on a whim. Dennis ordered a quesadilla. He eventually finished it. Dennis is a vegetarian.

I listened. I recorded.

There was such bad music playing in there.

This is a pretty long conversation.

READ MORE >

Today we celebrate the birth of the inimitable, incomparable, and indispensable Dennis Cooper--one of our absolute favorite writers and a true brother-in-arms. How will you celebrate Dennis’s big day? You could:

- Order yourself a copy of his most recent book, the story collection Ugly Man.

- Pre-order yourself a copy of Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback & Obituaries, his forthcoming nonfiction collection, which according to Amazon will be published on 6/29, which happens to be my birthday. Neat, right?

- See if there are tickets left for any of the remaining performances of JERK, Dennis’s latest collaboration with Gisele Vienne, starring Jonathan Capdeville. JERK is running through January 17th as part of the Under the Radar Festival. I saw the show last night, and it was just stunning--unlike any other theater-going experience I’ve ever had. (See above photograph.)

- Visit Dennis’s blog, which this weekend has an incredible feature on the Winchester Mystery House.

- Blast some Guided by Voices. Here’s a fan-made video for “Smothered in Hugs” the nonfic collection’s namesake song. Happy Birthday!

PS- Here’s a live version that has the embedding disabled for some reason, so you have to watch it on the Youtube site.

I love writing poetry but it’s taken time, like a difficult courtship that leads to a good marriage, for us to get to know each other. I wrote poetry for seven years to learn how to write a sentence because I really wanted to write novels and I figured that I couldn’t write a novel until I could write a sentence. I used poetry as a lover but I never made her my old lady. . . . I tried to write poetry that would get at some of the hard things in my life that needed talking about but those things you can only tell your old lady.

Utter delight. Thanks, Dennis! & kudos to his guest-poster, Winter Rates.

PS- if WR’s rad day isn’t quite enough Brautigan for you, you wish to check out this essay I wrote on In Watermelon Sugar for LOST Magazine a while back.

A post re:– neither repost nor riposte–Blake’s wichtige Liste and (only at first) about Infinite Jest in German. Maybe a chair is a good metaphor for who gets translated. Have you been translated? Have the Important Writers on Blake’s list? And not 25 because Saramago, Ouredník, and Zizek are already others, Ben Lerner’s a poet, Aase Berg’s both, and I’ll write about poets in translation and translation in poets at an other time.

Not sure if anyone went there during all the well DFW grammar talk (thanks, Amy), but imagine translating, say, Oblivion. Good that one of Wallace’s German translators, Ulrich Blumenbach, did just that, presumably (it first appeared in 2006), while whittling away at Infinite Jest, which took him six years and has had, as Unendlicher Spass (literally, the less Shakespearean Unending Fun), endless success: ten times the expected five grand copies have been sold since it appeared at the end of August, on the heels of Infinite Summer, which the publisher, KiWi, has translated too, as 100 Days of Infinite Jest (in German–it ended on 12-1).

In an interview with Der Spiegel, Blumenbach (pictured–in German) regrets that the author never answered his many questions, “a list always growing longer”: it seems Wallace had grown weary of taking translator’s queries, and, according to The Complete Review’s useful paraphrase of a slippery summary (still looking for the original source), considered the Spanish La broma infinita (tr. Calvo and Covian | Mondadori, 2002) and the Italian Infinite Jest (Nesi w/ Villoresi and Giua | Einaudi, 2006) and apparently other attempts (anyone know more?) to have “all failed, more or less.”

In a warm war, France is responding with (900 pp. of) Vollmann’s Rising (not translated by the great Claro, see below, who did six previous tomes, but by one Jean-Paul Mourlon, translator, it seems, of Jimmy Carter and Hilary Clinton). There’s also German Vollmann (3 titles), Spanish Vollmann (3 more), Japanese Vollmann (2), Greek Vollmann (2), and Czech Vollmann, all (not counting the French) with only one title (Butterfly Stories) repeated.

American Genius is only a Great American Novel for now (does it even have a British publisher?), despite Tillman’s first book of stories, Tagebuch einer Masochisten, having appeared in Germany in 1986, four years before her first collection in English, READ MORE >