Perfection. First published as a stand-alone short story, then as a part of Cooper's first novel Safe and later in the short story collection Wrong, "Perfection. First published as a stand-alone short story, then as a part of Cooper's first novel Safe and later in the short story collection Wrong, "My Mark" is a stellar meditation on desire and strongly rooted in Cooper's earlier work as a lyrical poet. The narrator is a writer named Dennis (ha!), and he thinks back on his complex relationship with beautiful, young Mark Lewis, ruminating about his feelings and the psychological movements he has experienced. The text radiates melancholy and cooperesque imagery, especially in the sex scenes which ponder the attempt to explore consciousness and connection by crossing physical boundaries, thus blurring the concept of interiority. Beautifully written, and George Miles (who will later inspire the five-part George Miles Cycle as well as its coda I Wished) also makes an appearence (though not by name).
A fascinating piece, especially when read in context of Cooper's later work that ventures further into the transgressive....more
Cooper's debut, now a rare collector's item (and re-published in its entirety in the short story collection Wrong), presents itself as a triptych of iCooper's debut, now a rare collector's item (and re-published in its entirety in the short story collection Wrong), presents itself as a triptych of interconnected stories, starring the beautiful, young Mark Lewis. All of Cooper's classic themes are already there: Youth, death, sex, mediated depictions of sex, reality vs. imagination, drugs, the longing for human connection, and violence - though the latter to a much, much lesser degree than in his later works. Let's look at the three individual parts:
"Missing Men" Where is the comparative study between Cooper's peer Bret Easton Ellis, Harmony Korine, and Cooper? "Safe" was first published in 1984, Less Than Zero in 1985, and the vibe is the same, especially in "Missing Men". Here, Mark is dating an enigmatic writer named Rob (in later novels by Cooper, there will be a whole array of characters called Dennis), answers a sex ad, and he accompanies his artist friend Carl to a an opening at a gallery, where Carl hooks up with the guy whose works are exhibited. I particularly liked the many references to art and art production - now I want a Dennis Cooper Künstlerroman. Do it, Dennis!
"My Mark" Perfection. This story was first published as stand-alone, and it's a stellar meditation on desire and longing strongly rooted in Cooper's work as a lyrical poet. The narrator is a writer named Dennis (ha!), and he thinks back on his complex relationship with Mark, ruminating about his feelings and the psychological movements he has experienced. Full of melancholy and cooperesque imagery, especially in the sex scenes which ponder the attempt to explore consciousness by crossing physical boundaries, thus blurring the concept of interiority. Beautifully written, and George Miles also makes an appearence (though not by name).
"Bad Thoughts" In the last part, Mark has died, and we live through the aftermath of people missing and remembering him - feat., of course, the convergence of sex and death.
This is an impressive debut, and it's crazy how Cooper went from this to radically transgressive works like Frisk. Fascinating....more
This infamously multi-faceted countercultural classic lives up to its expectations: In a parody of the hippie life style mixed up with a fable, BrautiThis infamously multi-faceted countercultural classic lives up to its expectations: In a parody of the hippie life style mixed up with a fable, Brautigan tells the story of iDeath, which is, dear 21st century readers, not a new Apple device, but a postapocalyptic commune centered around a house of this very name (Buddhism, ego death, you get the hippie idea). Many things in this world are made of the title-giving watermelon sugar, which makes no sense on a factual level, but adds to the overall hallucinatory quality of the text, as do the LSD-like effects of changing colors and structures.
Love & peace have of course long been perverted (the apocalypse apparently not leading to any kind of second coming), and the beautiful natural sights plus the love story between the narrator and a woman are mixed up with two dark, recurring plot points: The murder of the entire population of anthropomorphic tigers by humans, plus a seperatist cult committing communal suicide - this book was published in 1968, the Heaven's Gate ritual suicide happened in 1997. Scary. Also, good luck trying to interpret what the tiger genocide stands for, because there are several answers that ring true, none of them shedding a good light on humanity.
The language and composition of this novel are amazing, the interpretative levels are intriguing, and this holds a well-deserved place in the realms of American literary classics....more
In his first novel after completing the George Miles Cycle (I'm still traumatized by Try, but somehow in a good way), it becomes particularly apparentIn his first novel after completing the George Miles Cycle (I'm still traumatized by Try, but somehow in a good way), it becomes particularly apparent why Cooper and Bret Easton Ellis are both considered members of the Blank Generation: In "My Loose Thread", alienation, detachment, sex and violence determine the experiences of a group of teenagers living in the shadow of the Columbine massacre. This could be a Larry Clark movie if Harmony Korine was a better psychological writer (sorry, Harmony, still love ya).
