Late-Mid-Week Early(ish) Morning Roundup
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.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p_1E5d5bfE&
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?
Roundup in which the pollen count leaves me with no choice but to shapeshift into my reptile self
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.
This Is How You Will Disappear stills
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:
Justin Taylor—
Dennis Cooper’s blog focuses on Crispin Best’s for every year project, which I did not know about at all, much less that it includes contributions from some of our own contributors and/or fellow-travelers, including Jimmy Chen, Nicolle Elizabeth, Paula Bomer, and the great long-lost Ryan Manning. So that’s cool. Then, down in the comments thread, DC directs our attention to a piece by Weaklings-regular and general purveyor of greatness David Ehrenstein’s interview with Anna Karina in LA Weekly, “Sexual Politics: Godard and Me.” How’s that for Friday afternoon?
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Links, now with Direct Address
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.
Little House on the Bowery Reading
Dennis Cooper, James Greer, and Mark Gluth read at City Lights, March 16, 2010
Dennis Cooper | Mark Gluth | James Greer Tour
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
Hey, here are those links you asked me for
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!
Webaround
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.
Kareem Estefan Gets “Jerk” Right at BOMB
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.]
‘Late-Night Special’: A Conversation between Dennis Cooper and Blake Butler
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.
Uncategorized / 127 Comments
January 21st, 2010 / 5:22 am
January 21st, 2010 / 5:22 am
Happy Birthday, Dennis Cooper!
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!
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlvn9LfRETM
PS- Here’s a live version that has the embedding disabled for some reason, so you have to watch it on the Youtube site.
Richard Brautigan Day at Coop’s Place!
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.
Blake Butler—
Dennis Cooper posted today about his current theater project, which sounds and looks just too ridiculously cool for words: [Basics: 'This Is How You Will Disappear' (2010). Director: Gisele Vienne. Texts & Dramaturgy: Dennis Cooper. Score: Stephen O'Malley (w/ Jim O'Rourke, Merzbow, Boris, Peter Rehberg). Lighting Design: Patrick Riou. Fog Effects: Fujiko Nakaya. Holographic Effects: Shiro Takatani. Performers: Jonathan Capdevielle, Jonathan Schatz, Margrét Sara Gudjónsdóttir.] Also, if you are in NYC, his ‘Jerk’ will be at the Under the Radar festival from January 7-17, tix available here. I’m aiming to make a special trip.
20 Important Books in Other Languages; or, “a list always growing longer”
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 >
Blake Butler—
Dennis Cooper has posted his 1998 interview with Brad Renfro, where he uses his DC powers to get the kid talking about satanism, Stryper, punk, and other. He also drops the title of his next forthcoming book, a collection of nonfiction, Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, Obituaries, forthcoming July 2010 from Harper Perennial.
Great Days for Weaklings
I read Dennis Cooper’s blog every day, and it’s always a pleasure, but I want to point out that there has been an especially good run this week, and so if you’re an only-occasional visitor over there, this is a good time to go check in. Let’s move backwards through time.
Today’s post is a collection of eleven YouTube clips of Stephen Malkmus singing–solo as well as with Pavement. It kicks off with an acoustic version of “Box Elder,” one of my all-time favorite Pavement songs, which I’ve only ever heard rendered in full fuzz.
Yesterday was a “back from the dead” post–originally posted 10/19/06 on an earlier incarnation of the blog that was hacked and destroyed. DC occasionally painstakingly re-produces one of those lost posts, and I can’t think of one I’m happier to see again than “Great Moments in Gay Porn #8: Klark, a mini-retrospective.”
Career-wise, porn stars are to movie stars as dogs are to humans. That’s to say, their time in the spotlight may constitute a blip relative to their more respectable peers, but their lifespans as fan magnets can be no less storied and impressive. By that reckoning, Klark is something like the Paul Newman of Russian gay porn. In his ten or eleven year long run as a superstar, he has pretty much done it all without ever losing his Gary Cooper-esque stoicism (and consequent aura of dignity), his ever battle-ready attitude, his quasi-underraged everyboy bod, or his very Russian yet strangely nonspecific good looks. He may not get as many starring roles these days as he did when his competition was all but nonexistent, but he’s managed to outlast many of his famous predecessors by never quite stooping too low in his choice of roles to make a quick buck.
Irrespective of your particular level of interest in gay porn (my own is, let’s say, limited) Klark’s story is a compelling narrative, and I think the post is highly instructional in terms of how it approaches and handles certain challenges inherent in discussing an artist’s full body of work. Cheers to whoever it was put the special request in for this one.
Tuesday’s post was “Four Books I Read Recently and Loved: Urs Alleman, Eileen Myles, Reinard Seifert, Matthew Simmons.” In which DC enjoys and excerpts from (respectively) Babyfucker, The Importance of Being Iceland, How to Skin the Moon, and A Jello Horse. And Monday we learned about “Heavily plotted non-linear structures whose velocity lacks narrative drive“–aka, mazes.
Paragraphs of New Senses (7): Dennis Cooper
Nate lies by the road. It weaves off into the mountains out there. And it reeks. He’s been here for hours, partly obscured by the brush, awaiting the right car to pass, and a nice passerby. Someone in elegant clothes, whom he can fleece. God forgive him, he’s broke. The sun’s creepy, a hard piece of scalding red shit that has no consciousness of its own, so Nate can’t tell it anything real like, Go away. Everything should have a mind. So he could communicate with it. So he could say, Grass, get taller and cover me better. Or… School bus, stop here, right this second, and dump all your passengers out on the road so I can fuck, rob, or kill them. He wouldn’t mind if the bus said, No way, you’re too fucking lowly a jerk to waste time on. Or if the sun said, Oh go ahead and burn up, you asshole. Or if he could say to this road, Hey, can you glisten a little? ‘Cos that would look so unbelievable. And it would glisten for Nate, to be nice. Then it might say, Okay, now you walk on my surface awhile. And Nate would, even if it got him arrested. ‘Cos the road is so peaceful or something. Anyway, everything understanding everything. People’s guns saying, No, not him, asshole, kill him. And Nate’s pistol would swing itself around and do the shooting for him. And he’d just go, Well, hey, I didn’t make the decision. And his gun would go, Yeah, I made the fucking decision. And what would the cops do? Melt down the gun? Well, they could. And maybe they would be sad, ‘cos if the gun had a mind, Nate just might be attached to it. Shit, he can’t win. There’s no way the world’s ever gonna be totally perfect, unless nothing and no one had minds. If everyone just kind of lay there, only moving around when the wind knocked them up, or if the rain got too hard, or if there was a flood. Natural things. Nate would lie in the grass here for days, weeks, spacing out, then some storm would move him twenty feet thtat way, and his world would change, and he’d get to know new blades of grass and new dirt and new flies or whatever. He wouldn’t die, just change. Dry out, get wet, smell one way, smell another way. No boredom, no love, no fear, no being broke, no Leon, no… nothing. Maybe that’s what will happen at world’s end, after one of the millions of viruses sneaks in folks’ bodies, and no one, no matter how total a genius, can cure them. They’ll just… collapse where they are, and never see, feel, or do anything, and eventually everyone will lose sight of each other’s existence, and just become… what? Lumps of nature. In Nate’s case, a small, smelly thing lying out in some brush. A stupid thing drifting through history, no worse or better than trees or the bugs or his gun. Oh, he longs for that day. But until then he just loves this road.
- Period, page 16-17
