HTMLGIANT » Dennis Cooper

My fear arouses me: an interview with Dennis Cooper

Mike Meginnis — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 14:00:20 +0000

The odds are decent that you know Dennis Cooper better than I do. After hearing about his work for years and constantly promising myself that I would try a little someday, I found myself graduated from the MFA program with time to read books of my own choosing again, and so I finally started reading his novels, and I haven’t stopped in the few months since. You’ve already read in this space about his latest book, The Marbled Swarm, a ludicrously powerful book that you really need. After reading The Marbled Swarm I had to send him some painfully earnest fan mail, and he received this note with a grace and generosity that will surprise no one who has read his blog. I asked if I could interview him. He said yes. His answers are more than worth your time; the book demands it.

So I had a really frustrating experience buying The Marbled Swarm at a local independent bookstore. I saw that they had two copies of Blake Butler’s There Is No Year shelved where you would expect, and I figured it would be easy from there because a) you share a press and b) “Butler” is alphabetically pretty close to “Cooper.” After a long search, I had to go ask one of the bookstore employees. She said that your book was supposed to be shelved in gay fiction, with a question mark at the end of her statement. (I was there with my wife; the employee seemed skeptical that I would want a book from the gay fiction section. I was sort of furious about that whole interaction.) And it was there! Do you like being shelved under the category of gay fiction? Do you think it’s been helpful for your work, commercially or otherwise?

I’m always surprised and disappointed when my books are cordoned off like that. I can’t speak to the reasons why that store in particular shelved The Marbled Swarm there, obviously, but, in general, I think it’s the result of a longstanding habit.

When I published my first couple of novels in the late 80s and early 90s, there was this vogue among critics and publishers regarding the notion of ‘gay literature’. I think that was the point where literary arbiters first cottoned onto the idea that there was a historical trajectory involving the work of authors who happened to be gay that had been largely unexplored and was ripe for a thinkfest. Also, there was apparently a decent sized gay male readership of fiction at that time. I remember people in the publishing industry saying that any gay-themed novel was pretty much guaranteed to sell around 5000 copies, so quite a number of writers who happened to be gay were being swept up by major publishers and given small advances based on the logic that the books would at least earn back if not even make everyone involved a bit of money. I’m not sure if that was actually true or not.

I think the fact that my work passed for gay fiction helped get me onboard, and I did receive one of those aforementioned small advances ($2000) for my first novel Closer, although I think my luck there had just as much to do with my work fitting neatly into the historical tastes and profile of Grove Press, who, at that time, were still flying the edgy avant-garde flag by publishing Kathy Acker, Robbe-Grillet, Gary Indiana, and others. In any case, for years Grove put the keyword ‘gay fiction’ prominently in those little lists that publishers imprint on book covers and in catalogs to tell bookstores and libraries and I guess even readers what to expect. So, that caused my books to be sequestered initially, and I’m guessing that some bookstores just assume my name is still another word for gay.

So, I think the gay tag likely did help a very uncommercial writer like myself instigate an unlikely foothold in the so-called major publishing world, but, at this point, given that my readership is really mixed and that I’ve never considered my work to be gay or about gay identity or specific in that way at all, I find the categorization more lazy and restrictive than anything else.

You’ve said in other interviews that you were positioned by others as a “bad boy” more or less from the beginning of your career. And it’s easy to see how that would happen. You write consistently about brutal stuff. You’ve always said, though, that the idea is not to be evil, not to shock. And yet interviewers never seem to ask the natural followup question: what is the goal?

Well, to me, the whole argument that writing about sex and violence and the more extreme effects of confusion and etc. in a direct way automatically makes one a ‘bad boy’ is kind of crazed. I see the things I write about as hugely central and emotionally/psychologically deep and representative of not uncommon fantasies and/or actions. I don’t see that writing explicitly about brutality is tantamount to jamming it down people’s throats. I see my approach as being fair and appropriately subservient to the things I write about. I don’t think my approach is much different than that of any writer who tackles any subject that he or she wants to take and represent seriously. It’s just that what I’m interested in writing about has been sensationalized by readers in advance, so it has a ton of prejudice to get through.

As for my goal, I’m not sure that I really know. My thinking about fiction is that a work isn’t complete and finished until it has collaborated with the reader’s imagination, and thus any novel I write will end up being thousands of novels differentiated by each reader’s personal associations. My goal in general is to finesse the invitation.

As for why my concentration is what it is, basically the things I write about have been sources of fear and excitement and confusion and emotional resonance since I was a kid. When I was young, I wasn’t afraid that thinking about horrors intricately and entertaining the pluses and minuses of their complicated powers would somehow sicken or destroy me, but I found out quickly that the majority of people just don’t want to go there. In this, I felt very isolated and unique for a long time, but when I realized that I had a gift for writing, and that I really enjoyed spending huge amounts of time making sentences match my thoughts, my weirdness became the source my originality, and that became my work’s reward.

I guess I’m not really answering the question, but I don’t think about what I do in terms of a goal other than trying to make sure that my work is trustworthy.

Re: fear as inspiration, I feel like the works of my favorite writers tend to come from exploring fear, but I don’t hear a lot of discussion of fear as a source of creativity either in criticism or in discussions of “craft.” I’ve long felt the best way to write a novel is to write about what scares you most, partly because fear is humbling and writing from fear seems to create a less domineering relationship with a text. Can you talk more about your relationship to fear as a writer and human being?

Well, I just realized as I was deciding how to answer this question that fear is really hard to talk about. It’s easier for me talk about confusion. Maybe my fear grows a protective layer of confusion really swiftly. Or else my confusion attracts my attention as a writer, and the fear is more compulsive and stormy and just sort of functions as an intense fuel. Maybe it’s that the act of writing makes what I fear become pornographic to me, and that when I have language as a buffer between it and me, my fear arouses me, and being aroused either sexually or otherwise is always kind of an inherently confusing state, for me at least. When something is confusing, I’m usually compelled by it. Why, I don’t know. Maybe in the adult world where, unless you’re a conspiracy theorist, the distinction between reality and fairytales is usually very clear, confusion is the only Santa Claus or God left?

The other day, these rowdy guys started harassing and threatening me on the street, and my French is so shitty that I didn’t understand what they were yelling, and their English was so shitty that, when I tried to reason with them, they couldn’t understand what I was saying at all. My lack of understanding made me even more frightened, and their lack of understanding seemed to make them feel even more powerful. Eventually, they got bored of my fear and left. And it was scary, for sure, but, even while it was happening, I was thinking, ‘This is so interesting. I should pay very close attention to this so I can use it later.’ I don’t know if that’s a common modus operandi for writers or not.

Among writers who might describe themselves as your followers in some sense (for instance, many in the HTMLGIANT crowd and its aesthetic circles), violence and brutality become opportunities for extreme lyricism. The destruction of the body is a way of approaching something inside, or beyond, or beneath the flesh. But your prose seems to follow the opposite impulse: your voices are (in what I’ve read) pretty flat in terms of affect, and they flatten more if anything when violence enters the picture. The narrator of The Marbled Swarm, your most florid voice by far, is really sort of evasive when the actual violence takes place. What, if anything, does this difference between your work and those of your young admirers suggest to you?

I guess I’ve never really seen that difference before. Or maybe I don’t see those writers as sharing a group approach? Off the top of my head, when I think of writers associated with HTMLGIANT who have written about violence — Eugene Marten, Sean Kilpatrick, Blake Butler, Nick Antosca, and others — their aesthetic approaches to violence seem pretty distinct.

This might sound weird, but I think of the way I write about violence as being quite lyrical most of the time. Well, except in a book like, say, The Sluts where I was mimicking online chatter with minimal distortions. But I definitely do see my depictions of the destruction of the body as always intended to unearth what’s hidden in the body, and as trying to unearth what’s operating in the expectations that the body raises, and as trying to unearth the ways in which the world becomes emotionally overwhelmed and chaotic when brutality is occurring.

I don’t see my approach as creating distance at all. My characters often have kind of hallucinatory metaphoric responses to the body and its interiority in those situations. I think maybe the thing is that my lyricism doesn’t become visible as affect. It’s true that my writing can flatten when addressing difficult situations. I think that’s a reflection of my own confusion and curiosity about brutality, and my feeling that I don’t know enough to impose my own reflections on the situation. My interest is in erasing all pretense and any veneer of expertise and just paying very close attention to what’s going on and then representing — while, at the same time, curtailing — my own responses.