Our protagonist is teenage Larry, who is haunted by his (untrue) conviction that he killed a friend by punching him, when in fact, this friend later committed suicide - but unreliable narrator Larry, feeling numb to and alienated from his surroundings, has trouble keeping his psychological torment and reality apart. That's of course a typical Cooper theme, much like the fact that the teenagers he shows are neglected by cruel or incapable adults, in this case parents who are dying from cancer (Larry's dad) or drinking themselves to death (his mom). What's more unusual for this author is that he shows Larry struggling with his own sexual orientation, and connecting this confusion with the tendency towards violence - usually, Cooper (and Ellis!) show worlds in which people are just gay, period. Oh, and also, Larry has a sexual relationship with his brother and a girlfriend, and he agrees to help his sexual rival to kill a guy to collect money from a sexually confused Nazi. Dennis Cooper stuff, you know.
The text thrives on dialogue that focuses in on vagueness. Larry and his peers are confused, their communication is mostly a failed attempt to connect, as they are unsure about what they feel. Larry's hallucinatory accounts and his impulsive outbursts, his descriptions of the teenagers around him, the repression, confusion and self-hate paint an unsettling picture about the infliction of violence on the innocent and helpless - this is Cooper's take on school massacres. The stark sentences and the plot that for the longest time remains hidden behind Larry's angst and delusion make for a harrowing read that is, if you can take the intensity, smart and poetic in its very own way.
I have a whole pile of books that I need to read in connection to Cooper at home, so the deep dive continues....more
Meticulously researched and thus very detailed, Finkel's account of the many heists and obsessions of art thief Stéphane Breitwieser (who admitted to Meticulously researched and thus very detailed, Finkel's account of the many heists and obsessions of art thief Stéphane Breitwieser (who admitted to stealing 239 works from 172 museums) is certainly packed with info and additional background. What it lacks though is a convincing style: This story is begging to be turned into narrative non-fiction, but the text reads more like a summary of research results, which is a shame, because the psychological disposition of compulsive collector/criminal Breitwieser and the author's lengthy attempts to get this man to talk could have made for a riveting non-fic thriller à la Patrick Radden Keefe.
There are even minor characters who are a mysterious mess, like Breitwieser's ex-girlfriend and his mother. And of course, there is the question how this was even possible, how it can be relatively feasible to just take exhibits from the world's most important museums. What a captivating topic.
I just wish the language and narrative outline would support the story's intrigue....more
This splatterpunk internet phenomenon is of course just as gory and over-the-top-disguting as the genre requires, but it's also a satire on outsider nThis splatterpunk internet phenomenon is of course just as gory and over-the-top-disguting as the genre requires, but it's also a satire on outsider narratives, and that's where it gets interesting. Our unnamed narrator is a necrophiliac who works the night shift as a hospital guard (and yes, he has access to the morgue), and when he falls in love with a drug-addicted maternity ward doctor who enjoys eating dead babies, he's thrown into an identity crisis: He tells us (and mainly himself) that he's a proud existentialist outsider who sees through all the pointlessness of life and looks down on normies, but the lovely cannibal gives him all the feels, and he can't have that, because it requires him to face his social and sexual fears that are the real source of his lonely, fucked-up existence.
And it's actually pretty hilarious how Morrison writes an ultra-edgelordy novel about a pathetic edgelord and his mentally spiraling love interest who aims to become just as big of an edgleord as her corpse-loving Romeo. Also, it's in very poor taste, as you might expect (and as it should be to deserve the splatterpunk label): It's giving a little John Waters energy. Plus: There are pop cultural references, my favorite one being a bartender that is clearly the alter ego of Nick Cave had he never gotten off of heroin (the name of the dive bar? The Bad Seed, of course. And there's a The Death of Bunny Munroe hint).
So yes, this is the kind of book you recommend to your friends if you want to render them your ex-friends, but what do you expect? I laughed. ;-)...more
Let's get it right out of the way: The ultimate critical companion to Cooper is of course Hester's fantastic Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis CooLet's get it right out of the way: The ultimate critical companion to Cooper is of course Hester's fantastic Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper, Lev's effort is a mixed big and can't compete on any level. Still, there is some interesting stuff to be found here:
Then, there are a lot of not exactly stringent texts that seem to bury the fact that they can't quite figure out what Cooper does under biiiiiig words (especially Leora Lev reads like a parody of academic writing). Also, I see that it's cool if you can say that your anthology includes a posthumously published piece by William S. Burroughs, but once you read it, it's not much of a mystery why Billy boy didn't publish it when he was still alive. Let me tell you everything of note in this text: Burroughs was a Cooper fanboy. You're welcome. Plus, Earl Jackson Jr. has some quite tragic takes about Cooper and J.T. LeRoy (this compendium was published before the scandal broke that LeRoy's backstory was a cruel hoax).
