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
Open Call for Thoughts about Submitting Work to Online/Print Journals – via Dennis Cooper’s Blog
Sometime last week, Alan, a distinguished local in Dennis Cooper’s The Weaklings blog community asked DC a question about the relative virtues of submitting work to online and/or print publications. DC put the question to the community, but for whatever reason few took the bait, so DC told Alan that it might be a better question for a blog like ours. Of course this was all happening in the daily-epic “p.s.” section of DC’s blog, so I saw it, and offered to make that notion a reality. Here’s the question Alan asked. After the jump you’ll find the answer I posted on DC’s blog. And please do leave your thoughts in the comments section here on this post.
THE QUESTION: Is there a big difference in readership or prestige these days between print publication by a journal and web-only publication (by same journal)? I notice a lot of outlets for submitting my story are asking me to choose which one I’m trying for. I’d love to know what other people here think.
bright fish hitch coop and then some: a roundup
Susie & Aretha Bright answer more sex questions at Jezebel, including “I’m a girl who comes too fast.”
Stanley Fish on reforms to college composition courses. And then, a little later, a follow-up column on the reactionary, ill-informed comments directed at him for writing the first column.
Up from Our Own Comments Threads– Ed Champion’s Hate Mail Dramatic Reading Project now includes the letter Kyle Minor posted yesterday in the comments on Catherine Lacey’s post about said project.
Over at Coop’s place, there’s a Spotlight on Danielle Collobert’s “Notebooks.” >> he just left — when he leaves I never know when I’ll see him again — always chance encounters — or nearly — today I asked myself what little errors we’ve let come between us — I don’t know yet — I can barely guess — <<
And Christopher Hitchens remembers Ted Kennedy, as only William Logan can. I know this one sounds like the boring one, but it’s actually the most interesting of what I’ve posted here (except maybe the girl who comes too fast) and it’s utterly unlike any of the other six hundred Kennedy memorials you read or else avoided reading last week.
Actually, Hitch is probably only as interesting as the Benjamin De Casseres piece by Joshua Cohen in Tablet, which I blogged about here the other day (“Hope is the promise of a crucifixion”), but for some reason get the feeling nobody saw. So here it is again.
Today at Coop’s Place: It’s MIKE YOUNG Day!
Highlights of the Day include several more videos of MY’s music project, The Cinnamon Urns, plus links to Young-authored literature around the web, and excerpts from the MC Oroville chapbook. Of course, every day is MIKE YOUNG DAY in the collective heart of this blog, but a thousand cheers to you all the same. And bonus points to anyone who catches the titular reference in the video in this post. Double bonus points to anyone who posts a link to the *other* song that borrows that line for a title. (I’ll give you a hint: It’s much much worse than Mike’s song.) ((Triple bonus points for anyone who heard the phrase “Mike’s Song,” and instantly thought “Weekapaug Groove,” then felt a little bad inside, but also a little good.))
Visceral Readings: The Sluts
I’ve already read a lot this year, maybe even more than most other years. Though lately, in the past few weeks, I’ve found my attention kind of skewed up, which I guess is part of the pattern of reading: it comes and goes.
When I get out of the dire want to spend hours on my back looking at sentences, certain moods will come where I can’t get more than a page into something, no matter how strong, and it will take something of really strong aura, a riveter, to get me excited again. Something visceral, that grabs me by the throat and says, Bitch, you are going to read this.
This week, for me, it was Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts. I picked this up randomly, realizing it was I think the only title of DC’s that I hadn’t read for some reason. I brought it home in the rain and, having put down the last 8 or 9 books I’d tried to start in weeks beforehand, picked it open just to get a taste.
Uncategorized / 58 Comments
August 4th, 2009 / 4:15 pm
August 4th, 2009 / 4:15 pm
Keepin’ Up With Coop
What’s happening over at The Weaklings these days? Well, this week brought a bevy of guest-posts from some of Dennis’s Distinguished Locals.
Postitbreakup Presents…Auto-tune Day – A brief history of the use and abuse of the (in)famous pitch-perfection software.
At he '09 Grammy Awards, Death Cab for Cutie raises awareness about Auto-tune Abuse.
Bacteriaburger Presents…Nifty Day – A spotlight on the Nifty Erotic Stories Archive:
“Maintaining the Archive is done as a hobby: a volunteer, part-time effort. No one receives any compensation for or personal benefit from maintaining the Archive. Readers do not pay to access stories; authors do not pay to display stories; websites which host the Archive must make it accessible to all and do not pay for the content; stories are not obscured with banner advertising in and around them. The Archive does not own any of the stories and does not sell them or license them to others. All webhosting graciously is donated. Some readers help defray the incidental costs for which we are extremely grateful and hope that more readers will help in the future.”
And neither last nor least, Dennis himself presents “Recent works by some of the artists who also hang around here sometimes, Volume 6.” Some randomish highlights- a video of Derek McCormack & Kevin Killian reading, a story and a poem by Alec Niedenthal (whose work, btw, we just accepted for Agriculture Reader #4), and several more images like the pasted-below from Kier Cooke Sandvik.
Uncategorized / 6 Comments
August 3rd, 2009 / 10:14 am
August 3rd, 2009 / 10:14 am
Blake Butler—
3:am has a fantastic interview with Dennis Cooper regarding, among other things, Ugly Man (which I read in one sitting last week and loved, a possible explanation for my recent influx of sublimely jarring dreams), and includes the quote: “The generally held idea that the kinds of things I write about aren’t ’serious’ or aren’t what a truly serious literary work would concentrate on is just an insurmountable and boring enemy that I accepted would be there for all eternity a long time ago.”
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Blake Butler—
HTMLGiant gets kind props from Dennis Cooper’s Candidates for Best of 2009 Top 10 List: Internet. Many other Giant favorites are all mentioned including Ellen Kennedy, Brian Evenson, Vanessa Place, Dalkey Archive, and my gracious gracious self. Thanks Dennis! Check it out and share your own.
Dennis Cooper’s ‘Graduate Seminar’
One of the many great talents of Dennis Cooper is his knack for making the ‘profane’ or arcane seem not simply a specialized, ritual act, but a bevel in the everyday, of people. Among such commonly taboo subjects as rape, murder, S&M, you name it, Cooper’s work manages to funnel these acts not into the hands of the typically insane or ‘specialized’ bodies, but kids that lives in homes with parents, everyday kids, school kids, and people. I’ve several times been eerily moved by Cooper’s work in finding how close it felt to certain people I went to middle school with: the kid with the rat tail and cut off pants singing Cramps songs in the gym while everyone else tried to cooperate with the bowling unit, and he’s there kicking pins over, laughing. Several times that year he’d get his ass kicked, and others would be similarly embedded on my brain: the kid who brought in brass knuckles to fight behind the lunch room, the kids doing pink pills in the back of Ms. Storey’s English class and choking each other out to get off, etc. These elements are the everyday lining in those everydays, the bits that ride with me more than any of it, and so strangely, I’ve often found that read Cooper somehow taps into that mode, bringing it out not as a circus act, but as the thread in the simultaneously under-the-soil and always-right-there rhizome that it is.