When a doctor walks out of an emergency room and tells a family that their loved one died on the operating table, he doesn’t compose a poem about the death before he delivers the bad news. Maybe one of the big differences between that doctor and me is that I have months and years to figure out the right approach rather than just a minute or two. I think a flat but sensitive voice and manner are the most fair and effective approach to take with readers who might well be shocked or upset by what I want to tell them, but that flatness can be intricate and very carefully modulated and have a lot going on in it.

I’m interested in this idea of fairness. There’s this rhetoric of destruction that I often encounter in discussion of writers like you, like, “This novel will blast your spine out through your asshole and melt your brain into a hot pink puddle, it’s so good.” It seems like you’re saying that you want to talk to your readers about violence rather than somehow enact it on them through the text. How do you feel about your relationship with, and responsibilities to, your readers? What does it mean to be fair?

It’s not so much that I want to talk to readers about violence but rather that I want to simulate what violence makes me think and feel and imagine inside them. It’s more like I’m trying to use prose as the material for a designer drug that will work with readers’ eyes the way, oh, blotter acid would work with their tongues.

Fairness to me means that when my writing becomes disturbing or uncomfortable or disruptive, I do everything I can to make sure it’s a consensual and collaborative experience vis-à-vis the reader. I try to make my sentences and paragraphs become building blocks in those situations. I try to make sure that there’s enough coherence and charisma to the prose that readers’ imaginations will want to follow its instructions. Fiction is such an interesting form because it’s incredibly intrusive. I mean, it only exists in a technical, half-baked, lifeless form when it’s not being resurrected by the reader’s imagination. That intrusiveness means I have to take a lot of responsibility for what I write and how I depict it because, once the writing is activated by a reader’s imagination, they have to take responsibility for what they have willingly imagined, but their responsibility is always my responsibility too, if that makes sense.

The Marbled Swarm is, like The Sluts, structured as a sort of mystery. You’ve said in other interviews that there is an underlying reality in the novel, that there is a solution. This seems to me like another key difference between your writing and the novels of your aesthetic descendants. Their books often deny the possibility of a solution. This is part and parcel with a general skepticism re: narrative. You clearly share some of that skepticism, especially in terms of the capacity of language to represent its object. And yet you still write novels with solutions. Why?

Interesting. I’m not sure what I said about my books having solutions. I certainly don’t think they have narrative-based solutions. I tend to think of my narratives as the novels’ floor plans or landscapes. Eventually you exit, but the novels themselves are like museums or spooky houses where things accumulate and associate and then stop appearing and hopefully resonate. Or in the more deliberate examples, maybe they’re somewhat like video game narratives in that they have a point, say to rescue Zelda, but the actual rescue has no resonance or meaning in and of itself. That outcome is just what keeps you playing. And maybe a difference is that I sometimes like creating language puzzles whose facades give the appearance of clear cut narratives.

I used a mystery set-up in The Sluts because that novel’s conceit is that its storyline is an on-the-fly improvisation/exquisite corpse co-created by the novel’s many characters who are unreliable presences and fellow residents of a particular grouping of sites and message boards. The question was what’s real and what’s fake in the novel, and I saw the introduction of a potentially solvable mystery plot into the fray as an intrusive fiction, evidence that a single hand and intention had entered and corrupted something that could really only be free-floating and messy due to its mass of authors. I saw the mystery plot as a way to help readers to locate the novel’s lies. If things fit too snugly into to its artificial construct, they were distortions if not outright fabrications.

In The Marbled Swarm, the mystery story is a game, a sleight of hand being performed by a narrator who is trying to distract the reader from something that is disorganized and incapable of being represented, or so he says. The solution there is to circumvent the mystery story’s trickery and charismatic promises, to see through the neat, thick, complicated order that the mystery premise imposes on the novel’s internal world and try to find out what if anything is hidden underneath it. I guess that’s a solution in a way, but it doesn’t hold out a clear answer.

My experience of The Marbled Swarm is that I spent the whole book with my attentions sort of agonizingly divided. On the one hand we’ve got this narrator who is so damn smug that you hate to think he’s getting something over on you, so you try to watch for clues and make sure he’s not pulling some kind of trick. On the other hand it seemed less relevant whether what he said was happening than that and how he chose to tell it so I tried to watch for the underlying emotional truth. Then I reached the ending and it was heart-wrenching and suddenly I felt this intense empathy and heartbreak and I really wanted to cry but it wasn’t going to happen and I hadn’t “solved” anything. It seemed like the division of my attention was important to the ultimate effect. How do you write one text that divides readers against themselves? I mean this more in a practical sense than anything.

Thanks. I’ve always made these kind of elaborate graphs before I start writing a novel. And when I’m developing a novel, I’ve pretty much always subdivided it into what I call systems, meaning that I think of its structures and narratives and characters and rhythm and poetics and so on as separate through-lines that I develop individually via notes and in my head. Then I try to meld everything together into something seamless when I start writing. I started doing that originally because I can’t keep track of things otherwise, and I’ve only written one novel (My Loose Thread) in a linear way as a challenge and experiment, and that was like pulling teeth, as they say. I never took a fiction writing class when I was younger, and I almost never read novels that are conventionally constructed, so I don’t have the basic fiction writing skills or instincts or knowledge to be able to write novels. I feel like an interloper. So, basically, I’ve been working that way for so long that I’ve gradually figured out ways to make the systems in my novels more flexible and interactive, and, in The Marbled Swarm, I decided to take that as far as I could.

You’ve mentioned Robbe-Grillet as a strong influence on The Marbled Swarm. I should say that I’ve only read his novel Jealousy, which was a real fever-dream of a weekend. So let’s assume for the sake of conversation that Jealousy is what you meant when you said “Robbe-Girillet”; if so, then were the novel’s lessons purely linguistic, or does your book owe something of its structure to Robbe-Grillet’s as well?

Robbe-Grillet’s influence on me has been significant for a long time, but The Marbled Swarm shows the clearest evidence of his impression, I guess. The thing is, I made a deliberate point of not reading any French literature while I wrote TMS because I wanted to get the quality of the French novels I loved in the writing without risking too strong a resemblance. So, I was using my memories of Robbe-Grillet’s work, which I hadn’t read in years, as a guide rather than using his work as a model firsthand. Still, TMS is something of an homage to Robbe-Grillet, although not in the way you might expect. The chateau that appears at the beginning of TMS and then mutates throughout the novel is based on the chateau where he actually lived. I’m friends with his wife Catherine Robbe-Grillet, and she invited me to visit for a day. So my description of the chateau is actually an exact replication of his real house, although I added the secret passages and so on to make it more Robbe-Grillet-ian because, in truth, it was pretty much just a modestly decorated, conventional home.

You’ve said you write porn between novels as a sort of exercise. Porn as a category is interesting to me. I’m curious what, for you, differentiates porn from other writing.

With extremely rare exceptions, I find porn writing totally uninteresting, but that’s probably because I’m a such a prose nazi. I think visual porn is far more successful and can even be like art sometimes, even if the art is often an accident like it is in really good documentary films. I like how when you’re writing porn, you have a single and simple goal to get a hard-on and keep it there for the duration. How you get there via the writing doesn’t matter at all. Writing porn between novels is an exercise I use to clean out the earmarks of the prose I was working with in my last novel, and to write completely unselfconsciously, without ambition and in total privacy. Sometimes, although it’s pretty rare, my unselfconsciousness allows me to try things that I’m normally too rarified to consider trying because they seem so crude, and sometimes I find strange or subtle things that I can develop in my fiction later.

What was your last obsession? What are you obsessed with now?

I do a blog where I make and launch these fairly comprehensive posts about things that fascinate me six days a week. And the tempo of the blog, whereby I switch subjects and topics daily, has made my obsessions flare up and die out very quickly. So, for instance, yesterday I was obsessed with this songwriter/music stylist Michael Quercio who invented the minor but influential rock genre Paisley Underground back in the ’80s, and who has made fantastic songs with the bands Salvation Army, The Three O’Clock, Permanent Green Light, and currently Jupiter Affect. Today I’m obsessed with the work of this Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl, and I’m putting together a post about him. In both cases, I’m doing a quick study of what it is about their work that interests me while they’re the center of my and my blog’s attention, and I’m thinking on the sidelines about how I might learn something from them that I can translate into my writing later. As far as a current obsession of mine that my blog can’t cordon off goes, I’m really into gingerbread right now.