So seek this out in case you're doing a deep dive, but other than that, Diarmuid Hester is your man....more
Okay, let's start with a little story from my life as one of three straight, cisgender hosts of a literary podcast: We frequently interview and discusOkay, let's start with a little story from my life as one of three straight, cisgender hosts of a literary podcast: We frequently interview and discuss the works of queer authors, but we tend to get terrified when it comes to recording conversations with or talking about texts specifically by nonbinary writers. Why, you ask? Because our show is in German, and we don't have the singular "they", so there is no agreed upon pronoun we can use. Our fear is that we mess up; not because we don't care, we do care a whole lot!, but because we are still learning. We do want to respect these authors' identities, and fear that we might fall short. Does that mean we just drop their books from the program? Absolutely not, our goal to achieve visbility for great nonbinary artists will not be compromised by our feat to make mistakes. And I'm telling you this story because Jeannie Gainsburg does a fantastic job working against such fears by encouraging people to continually try and learn how to be an effective ally.
This book is all about the joy and pride people can find in fighting the good fight - yes, it's also very informative and underlines how important it is to hold oneself and the people around us accountable, but ultimately, Gainsburg talks about creating inclusive, safe communities, and the power that comes with caring about justice and fairness. And I appreciate that, because I think many straight, cis people are afraid to get involved because they are (yet!) too ignorant or afraid they might make mistakes. They should just get started, is what Gainsburg says.
Butler's controversial memoir about the suicide of his first wife Molly Brodak led to a rather outraged discussion whether it's valid to write about hButler's controversial memoir about the suicide of his first wife Molly Brodak led to a rather outraged discussion whether it's valid to write about how a mentally ill person who took her own life pushed her loved ones to the psychological limit - and bless all those self-righteous people who think they take the moral high ground by condemning the author, you very obviously didn't spend years of your life trying to take care of a psychologically disturbed family member. The thing is: It's a taboo to talk about how the sickness of a loved one can destroy their caretakers, especially when these caretakers deeply love the afflicted person. And it's a common occurrence: Many people who tend to seriously (physically or mentally) ill family members over a longer period of time develop illnesses themselves, due to exhaustion, and, yes, moral pressure: "How dare you complain, you're not the one being sick!" They have to suffer in silence, or they are declared to be bad people.
And that's what at the root of the conversation here: Butler tries to understand Molly's mental disposition, which was likely bipolar disorder, he tries to get to terms with their toxic dynamic, and with the things he discovers about his dead wife after she shot herself. He aims to construct explanations related to her childhood, which is, of course, futile kitchen psychology, he will never truly know. At the same time, he loses both of his parents to dementia. It's pretty hard to maintain that this book is literary revenge, because Butler himself looks pretty bad in the text: Unfaithfulness, lots of alcohol, general edgelordery, problems with personal borders, a temper, giving a ton of psychedelic drugs to a mentally ill woman, the list goes on.
The dynamic between Molly and Butler is so toxic, you don't even know where to begin. But this is not the source of Molly's problems: Trying to find some kind of transactional cause-and-effect relation means blaming Butler for Molly's bipolar disorder, but the disorder adds to the situation, the illness itself is not Butler's fault. And there are limits to what Butler can do about it. Let that sink in, and ponder what that degree of helplessness means for him. The illness also doesn't take all personal responsibilty from Molly, she still has agency. The problems of course lie in determing where, when and how the illness affects her agency.
So is Blake Butler a great guy? Who knows, the rendition he shows us in the novel is a flawed guy struggling to be a husband to Molly, who herself struggles to be a wife. What's hard to maintain is that he is here to demean a dead person. The text has plenty of contra-arguments, and it's important to let family members of ill people talk without judging them so harshly and self-righteously. Also, the whole thing is very well-written, especially the beginning which takes us along when Butler discovers the body: It's devastating to read....more
Listen, as a third-wave sexpositive feminist, I have a whole ton of issues with Dworkin's politics, but this excellently written book does a hell of aListen, as a third-wave sexpositive feminist, I have a whole ton of issues with Dworkin's politics, but this excellently written book does a hell of a job describing what misogyny means when you're a woman: Rendered in an intense, vivid stream-of-consciousness, narrator "Andrea", the fictional alter ego of the author, survives experiences that are very close to the real life of Dworkin, and the prose forces readers to partake in the emotions that come with it. The novel takes us through numerous instances of mainly sexualized physical violence, and Dworkin manages to show how this is merely the ultimate effect of what we would today call "rape culture": Women are constantly confronted with societal expectations, deviation is punished, until women internalize the gaslighting, slut-shaming, victim-blaming etc. and, conveniently, start gaslighting themselves, until they lose trust in their ability to judge what happens to them or even become perpetrators in their own way. It's all around de-humanization (also for men, btw; check out Klaus Theweleit's work, it's worth it).
The novel impressively shows that much of Dworkin's theory is rooted in trauma; hell, the whole book illuminates the mental disintegration of the main character "Andrea", starting with a sexual assault in a cinema when she was nine. Older "Andrea" strives to live freely and partake in counterculture, only to learn that there is no place for her in the peace movement and the revolution, at least not as a revolutionary. The same goes for the art world. And this is where the schism between second- and third-wave feminism happens: The conclusions thinkers draw from systematic female exclusion and abuse. But "Mercy" has prompted me to ponder more deeply that a feminist like Dworkin, born in 1946, was confronted with a whole other societal climate, which does, IMHO, not render some of her attitudes more valid, but it is fair to consider the specific trauma they were probably influenced by.
There are some pieces of information and motifs that are repeated through out the text, and while they add to the structure, not all of them work. For instance, I have to say that as a German, I read all of these Holocaust comparisons and I find them tasteless and all-around wrong (yes, I'm aware that a) Dworkin was Jewish, and b) that this is also a cultural issue, and Dworkin was US-American, but this German Catholic thinks it's not okay, especially not for shock value). Also, just for the record, it's of course untrue that "Andrea" is exclusively a boys' name in Europe; in Germany, for instance, it's a very common name for women.
Overall, I have to admit that I was surprised by the amazing prose Dworkin produces, and she also gives us some hilarious passages about the great literary fuck boys, and what's not love about this (and I say that as a avid fan of the likes of Jack Kerouac). This is an intense, horrifying read with impressive literary quality, and a book that can be discussed in the context of feminist theory despite being a novel.
EDIT: Just found an interesting article about the new found relevance of Dworkin; spoiler alert: It's her rage we connect to in times like these: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/op......more
Smart, informative, and endlessly entertaining: This compendium by law professor, academic and activist Florence Ashley combines socially relevant essSmart, informative, and endlessly entertaining: This compendium by law professor, academic and activist Florence Ashley combines socially relevant essays with smut and philosophy with memoir. The author starts from the assumption that we should overcome the strict separation between body and mind, because the body can hold important information, and sexuality is a site of knowledge: "Some truths can only be told through the erotic", as “the erotic is embodiment, feeling.” In different text forms, they go on to explore the relationship between sex, gender, and politics. In an interview, the author explains: "If we’re ashamed of our sexualities, of having bodies with needs and desires, we’re easier to control and exploit" - so true.
Ashley's book does talk about transphobia, but also about queer joy, and for a cis het woman like me, it was extremely insightful to read about their experiences, which, as the texts show, are of course relatable to all people living in a body.
Very unusual and disruptively challenging how we talk about gender/sex, and I hope Ashley will write some more books....more
It's hard to overestimate how important it is to tell this story about how internalized racial prejudice led representatives of the German state and mIt's hard to overestimate how important it is to tell this story about how internalized racial prejudice led representatives of the German state and media to unintentionally help a neo-Nazi terrorist group: Between 2000 and 2011, the self-proclaimed National Socialist Underground (NSU) killed ten people, attempted to murder 43 more, committed three bombings and 15 robberies. The NSU was the biggest domestic terror threat after the leftist Red Army Fraction.
Kushner is here to meticulously reconstruct how the core trio, two men and a woman radicalized in the former GDR, went on a rampage and murdered nine people with immigration background, and yes, let's say their names: Enver Şimşek, Abdurrahim Özüdoğru, Süleyman Taşköprü, Habil Kılıç, Mehmet Turgut, İsmail Yaşar, Theodoros Boulgarides, Mehmet Kubaşık and Halit Yozgat. Also, they murdered policewoman Michèle Kiesewetter (her colleague barely survived being shot in head). What's particularly shocking here is that police, politics, state and media for years referred to the series as the "Dönermorde", Döner being a dish with Turkish origins that is very popular in Germany - the term insinuated that the murders were the result of some kind of feud between immigrant groups and organized crime connected to immigrants, which was exactly what the people responsible for finding the perpetrators assumed. But the killers were white bio-Germans, they were fascists.