I have a real personal soft spot for God Jr., because I really love video games and their weird logic, and that book probably tapped into that logic better than any other fiction I’ve read. Do you play video games much? What games influenced your depiction of the game in the novel? I thought I recognized bits of Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie.

Thanks. Yeah, I’m a gamer. I came to playing games pretty late, in the mid-90s. I never played them when I was young, and I still have rarely ever played handheld platform games. I was pulled into computer gaming by the buzz around the first Myst, and I spent a year or two playing its offshoots and copycats then finally sprang for an N64. I’ve been a hardcore Nintendo/Miyamoto guy ever since, apart from a few spells when friends have lent me their XBoxes while they were out of town.

Banjo Kazooie and its sequel Tooie were the biggest influence on the game in God Jr. There’s also some Conkers Bad Fur Day and Paper Mario in there. And there’s also some influence from Eternal Darkness. I don’t know if you know that game, but it kept making you go insane, and you were supposed to cure yourself, but you could also play the game while you were crazy, which was infinitely more interesting. The game would start hallucinating wildly, and all kinds of strange effects would happen, like your protagonist would suddenly fall through a floor and end up wandering around in the pixels and blueprint of the game, or there would be an announcement on the screen saying your controller was unplugged and that your game data was going to be erased in 10 seconds. I tried to use some of that trippy interactivity in God Jr. too.

Eternal Darkness! That game was a huge deal to me. It’s interesting too because a lot of the most memorable hallucinations are really acknowledging the underlying reality of the situation, which is that you’re playing a game. I remember the most frightening one I saw was this sudden message at a totally anticlimactic moment saying, “Thanks for playing, look forward to seeing the rest of the story in Eternal Darkness 2!” Which was so plausible it genuinely freaked me out, in a stupid sort of “oh no I wasted my money” way.

I’m still kind of holding out hope for Eternal Darkness 2, actually, so yeah. Seriously, there used to be this MacRumors-like online forum centered around Eternal Darkness 2 that I was a member of for a long time. The really strange thing is that, unless I’ve missed something or unless you can enlighten me, there hasn’t been a game since then has continued much less furthered ED’s interest in seriously fucking with its players. Tech is so vastly more sophisticated now that one can only imagine how evil ED2 or its equivalent would be.

Here is something I always wonder about with writers. Your books are in libraries. (Several are in mine, anyway.) Have you ever checked in on them? Have you studied the gunk between the pages? If so, how did it make you feel? I shelved books for a couple years at a local library and I came to feel that the pubes and blood and curry stains and so on were deeply important to the whole experience of borrowing a book.

No, I never have, actually. But I’m definitely going to start doing that now. Weird.

Stuff I Loved in 2011

Ken Baumann — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 02:55:00 +0000

That’s the feeling I look for, right? In whatever I’m eating, be it real food, or entertainment, art, people. The major event. A safe, manageable portion of the inner land or map blown away, torn out and away, dissolved or smoked. I only know a couple people who really seek that, or when they say they want that destruction it’s a good lie, and maybe they’ve said it enough so it’s shared and indistinguishable from truth. Regardless, it’s a common myth, a familiar dragon to chase, that of the Art That Changes For Good. I rarely recognize the mountain exploding in realtime, while reading something or watching a movie, it’s felt live that way maybe four times in my adultish life. Mostly it’s just feeling the echo of the boom a time later. Still, standing mountains aren’t terrible, and are often really nice. But sometimes you get lucky (pictured, pictured). Here’s what my year looked like:

This year was more so filled with people and events, but some books and movies were important: I read Nothing by Blake Butler in the third floor bedroom in an old house in Sezze, Italy. The room was incredibly hot, and the open window often sent in weird, angry voices over bullhorns; it sounded like some kind of really violent political rally/concert. I read it in three long nights, about six hours of sleep between them. We finally figured it out: sleep in the bottom floor. The stone walls helped. ‘Great’ is used a lot, it’s an easy word to say and type, but Nothing is great. I reviewed it in full over here, but the experience of reading it both induced a 7 day long insomnia in me, and let me unlock and inhabit old memories and soft new thoughts about myself, my mind, death and living. It’s a big book. And so fucking admirable and beautiful that HarperPerennial published it. Another one from HP that I read this year is The Marbled Swarm by Dennis Cooper. I tried a review at that one here, too, but it’s a book that’s perfectly confusing and a strain to talk about in any typical way. Which is very good. I’ve read it three times.

I read 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. It took at least three months. It’s worth all that time and more. I’ve never read a book that feels this bottomless (a very different sensation than full, like Finnegans Wake or Infinite Jest even). Through the long span of reading it and not reading it, just looking at it, or carrying it around, I kept thinking about art. It’s power, its lack of power, what it does to the hypercultured; I’d call most readers of this blog hypercultured. Does it blunt us to the real trauma around us? To the relationships and forms that are actually unavoidable? I wouldn’t be surprised. I do know that art really can “humanize” someone, in that it can make them really aware of other minds and ways of life, painfully & acutely aware, for the first time. It’s becoming harder to fight off the idea that art is best as a benign storehouse for excess energy, for ideas or behaviors that would normally be considered weird or offensive, and that, at its best and most beautiful, is contagious and hooks people into its practice and community, in order to grow itself as a form of human activity; but why fight this? In other words, art as/is the least harmful cultural node. 2666 seems to me like a thing made to be a symbol and signal of chaos and fear, maybe a reminder to be reverent, at the least.

Then, in a wholly different way, I read Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. Which is just information & knowledge porn. So pleasurable. It’s an amazing story about money, what money has ever been, what it has wrought. A serious work of scholarship and synthesized histories. If you’re curious at all about the most powerful force of human organization in the last 5,000 years, uhh, read this. Disgustingly dogeared. Hey, publisher Melville House: congratulations!

Movies were rough. Mostly. Martha Marcy May Marlene captured some time and sequences that were bafflingly good and poetic, and is probably my favorite movie released this year. Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty is really good, really interesting, and the clearest successor to Eyes Wide Shut that I can think of. Wonderful to see a film from a first time director (and a novelist!) be so clear in its style and force. Elizabeth Olsen and Mia Wasikowska gave the two best performances I’ve seen this year. And I got so emotional in Warrior, it was great. And the movie handles a lot of the necessary tropes really deftly. And I know it wasn’t released this year, but I saw Inside Job for the first time. It effortlessly lays out the finance industry’s crimes, it’s fun to watch, and it’s the movie I think everyone should be forced to see before they take a job or sign a mortgage.

Another book I enjoyed: Berg by Ann Quin. And Deliverance by James Dickey is so lush and tense simultaneously. (thanks Derek, thanks Gian!)

There’s other stuff of course, always: websites, articles, scattered writing, images, video games, art in large buildings. But overall, it was a year mostly full of friends and moving in the meat world. This is the stuff that let some air in.

Dennis Cooper on Other People

Blake Butler — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 19:53:36 +0000

The newest edition of Brad Listi’s Other People podcast features an hourlong & particularly wonderfully personal interview with Dennis Cooper.

The Marbled Swarm swarms now

Blake Butler — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 18:40:17 +0000

Today is the release of Dennis Cooper’s latest, The Marbled Swarm, and it’s truly something else, even for someone you expect to knock your head off every time.

I reviewed it here for Fanzine; Ken reviewed it here on HTML.

You can buy it now.

Portrait of the Artist as the Books He’s Loved

Impossible Mike — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 00:05:51 +0000

This is an experimental blog post. The experiment is over when I hit “post.” The success of my attempt is undetermined, but as the history of our world goes, success cannot be achieved until it is attempted.

I’ve railed here & other places against the idea of the established & (fairly-)homogenized literary canon that dominates, in the West at least, our culture of the written world as a whole. The Canon, with a capital “C” here in order to demonstrably placate that hierarchy that the hegemony tends to assume a Solid Reality, is, of course, often considered a collection of works that can be held up as benchmarks of what exactly it means to be great literature. But, of course, as we know, meaning is differential, and the greatness of a work of art, whether it be found inside of the realm of the text or the painted image, is an entirely subjective experience. Even the Canon, held up as a standard, has essentially grown and been developed throughout the 20th & 21st century by (undoubtedly) men in High Places, arguing for the prevalence of a work.