And of course, Kushner's research is great, and I applaud that he highlights this story for English-speaking audiences, because there is A LOT to learn here, and not only for Germans and Germany. I also applaud that he reveals the destiny of the victims and their families instead of being carried away by "evil": He sees that the terrorists were three banal losers who went berserk, and that they as people are not what's interesting here. What's interesting is how the system and society failed to stop them, and what that meant and stills means for the loved ones of the victims and, ultimately, all of us in Germany.
On to my criticism, which is probably strongly influenced by the fact that I have already heard a lot about the NSU and the failed investigations, so maybe that book isn't even written for me. I think the sociological background of radicalization in East Germany and many other factors that contributed to what happened here are not discussed deeply and seriously enough. For instance, we get arguments like: "But XY democratic party didn't care", which is obviously way too simplistic and thus explains nothing. Granted, this is a huge clusterfuck of a story, but the attempt to explain the multi-layered causes is where the lessons lie.
But as a recap, this is valuable, and I think that the book is generally aimed at non-German audiences with different needs. And people should hear this tale and think about its implications, as well as how we can stand up against neo-Nazis everywhere....more
More than twenty years after the last part of the George Miles Cycle, Cooper has published a coda that relies less on the subconscious, the hallucinatMore than twenty years after the last part of the George Miles Cycle, Cooper has published a coda that relies less on the subconscious, the hallucinatory and psychosexual affects, and takes a more direct approach to his love for his late friend George - or, at least as direct as it gets with a poet like Cooper. I loved the The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter-reference in Guide (#4 of the cycle), and in "I Wished", McCuller's masterpiece and the movie version serve as key texts to explain the dynamics between severely bipolar George and Dennis, who both long to connect on a deep level, but are fighting the circumstances (see: Try, my favorite part of the cycle). While never directly explaining the characters, motifs, themes and plot lines in the cycle, Cooper's meditation on the wish for love is revelatory for every single entry in the pentalogy.
In biographical passages like the axe wound inflicted on the author as a kid or his first meeting with George (all also chronicled in the outstanding research work Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper, which appeared before "I Wished"), we get investigations into the beginning of the author's obsessions, like his wish journal, the stiff acting skills of the Schultz twins, and John Wayne Gacy's last victim, Robert Piest (hello, Closer). The passages about Cooper's wish for George to get healthy, for them to be able to be together, are devastating, as is his writing about the wish to pay tribute to George, and struggling to find a form that seems appropriate.
In the fictional passages, there are once more iterations of "George" and "Dennis" with connections to the cycle, but everything becomes less hallucinatory and more surreal. "George" appears as the son of a Russian gymnast, he hears from Santa Claus about being an invention and gifting, he chats with the Roden Crater about being turned into art, all while "Dennis" tries to love the fictional versions of George.
This is probably the strangest eulogy to a dead lover ever written, and I love the warped poetic force and how it relates to the cycle. So sad, so disturbing, so powerful....more
The final part of the George Miles Cycle vividly illuminates how Cooper's psyche is haunted by the love of his life whom he lost to mental illness andThe final part of the George Miles Cycle vividly illuminates how Cooper's psyche is haunted by the love of his life whom he lost to mental illness and subsequently suicide: In a spectacle of mirror images, the story revolves around a writer who builds a literary fun house of worship for one George Miles, who as a fictional character then roams this house in various iterations. While this aspect of the text is rendered in a somber, longing tone ruminating youth, loss, and pain, there is a juxtaposing arc which, for once, satirizes the obsessions that determine the pentalogy: The novels in the cycle show extreme sexualized violence, drug use, alienation, loneliness, and depravity, so for a change, "Period" introduces a Satan-worshiping rock band on a murder spree whose members spit out pseudo-existentialist cringe content - it's a meta-commentary that counters the psychosexual imagery Cooper has up to this point employed to fictionalize his pain regarding the loss of George.
The five-part George Miles Cycle is more than the sum of its parts, and the more books I read, the deeper I understand how Cooper is using the novels as an exploration of an alienated consciousness and subconsciousness. Often, reality and hallucination / fantasy fall into each other, and the transgressive nature is not unsettling because of the extreme scenes that are depicted in detail (not so much in "Period", but oh boy the other parts), but because of the exploration of a disturbed mind under duress.