The necessity of a canon, in my opinion, is a moot point. Jonathan Rosenbaum, an American film-critic than many people who write & think about cinema often hold up as a pinnacle of contemporary (American) film-criticism (one who I only find interesting at best, but that’s better than not being interesting at all, right?), has a book called Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons, which posits the idea that “canons of great films are more necessary than ever, given that film culture today is dominated by advertising executives, sixty-second film reviewers, and other players in the Hollywood publicity machine who champion mediocre films at the expense of genuinely imaginative and challenging works.” The sentiment here is fine, and I’ll be honest, I haven’t read the book, most in art and in life I am far more interested in a heterogeneous existence than a homogenized one– I don’t want to live in a world where everyone is obligated to acknowledge that Citizen Kane is “the greatest film of all time” (wrong), or even a world where everyone is institutionally obligated to at least admit that it’s a great film, whether one likes it or not.

Frankly, we all still live in Plato’s cave, there are no absolutes: all we have, personally, is experience and subjectivity. For a second let’s forget this idea that there are objective standards in art (the principles & elements of design, for instance). Yesterday (and tomorrow) on Dennis Cooper’s blog, fans & regulars in the blog’s comment section are having lists of their favorite books posted. I love lists. I was immediately sad that I neglected that send a list in to Dennis to have posted. Then I thought, “oh, I’ll just do it on HTMLGiant and link to the posts at Dennis’s,” which is more or less what I’m doing.

But when I considered it, I really started to question why exactly I felt such a strong urge to publicize a list of my favorite books. A list, in it’s pure form, offers little other than a vague window into its creator’s interests, which ultimately reveals nothing about the person who made it. Maybe it offers a cohesive picture of some sort of genre or system of moves or aesthetics, but the list on it’s own, without any context, is just a list. It’s something easy, they’re fun to make, they’re fun to read, but if one were to encounter a list of, say, 50 books that they’ve never heard of, the list would cease to mean anything other than “this is a list of 50 books I’ve never heard of.”

The late-great Raymond Durgnat, another film-critic, wrote a book called Film & Feelings. It’s another book I’ve never read (although this one I have far more interest in reading than Rosenbaum’s book on canons), but I’ve always loved the title. I don’t, ultimately, know Durgnat’s thesis so I’m not going to appropriate it and drop it here, but suffice to say, the more I think about criticism, of art in general, the more I’m inclined to consider the idea that the only way criticism accomplishes anything at all is when the criticism, instead of attempting to position whether the work of art at stake is either “good” or “bad,” or even “successful” or “not-successful,” I think I’m ultimately more interested in reading criticism that approaches its entrance via the experience of the work, the interaction with the work.

Because of everything above, I have decided to present a number of my favorite books (this is a lit-blog after all), a personal canon if you which to call it as such, within the context not of how the books operate on their own accord, but rather how the books have operated within my own personal history: my experience with the books. I think it’s important to note that I think there’s a major difference between saying something like “I like this book because I was really sad when I read it and I could totally relate to this” and attempting to talk about a work of art in the way I’ve vaguely describing above– I’m still not entirely in favor of lazy empathetic readings (which I’ve said before basically everywhere)– there is almost nothing more offensive to me than a response to a work of art that is limited to “I like this because I can relate to it.” I feel like maybe that’s a good starting point, but ultimately that’s only the way you are encountering the work, and there’s no reason for me as a person reading/listening to your “criticism” to, well, care that you can relate to something. Consider a potential conversation:

“I just really love [book]. Like, I felt like I was reading a book about myself, and that was really comfortable.”
“Dude me too, like, I could just really relate to it, that book is amazing.”
“Yeah bro, it’s the best.”

See what I mean? That shit doesn’t go anywhere. I don’t mean to say it’s not a valid reaction, but I question why it’s a reaction that I (here being the audience of a criticism) should be interested in. Circle-jerks get boring, everyone knows how to get themselves off better than someone else.

As personal canons go, I refuse to set any constraints other than to build until I feel whole. A canon is an arbitrary matter, and setting a specific number of titles to build into a canon seems a factor that could lead to a less than enthusiastic choice. Either you have to knock something off to fit something else on, or you have to come up with lesser works to fill holes. This post is only movement, not shape.

But more to the point, here’s my attempt at a “personal canon,” explicated via the experience of the books divorced from a purely empathetic reading.

* * *

THE CORE, THE HEART, THE HEAD

The Complete Works of Georges Bataille

I have not read the complete works of Georges Bataille. I would estimate that I’ve read something like 50% of his work that’s been translated into English, which overall seems to be about 2/3rds of his work as a whole. However, Georges Bataille is dead and I am not, and the influence of Bataille over my entire existence means that this fact is important: as an aesthete, the experience of the new drives me; if I were to finish reading all of Bataille’s work at 25 years old, I would feel disappointed that there were nothing left awaiting me. So I have slowed down.

My first encounter with Bataille was at age 13, discovering, through some unguided & rhizomatic float through the internet, a PDF of the quintessential novella, The Story of the Eye at Supervert. The guiding factors that lead me were undoubtedly some combinatory effort of porn and perversity and the headiness of life itself. Being a teenager is very confusing.

Finding Bataille’s work cemented something for me that has become a cornerstone of my presence in the world: subject matter that lies outside of the realm of morality is often a more direct route towards the impossible questions of life: why am I alive? What does death mean? What does it mean when I come? Bataille’s work probes the impossible, and there is nothing else I am more interested in doing. Some people have Christianity, I have the history of French literature and theory as derived from Bataille’s failed system of non-knowledge. If literature is about life we have to realize that, ostensibly, life is fucked & impossible. If literature is about life we need to realize that life is droll and surpassable. If literature is about life as it stands literature is not about life, it’s about stasis, and I need to always be moving.

I entered my first sexual relationship when I was 18, which was tangential to the time that I read the texts that were eventually collected under the heading of The Impossible. Three texts are in this book, published by City Lights: Dianus, A Story of Rats, and The Orestia. Formally there is an immediate prescience in the heterogeneity of the text: A Story of Rats is narrative fiction, Dianus is arguably a “philosophical essay on poetry,” and The Orestia is poetry. Three disparate forms uniting into a cohesive ideogical whole. The combination made everything stronger, and the fragmented refusal to submit to a single genre or form while probing an idea became the only method I understood in terms of navigating reality.

My first sexual relationship, as most tend to go, was fucked. I experienced an honest desperation trying to mete my body’s desires with a socialized engagement. Quoting from memory (so this might be a little off, my copy of the book is sadly not with me at the moment), the book opens with the following lines:

Incredible nervous state. Trepidation beyond despair. To be this much in love is to be sick, and I love to be sick.

People talk about religious ecstasy, a moment when they “see the light” and accept a Christian God’s guidance. This was my light. A negation perhaps, but in three short sentences I had an ally in my confusion. I felt like literature could be beautiful, and I could be too. Moving further into Bataille’s crazed expression I found more and more that explained to me everything I ever wanted explained. I see nothing negative about this experience, as the work carries me when I need to. An obsession, perhaps, born from darkness, used as the guiding light. Tony Duvert once said that homosexuals don’t read Bataille, but I don’t think Duvert was reading Bataille hard enough. Bataille is often, despite statements of his own to the contrary, assigned a fascism in his words. Perhaps this is detritus of those who read and feel Nietzsche. Am I trying to throw myself into a lineage? Maybe. But when I want to feel and I want to understand, Bataille is the cradle that holds my cold body.

The earth loves cold dead bodies.

The Complete Works of Antonin Artaud

Artaud screams, his work screams, his scrunched face howling in ecstatic pain, shouting, his is the plague, he is the theater, he is the progenitor of what are can (and should, in my world) be. The Theater and Its Double opens up a door to a world of art that refuses what art currently exists as in a contemporary, capitalist locus. The theoretical writings on art display such a focus that it’s impossible to not understand.

My reading of Artaud has been vague and scattered. Approached undoubtedly out of second-hand knowledge of the work, a tangency to the author I had already carried as figure-heads, I came to Artaud more recently that most of my prophets. Away from the theoretical writings, lucid in their perfection, Artaud’s “poetic work” (a terrible descriptive term, but necessary I think) is a display of how once can transgress the page and become the work. Glossolalia amidst screams. “I am not dead, but I am separated.”

To read Artaud is to understand the body as text, the paper itself carrying not just words, but a man. There is no representation, there is only a directness. Artaud is not read, he is experienced.

THE REST OF MY BODY AS WORDS ON A PAGE

Ettore Sottsass Metaphors ed. Milco Carboni

Sottsass was an Italian designer & architect whose most prominent work comes from the great decades of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. He was at the head of the now infamous MEMPHIS group, which is having somewhat of a resurgence as early to mid 80s aesthetics find a place in the contemporary consciousness, and frankly I’m ok with that, because it’s lovely. Virtually everything he designed, whether a room or a bed or a typewriter, is absolutely amazing: his design skills inspire awe.

For someone rooted in an industry based & maintained by capitalism and wealth, Sottsass also maintained the role of a visionary and dreamer. He wanted good design for everyone, and instead of falling into the socialist homogenization of living spaces like many other leftist designer/architects before him, he considered beauty a natural right that everyone was privy to.

In 1995, he said the following about living spaces:

Anyway, perhaps, what I know is that designing a place for living means designing or at least supposing to design, on each different occasion, a kind of temple, a closed place, within the limits granted to our scope for respite. But it is always a temple, because it is built for that certain degree of sacredness that we, by designing, manage to devote to protecting those who will be living out the days of their existence and also their lives in that place.

I can’t for the life of me remember my initial encounter with Sottsass, but it’s ended up being an important relationship that I’ve cultivated. METAPHORS is a more poetic, experimental set of works carried out by Sottsass, it’s not design work per se, but rather explorations of ideas surrounding space and how humans interact with it. Mostly taking place in the desert, Sottsass sets up signifiers of buildings and environments using cardboard boxes, poles, string, and other ‘disposable’ materials, captioning each image with what could be considered truisms (one of my favorites being “IN SOME ROOMS MURDERS ARE COMMITTED”).

The images are beautiful: black and white, grainy, other-worldy almost, and it’s inside of these images that my head immediately finds narratives, inside of these images where I can enter a zone of space isolated from the terror of existence.

Mercury by Anna Kavan

My first encounter with Anna Kavan came via an image found trawling through a friend’s flicker page. There is a lovely group of really wonderful women I have met online via my obsession with the 60s & 70s films of the fantastique, and “Oola” is one acquaintance I was particularly bewitched by. She seemed to have impeccable taste and a wonderfully exciting life (from what I could see of it online), so the combination of my experience with the owner of the book and the cover of the book itself, I immediately requested the book from inter-library-loan (at the time, Kavan’s Julia and the Bazooka was out of print).

Reading the book I felt a wonderful disorientation; Kavan was writing in a style that was somewhat indicative of my favorite period of Robbe-Grillet’s work, but she was doing it with entirely different subject matter. The fantastique in Kavan’s universe is how impossible reality is. Kavan was a covert heroin user throughout her whole life, and I get the impression she was eternally sad– I am attracted to eternally sad artists (and eternally sad hot dudes, but that’s another post).

While I loved & continue to love the stories found in Julia and the Bazooka, I was absolutely blown away when I read Mercury. The book is arguably the “B-side” to Kavan’s somewhat more notorious novel, Ice, which is also a fantastic read. Taking somewhat of the same narrative, but replacing the point of view from the male protagonist in Ice and taking the eternal female-victim and putting her in the first person position, the story becomes even more fucked and fantastique– there is sadness, sexual degradation, and a pulling away, a coldness. There is maybe even a potential, barely avoided sacrifice to an ancient demon-monster. The universe of Kavan’s novel is simultaneously unreal and irreal, and it’s the combination that presents the idea that the world is the end of the world (as Dan Hoy would say), that reality is nothing but.

There are slippages in narrative, perhaps a lazy way would be to say that structurally the narrative progresses via dream logic– critics, speaking about Robbe-Grillet’s work, have adapted the term that Robbe-Grillet used himself, “slippages,” or “slidings.” The amazing thing about Kavan is that her slippages are even more successful than Robbe-Grillet’s; they’re heavier, darker, more fluid. It’s not just a structural tool for Kavan, rather it’s her own drug-addled reality carried to narrative. And I can feel these slippages.

A friend recently stated something so obvious to me lately that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before– when you’re five years old a year is a fifth of everything you’ve experienced so far; a year as an eternity. When you’re 30 a year is only a thirthieth of your life, a much smaller percentage of course– this explanation of the relativity of time seems amazing to me; and Kavan’s work moves through a relativity translated through language, and it’s beautiful.

The Ship by Hans Henny Jahnn

Because of my understanding of the world and the way things filter into visibility, I remain forever convinced that the best that human beings have had to offer often becomes buried, hidden, forgotten. Because of this conviction I spend time seeking out what could be termed obscure or forgotten art; long out of print books, lost movies, etc. They hold secrets that, for some reason or other, have often slipped into the dark recesses of culture, abandoned because they couldn’t force themselves into the day for whatever reason. Jahnn is a criminally under-recognized author who, especially in the English speaking world, has slipped through the cracks.

A German author who also restored and built organs, Jahnn was described as a homosexual who wrote one of the most dark & unsettling works of literature ever written. That sort of description literally screams my name, as I am a queer who prefers “dark and unsettling” works of art. The Ship is ridiculously out of print and unattainable (I don’t even own a copy and it’s, obviously by its inclusion here, one of my favorite works of literature ever), but there are two or three copies circulating in the American library system, so I once again called on the trusty inter-library-loan and tore through my copy.

The narrative is somewhat obtuse; Jahnn will drop his primary narrative thread in order to interject smaller narratives that do nothing other than to establish an ultimate sense of dread. when someone like Tao Lin calls something “bleak” it seems like a bright sun-shiny day compared to the heaviness of Jahnn’s book. The interjection of irrelevent narratives into a larger narrative to strengthen the tone of affect is something I haven’t seen anywhere else in literature, and the closest examples I can come up with are found in the films of Philippe Grandrieux (another here), more than half a century after Jahnn’s work was written.

When I was fifteen years old I decided, to myself, that the best possible world would find me losing my virginity on a boat. While this didn’t happen, since that declaration I have been unendingly fascinated by water, by these vessels that carry bodies and materials over water, but the life that could be found on a boat. As the title would indicate, the narrative of Jahnn’s book takes place entirely on a boat. The narrative introduces many mysteries that are never solved, there is a resoundingly oppressive atmosphere of dread, there is nothing but terror. The totality is beautiful; this is true horror.

Mezza Voce by Anne-Marie Albiach

My discovery of French écriture (which is I guess what only I call this sort of “poetry-as-text-as-writing-whatever” ‘group’ of French poets writing at the same time & in the same sort of stylistic moves [though of course very varied]) came within my excessive hunting. I had gotten wind of the fact that Maurice Roche (another criminally underrecognized author who is largely unavailable in English) had a text available in the “New French Fiction” issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction from 1989. I immediately left my desk and work and ran through the periodicals, grabbing the bound volume that contained that issue. I read the Roche immediately, loved it, and began flipping through the rest of the material.

A lot of the names were already known and loved by me, but there was a new one that, based on formal experimentation alone, I immediately obsessed over: Mathieu Benezet. The included story (or fragment? I guess I’m unsure) is amazing, and so I immediately started to find more work by him in English. Naturally, as is what often happens to me, there was absolutely nothing available, except for a single poem from a short-lived literary mag from the 80s that, once I managed to track down, ended up being ultimately disappointing and nothing like the text I had encountered in RoCF.

However, I was on a new trail. The issue of RoCF included a section in which the authors included named their influences, and Benezet’s included an entire group of writers that he was indebted to; the only two I was familiar with being Roche (the source of this journey) &, of course, Mallarmé. The list included most of the poets that I shortly became obsessed with, including Anne-Marie Albiach.

Albiach’s work here, specifically in Mezza Voce, really takes on the book as a whole, allowing for the white space of the page to operate as a performative stage, a place for language to operate. By the time I read this work I was familiar with a lot of the moves used by these poets, but in this book the work as a whole coalesces into an affected zone of mood in a far more articulated style, and it’s for that reason that this book is here, it is for that reason that this book has pushed me harder and harder towards conceptualizes books as BOOKS, and not just as stories.

This was something I knew I wanted to do, but I had rarely encountered it in a way that really excited me. Even looking at as many artists’ books as I could get my hands on, I would rarely find something that felt simultaneously necessary as a book AND exciting as a book. This fit the bill, proving it could be done; showing me that my textual quest can end well.

The Cage by Martin-Vaughn James

I love comix. I read as many as I can get my hands on. I hate super-heroes, any sort of traditional comic narrative. At first I found this limiting, as it wasn’t so easy for me to find the stuff I loved out of a medium that I already knew I loved, but as with anything, when you look deeper, there’s a lot of shit to be found.

“Indie comics,” of course, seem to be the first steps away from considering comics as exclusively a medium for super-heroes & power-fantasies. This was my first escape; this is how I found out that the medium was endless. Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, Chris Ware– these are good comic authors to read, and they served an interesting entrance, but ultimately their subject matter is less interesting to me than the “text only” books I was reading.

I found the closest parallel to my literary tastes in euro-comix, specifically the work of Guido Crepax and the dream team of Schuiten & Peeters (who write the extremely amazing Cités Fantastiques books). Reading about Schuiten & Peeters one day, I encountered a mention of Martin Vaughn-James & his book The Cage; the comparison was found in the architectural detail, and as a huge architect nerd this put the book on my to read list. Once it arrived at the library I was literally blown away.

The Cage is one of the most impressive and intelligent works of the comic genre I’ve yet to encounter; extremely obtuse & heavy, but not in any sort of vague “hippie” way that it’s zeitgeist would often lend itself to. Vaughn-James worked within the realm of Canadian experimental literature (the book, now super out of print & one of my prized possessions, was published by Coach House in the early 70s), and it seems that Vaughn-James was friends with bpNichol & the like. This makes sense, as the work carries a textual accompaniment that denies any sort of subjectivity at all; while the book is entirely narrative, it lacks any characters. It is entirely movement and space, and it is beautiful and mysterious.

A successful example of a narrative work completely lacking characters was something I was always interested in proving possible, as my own ideas about narrative tend to avoid psychologizing and the inclusion of characters as anything other than conduits for events and ideas. This book proves that you don’t even need characters to have events and ideas, you only need, let’s call it, movement, spaces, zones.

Recollections of the Golden Triangle by Alain Robbe-Grillet

I will be the first person to admit that I am a Robbe-Grillet fanboy. My trifecta of perfection used to be identified as Bataille, Robbe-Grillet & Dennis Cooper, but now it’s a lot more fluid. I saw Last Year at Marienbad in high school almost by accident; I had heard it mentioned in relation to the euro-horror genre films I was obsessed over and was expecting something with a lot more (explicit) sex and violence. What I found was, of course, something entirely different, but entirely perfect nonetheless. I fell in love.

I started reading Robbe-Grillet’s books a year later; Jealousy & In the Labyrinth first, in the combined mass-market paperback edition Grove Press had put out in the 60s. I apparently had ordered the book while drunk one night, living in in the dorms, and then completely forgot about it. I hadn’t quite connected the idea of Robbe-Grillet as author with Last Year at Marienbad. The day before I had to move home from the dorms for christmas break, the book arrived. I read it and enjoyed it but wasn’t totally sold yet. I understood the book was doing some amazing things, but it wasn’t until I got further into Robbe-Grillet’s films & his later works of fictions that my obsession grew into true lust.

Recollections of the Golden Triangle and the novel immediately preceding it, Topology of a Phantom City share a kinship; they are almost brothers as novels. Both novels are intertextually assembled from various work Robbe-Grillet had written in other contexts, and brought together perfectly, and despite my fetish for ruins and architecture, Recollections wins out as my favorite due to the tableau that occur throughout. Robbe-Grillet, in some circles, is known for writing particularly “deconstructed” detective novels–this is partially true, but also missing the point. Robbe-Grillet’s play with genres (mystery, pornography) are more structural experiments that happen to coattail with his obsessions (being sadomasochism & young girls). Recollections is often accused of misogyny, and if you’re dealing entirely with the novel on the surface, that’s impossible to excuse, but I think Robbe-Grillet operates similar to, say, the pink films of Hisayasu Sato, or even Duchamp’s final work of art, Etant Donnes. The subject matter is always a conduit to a larger idea that overwhelms what’s on the surface. The surface is a diversion. This contrast, the mode of operating has influenced my thought in such a heavy manner that sometimes I find it impossible to privilege the surface over the structure of anything.

The Doll by Hans Bellmer

There has been a surprisingly lack of books about artists, or artist monographs on this list so far, which I think is ultimately problematic (I read as many art related books as I do books of fiction), but as I stated at the start that this post is experimental in nature and I’m not enforcing any structural constraint upon it, I’ll let it go.

However, it would be impossible for me to do this without mentioning this book.

In the past, I often had a hard time remembering that I had a body. I spent most of my time living in my head. Tired of this, I began tattooing myself with signifiers of larger, important ideas onto my body, perhaps in an attempt to refuse the duality explicated by my lifestyle. The first tattoo, of course, was a Bataille tattoo. This was necessary, planned. The second tattoo was a diagram from this book.

There’s, perhaps, a particular irony in committing, to my body, a diagram from Bellmer’s The Doll, as much of the primary concerns of Bellmer’s have to do with the body and desire: I assigned this to my own body, a self-contained loop perhaps. Bellmer’s writings, which might seem unhinged to some, convinced me that writing desire and sexuality divorced from the context of any sort of normative sexual experience is fruitful to larger ideas regardless of whether or not you are alienating a potential audience. We must probe ourselves, and our own obsessions are the only things we can count on to carry us to the larger ideas. Obsession could probably be considered an overwhelmingly present “theme” throughout the books on this list, and that makes perfect sense as I am an inherently obsessive person.

Period by Dennis Cooper

Dennis Cooper was, without a doubt, my first literary love. Oddly enough, I came to his work through Todd Verow’s film adaptation of his second novel, Frisk; a film which is often considered a terrible piece of shit, especially by those dedicated to Cooper’s work. For me, I’ll always have an appreciation for the film, primarily because if it weren’t for being a young perv watching every gay movie he could get his hands on and seeing this film, my literary history would have potentially taken an entirely different route (but also because Parker Posey is in the film and she’s amazing).

Dennis’s work was the first time I ever encountered ideas about the desperation and longing, the love and intimacy that’s present within desire; how complicated everything really is, and how something so terrible can be ultimately poignant and filled with beauty. The George Miles cycle is a paean to a personal icon, and how perfect is that? Period is the book most in-line with my personal aesthetics– it’s dark, contains haunted houses and black metal, is probably Dennis’s most visually experimental book, and ultimately is filled to the core with feeling. I hate sentimentality, and filtered through his empty characters, Dennis’s emotional core is never sentimental, it’s only ever acute and desperate, but ultimately honest.

Sex is a driving force behind life, desire that is, sex being a pure conduit of desire, all of this is life. Dennis’s texts show that, and for me I can’t think of a better way to interpret how impossible the world is.

Raimund Abraham: Unbuilt ed. by N. Miller

I read a lot of books about architecture and architects, despite having little to no interest in studying to become a practicing architect myself. I briefly considered it, when I was still considering graduate school, but realized that the narrative potentiality of space is different & perhaps only a minute part of what goes into literally building a building. Regardless, I keep reading.

Abraham was a chance encounter. A random tumblr had posted an image of his which lead back to Lebbeus Woods’s blog, which had a post on Abraham (it’s worth noting that Woods is a brilliant architect himself). Another quick & immediate search had the book on it’s way to my hands.

And what a book it is. Collecting almost all of the projects Abraham ever conceived of, the monograph presents the visionary work, mostly houses. Abraham is part of a group of architects who rarely have works built, rather they develop theories of architecture based on narrative & simple plans for buildings (I’ve heard them called “paper architects”)– pure imagination (see also Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, Douglas Darden, Will Insley). As someone with an obsession with spaces, and houses in particular, I find little more joy than in simply looking at these plans and sketches, throwing myself into the experience of the space.

The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism by Nick Land

Nick Land is a cornerstone of particular modes of contemporary philosophy, mostly of those related to Urbanomic & the journal Collapse (Urbanomic published the recent collection of Land’s collected articles). For someone who has achieved deistic status by a few, he’s hated & despised and viewed as evil and pure-capitalist-fascism by others. Similar to Bataille. And this, of course, is ostensibly Land’s reading/appropriation of Bataille.

Land is pushed by many as purely typical of a 90s nihilist malaise that we’ve moved past, or something, but anybody who says that clearly isn’t paying close enough attention. Taking science & Bataille, Land looks towards the future, and the future looks bleak. I need to read this 100 more times before I understand it, but it set my specifically on the path of philosophy reading that I’ve been doing for a few years, and that’s important because to ignore the current state of my headland would be to ignore the fact that I am still alive.

Secrecy, speed, affect: The Marbled Swarm

Ken Baumann — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:00:14 +0000

The Marbled Swarm

by Dennis Cooper

Harper Perennial, November 1st, 2011

$10.19 / Buy from Amazon

1. A precursor: the often repeated and often obvious dictum from authors: if one could summarize the idea or express the idea elsewhere, it would not be a book.

2. Another precursor: I have to use numbers for this review. The accumulative force in The Marbled Swarm has made me nervous to write about it. These numbers should help. Related: numbers are very rarely used in the book; we are maybe twice given them as markers, as soft attempts at erasure, but more so as another meter to remember. I understand the absence of counting in the book.

3. Formal book reviews mostly feel homogenous to me; some young limping component of an old structure; sutured to print? The format seems off, or rather: very rarely off. I’m pretty often baffled, too, by the claim that some argument must be lodged and pushed through to agree a reader; maybe I discredit the militaristic form of rhetoric, or of establishing a reading. To me, the reviews, the books too, that are interesting and alive feeling do not seem camped or aimed, yet open and transfixed.

4. I read The Marbled Swarm for the first time on a plane. Enclosed by a tube, moving very fast through different pressured air, hoping for a smooth passage. Fantasizing about puncture.

5. The book, on the first read, left me begging to know. It is a formal agent of confusion. The steadiest, most rarely undermined premise or concept in it is that of the power of the marbled swarm, a highly designed and culturally varied rhetoric. The narrator is deploying his version, an admittedly flawed reproduction, while showing us events.

6. The book moves thus: a mystery is lodged. Not much later, we learn that the book is a functional report, or tale; it is a written memoir. The writer is the hero is the writer. Then more mystery. The board game Clue is a good reference: in the first mystery, there is a house. Important rooms. Newly familiar guests. Motives. A crime; better to say an act, as there is no punishment or policing; the game doesn’t end. Instead of unwrapping the envelope and counting up whatever solutions you’ve stored, a new envelope is discovered, or the bottom of the board is found to be an entirely new playing surface. You flip the board, and you begin again. The text masterfully shifts in time and recounts another odd circumstance or coincidence and its inevitable discoveries, in which you are quickly lost.

7. This accumulative web of information does, must, have its holes. Reading the book for a second time, I was sure the sure the space behind the web was the tactful and often seemingly taxed act of confession. The gears revealed. The spinning momentarily acknowledged, reversed, slowed.

8. I was wrong. I think.

9. As reader, we are given a total story that contains within it many tracks: we often move forward in one direction, moving ahead by a straight timeline and a mounting proclivity or desire, then an incoming force approaches in the opposite direction, our path still holding as the desire morphs into an abandonment, or a lack of agency, and as the two forces become parallel, you’re switched tracks, now moving in the opposite direction, still moving just as fast, fed new information and motive and context, all the while caught in a direction that will eventually return you somewhere that feels like the origin. Subtext is the track.

10. To get more material: The Marbled Swarm accumulates mystery, desire, and connections as it appears to shed mystery, desire, and connections; magic. Or sleight of hand.

11. The presumptive power of the marbled swarm allows you to assign as many or as few secrets to the book as you’d like. And, of course, later we are left to think there are no secrets at all.

12. On a sonic and syntax level, the voice of the narrator, the book, is entirely peculiar. In my first read it took me thirty pages or so, the first section, to relax into its rhythm and get used to how it deployed information and tasked out images. There’s a lot of distance installed in the book’s tone. A sparring distance. As you start to feel you’re getting it, digging into the book’s tunnel, you find yourself diagramming and assessing paragraphs contextually, looking for blatant codes or clues like alliterative elements or the utility of an odd word or phrase, but also reexamining the surface of each unit; seeing the paragraph in relation to its top and bottom, seeing the page in relation to its chapter or some phrase littered a dozen pages back, or holding on a sentence and trying to find a pattern or shaped hole in the web. Now, writing this, I realize that’s hard to do when you’re stuck in the web. I wonder where a fly looks when it struggles.

13. As an actor, this book is extra effective. A fundamental consideration in the book is the idea, execution, and presence of performance. How and when to be something else. What mood to transmit or sell. The willingness to subsume yourself in another’s plot. As the characters in the book die or disappear, some are passed off into another body, another boy. These new molds are less dopplegängers, but more scarred replicants. As if with each generation or genesis there is a new piece of the machine’s logic that isn’t broken in, or busted down. The book highlights, through its mangled actors, the ability of the Story to yield to chaos as long as it moves. That the final result or grand goal of Story is mostly to make sense of things, structurally or emotionally, seems a very small and myopic task. Great art does cohere around erosion; it opens up the field of experience. Like Deleuze & Guattari said, great art restores the infinite. This book is great art.

14. Confusion, as a resting place, is as tortuously paradoxical as other terminal points. Dennis Cooper has said, “Most people fear confusion, but I think confusion is the truth and I seek it out,” and also, “I think confusion is the truth, except when I’m feeling it, ha ha.” That one can feel based but entirely lost, on a pure blank flat horizontal plane. As opposed to the final screen in David Foster Wallace’s Mister Squishy, this place is frenetic and always opts out, not further in.

15. I don’t want to expose the details of The Marbled Swarm. I would rather face it.

16. There is camera, then light, then makeup, then skin. There is so much more to say.

17. A detail to remember: the book invokes cartoons and fantasy and play, but not mainly to subvert them to whatever evil purposes; the subversion is not a one layer operation. Also: this book is really funny.

18. It would be lazy to equate this book to a fancier Robbe-Grillet; it is not that. More strikingly, this book finds less abstract ideas to grip on and less stringent lairs to roam. The only hard, decoded data I’d give as advice to someone about to read this book: Believe lies.

19. That gets you deeper.

20. What is the most engaging movement in this book, to me, is the emotional admission. After hours of murder, cannibalism, profane aestheticism, gruesome sex, abuse, and a hyper-measured delivery more unnerving on the page than all that activity, we are given a feeble child. And whereas in most books this would serve as the justifying confession to the book’s prior sin, the moralist reader’s WMD, this appearance does something totally new to me. It invokes itself almost as a ghost; a presence both present and gone, a force that you then realize has haunted all the halls and mirrors you’ve glided in for years. Finally, amid all the interpretation and artifice and architecture, we are given the only obvious door. The fine and masterful beauty of this book: we can seek a way around it.

Dennis Cooper in The Paris Review

Ken Baumann — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 21:27:40 +0000

Anybody who’s remotely interested in the art of/work of writing should pick up the current issue of The Paris Review and flip to Dennis Cooper’s interview. It is pure inspiration.

Paris Review 198: Cooper, Baker, Howley, etc.

Blake Butler — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 16:22:54 +0000

Dennis Cooper is interviewed in the new issue of the Paris Review (“I’m as interested by what sex can’t give you as by what it can.”)(as is Nicholson Baker)(as is a story by the rad Kerry Howley).

Dennis Cooper & Keith Mayerson’s Horror Hospital Unplugged

Blake Butler — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 16:46:22 +0000

Finally the gorgeous and psionic (and previously OOP) graphic novel Horror Hospital Unplugged, written by Dennis Cooper and illustrated by Keith Mayerson, has been rereleased by Harper Perennial. “If Antonin Artaud and Keith Haring took the wrong drugs and collaborated on a kids cartoon show.” Wish I could plaster the walls of my house all over.

More excerpts available at DC’s blog, as well as in the ‘look inside the book’ feature on Amazon.

What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions: Dennis Cooper}

Christopher Higgs — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 16:20:32 +0000

According to his official bio, Dennis Cooper was born, he grew up, he wrote, he attended, he transferred, he was expelled, he met, he attended, he then attended, he studied, he founded, he lived, he moved, he began. And now he currently spends his time between Los Angeles and Paris. Harper Perennial will release his newest novel The Marbled Swarm in November 2011, and next month they will be republishing Horror Hospital Unplugged: his 1997 graphic novel collaboration with artist Keith Mayerson. He blogs at denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com.

Question #1 – The Body

In the first volume of “Five Questions,” when asked to describe experimental writing, Bhanu Kapil redirected my question to the body: “Or: What are the somatics of an emigrant line?” She then went on to discuss “the diasporic body” -and- “the language of somatic experiencing.” I find this provocative line of inquiry very interesting because it draws our attention away from the role of the mind in creating literature and instead compels us to pay attention to the role of the body. What thoughts do you have about the relationship between the body and experimental writing?

Well, since experimental writing gives an author broader and wilder access to his or her imagination, the prose should ideally have greater contact with the writer’s overall needs or priorities or dictates. So, emotion, for instance, should have a chance of being represented within the writing in a far less restrictive manner than it is in conventional fiction where it’s generally isolated as a character trait or employed as a tonal gotcha. If you see narrative or plot as just an optional propellent or fuel for your work, and if you think of your characters as important fractions of your work rather than as its most realistic and intimate vehicles, you’re no longer called upon to just repopulate and spin a linear parade of words while always making sure it’s still a parade. In conventional fiction, bodies are usually preset depictions that quickly become givens of the characters. Those bodies can be sexy or comical or repugnant or whatever else but they always need to be some degree of sympathetic and maintain their status as text-based human doppelgangers. Then those bodies travel and emote and fuck or whatever their way through a story that is intended to represent their lives and wherein readers are allowed to play god — do the fly on the wall number and sometimes read their minds. But if you approach the writing of fiction as an unmitigated experiment, and if you don’t just try to rearrange the same old strictures abnormally, you don’t have to reduce the body to a series of finite illustrations, at least in theory. I tend to find recorded music really helpful as an alternative role model for writing because it can achieve a full body effect without limiting its emotional or sensual intentions to a singer’s voice or to the lyrics or to a lead instrument. That effect can come from everywhere in the mix, and all the elements that compose a piece of music are ostensibly equal, and it’s up to the artist and his or her technicians to modulate and organize them until the song is most powerful. I don’t know that it’s possible to just translate those principles into writing in a literal way — play sentences like they were keyboards or a bunch of guitar strings or whatever — but I’ve found that thinking of the obligatory components of fiction as fragments of an unpredictable constellation is useful as a way to try to flush emotion and eroticism and tension into my writing and not just nitpick them with my head.

Question #2 — Politics

In describing experimental writing, Miranda Mellis suggested, “Its politics are its aesthetics and vice versa.” I’m interested to learn your perspective on the political potential and/or limitations of experimental writing. Additionally, in what ways do you think experimental literature can engage with politics differently than other forms of literature?

I can’t remember ever having found myself persuaded by a work of fiction’s politics, but I tend to concentrate on the style and systems of the fiction I read. I’m mainly interested in how writers choose to communicate, and if their constructions are dictated in some formal way by their politics then I pay attention, but otherwise when a piece of fiction is addressing or pressing a political bent in an overt way, I guess I tend to see it as part of the shape of the fairytale. My own politics, which I identify as anarchist, are fundamental to how I make work, and I don’t think I could have written my novels without employing anarchism’s structuring principles and philosophy on the level of aesthetics in a thorough way. For instance, I’m really interested in exploring highly charged and confused/confusing situations where characters are obsessively coupled and mismatched, and where the distinction between predator and victim is dangerously clear cut. By diagnosing the problem as a power imbalance and seeing that issue as part and parcel of a fundamental societal current in which all the characters are being victimized, it allows me to create a moral ambiguity whose resolution preoccupies the reader and hopefully results in a more penetrating, uncertain response to a narrative/character-based configuration that, under normal circumstances, would trigger a censorious judgement call. That’s a specific example, but, in general, approaching, say, the writing of a novel with an anarchist viewpoint makes the idea of creating a revolution within that form not just an ultimate narrative goal but an obligatory and organic first step.

Question #3 — Economics

Debra Di Blasi responded to my question about how we might evaluate the success of a work of experimental literature (in light of the seeming lack of established criteria) by arguing that the act of “Determining ‘success’ or ‘failure’ shifts literary significance to product rather than process, to a means to an end rather than a means to a means to a means, i.e., evolution. Product concerns itself with marketing, process with art. They remain antagonistic neighbors.” By shifting my question away from the realm of aesthetic judgment and toward the discourse of commodities, Di Blasi raises interesting economic considerations. How might we begin to think about the use value of experimental literature? Or, to put it another way, what does experimental literature offer society or the individual that cannot be accounted for elsewhere?

Well, literature is a very special medium because the relationship between a work’s artist and its recipient is uniquely private and collaborative. A writer writing is entirely alone with his or her text, and reading a text is an equally solitary experience. That in and of itself isn’t entirely unique because you can listen to music on headphones and watch a DVD when alone and arrest that music and film for yourself, and so on. But what’s unique in the case of literature is that the text isn’t the finished work. A novel or short story isn’t a solid object. It’s just groundwork, and the reader’s imagination and reference points revive its content, extrapolate from its clues, and finish the work individually. In a way, when you’re writing a novel, for instance, you’re actually writing an unpredictable number of novels at once, and that number depends on how many copies end up being read. No other art form that I can think of involves that level of collaboration between artist and audience and disrupts the passiveness of being a work’s receiver with so much freedom and creativity. The high degree of interaction and codependence that the writer/reader axis makes possible is gorgeous and offers such a great opportunity to experiment with how text reacts when it comes in contact with the imagination. And writing allows you to play with the crapshoot decision of when a work is finished or, rather, when something is ready to be placed outside of your control and then finished by other people in largely unknowable ways.

Question #4 – Race

When asked about the relationship between women and experimental literature, Alexandra Chasin responded by asking, “What about the relationship between people of color and experimental literature in the U.S.? What about representations of race and racial Others? Can we talk about that?” Since this sentiment was echoed by various of the previous “Five Questions” participants, and because it strikes me as true that discussions about race and representations of racial diversity tend to be underrepresented in the field of experimental literature, I think it’s important to pursue answers to those questions. What are your thoughts?

I’m not sure that I fully understand the question. Is the idea there that an experimental writer’s race is a determining factor in his or her ability to get published and, once published, to receive appropriate recognition, and that the community of experimental writers is more racially diverse than the arbiters of experimental writing have acknowledged? Or is the question more about how excessively white the characters in character-based American experimental literature tend to be given the diverse racial make up of the country’s citizens? I don’t really have an interesting answer to either of those questions. If the first is true then, yeah, that’s a real problem. As for the second, I’m not particularly interested in experimental literature wherein replicating the real world is the primary goal, and I guess I don’t think writing experiments should be restricted by the real world’s rights and wrongs. My main reaction to the question is to want to recommend some books of experimental fiction off the top of my head that I think are fantastic and whose American authors aren’t white: Darius James’ Negrophobia, Lawrence Braithwaite’s More at 7:30 (which is being published next year, I think), Lily Hoang’s The Evolutionary Revolution, R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the R’s, Will Alexander’s Diary as Sin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Ishmael Reed’s The Freelance Pallbearers, Bhanu Kapil Rider’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Clarence Major’s My Amputations, …

Question #5 – Reading Suggestions

Which are your favorite works of experimental literature, and why?

The works I’m going to list are all favorites for the same reason. Their effect overwhelmed me at the time that I read them and made me study how they worked, and what I found made me question and rethink my own strategies and goals in their light. Other than that, I don’t really know why they’re especially important to me. Maurice Blanchot’s Death Sentence, Robbe-Grillet’s Recollection of the Golden Triangle, Robert Pinget’s Fable, Agota Kristof’s The Book of Lies, Jean Genet’s Funeral Rites, Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, Lautreamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror, Pierre Guyotat’s Eden Eden Eden, William Burroughs’ The Wild Boys, Raymond Roussell’s Locus Solus, Claude Simon’s Triptych, Ivy Compton-Burnett’s The Present and the Past, Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations, DFW’s Infinite Jest, Andre Gide’s The Counterfeiters, … If it’s okay, I’d also like to mention a handful of favorite books by American experimental writers who are roughly in my age group and whom I consider to be writer comrades. Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker, Kevin Killian’s Shy, Robert Gluck’s Jack the Modernist, Lynne Tillman’s No Lease on Life, Eileen Myles’ Inferno, Bruce Boone’s Century of Clouds, …