"Period" entails poetry that can be read in context of A Season in Hell (Cooper is an Arthur Rimbaud fanboy) and, like Guide, partly foreshadows The Sluts. As it is the mirror piece to Closer, it also tackles obsession with some parallel narrative methods. Still, the heart of the pentalogy, Try, is my favorite part, as it ponders one of Cooper's main concerns, friendship, in such a heartbreaking way.
20 years after the George Miles Cycle, Cooper published a more autobiographical text about his beloved George, I Wished, which appears as a coda to the cycle. Of course I'll read it next....more
For the life of me, I could not get into this: There is so much packed into Kwon's second novel, both aesthetically and when it comes to themes, that For the life of me, I could not get into this: There is so much packed into Kwon's second novel, both aesthetically and when it comes to themes, that the text appears to be constantly pulled apart by centrifugal forces. What's the center, you ask? Well, that's the next problem: Religion? A marriage under duress? Queer desire? BDSM? Art? Everything of the above and more?
Main character Jin is not only a photographer grappling to find inspiration, she's also an ex-evangelical whose half-Argentinian movie-producer husband suddenly wants to have children, although they had agreed otherwise. Enter Lidija (assumed name, she's Korean like Jin), an injured ballerina, so also a momentarily stifled artist, who as a dom wants to and knows how to fulfill Jin's desire for sexual power play.
I applaud Kwon for finding the courage to write against shame and sexual stigma, which Kwon has explained was a very difficult endeavor (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandst...). Alas, the will to write dense poetic prose tends to overpower the whole text, as does the impetus to add all kinds of minor issues. IMHO, the connection between creative and sexual expression should have been at the center, aspects like a Korean ghost haunting the story are a great idea theoretically, but then mainly work as a distraction.
Still, I hope this ambitious text will find many readers who have an easier time enjoying the various layers the book has to offer and more patience when it comes to the meandering character of the pacing....more
Dennis Cooper had sex with Leonardo DiCaprio. Maybe. At least in this novel. The mirror piece to Frisk in Cooper's meticulously constructed George MilDennis Cooper had sex with Leonardo DiCaprio. Maybe. At least in this novel. The mirror piece to Frisk in Cooper's meticulously constructed George Miles Cycle, "Guide" picks up on the same themes: Revolving around desires and obsessions that tear down the walls between fantasy and reality, the novel is once more narrated by a character named Dennis Cooper who, one more link to "Frisk", writes novels about serial killers. Another major parallel is the threat of HIV/AIDS that can be seen as the real-life catastrophe that manifests in some of the hallucinatory violent episodes we read: For the people in the book, the fascination lies in the control over bodily harm, while HIV/AIDS just strikes. Many characters affected in one way or another walk the line between life and death, an experience heightened by the major role of drugs (heroin as a means to prolong bardo and dissociative drugs as a means to destroy the order of reality).
As Dennis, our narrator, is not exactly a straight edge dude, his grasp on reality is fragile, and as the the real-life Cooper is fascinated by fandom culture (which will later give us the extremely dark comedic parable The Sluts), "Guide" involves 90's rock musicians like the members of "Blur" and "Silverchair" as well as, ähem, Leonardo DiCaprio. Another new twist to Cooper's pre-occupation with mediated culture is that apart from the filming of violent acts that (within the logic of the text) might be real or not, "Guide" also ponders the ethics of journalism and writing in general when it comes to representing marginalized people, and it wittily does so by rendering the Dennis-character highly dubious.
Aesthetically, the work is very ambitious: The text is fragmentary and told in interlocking story arcs, with a whole cast of characters. I sometimes struggled to get through the structure, because it's not written to be immersive, but in the end, I always wanted to know where this might lead. Still, I will not even bother to re-construct the plot, because really, it's about the aforementioned themes that are played out in nuance by employing a wide array of literary personnel.
Somewhere in there, we read the real story of how Cooper met George Miles and what happened to him - the author didn't even know when he published the beginning of the George Miles Cycle that his muse had shot himself. Now I can't wait to read how Cooper finishes the pentalogy with Period, and then I'm on to the coda I Wished.
Laura Albert a.k.a. J.T. LeRoy is a woman who, at the height of the AIDS crisis, pretended to die from the disease, invented a ton of extreme violenceLaura Albert a.k.a. J.T. LeRoy is a woman who, at the height of the AIDS crisis, pretended to die from the disease, invented a ton of extreme violence she proclaimed to have endured during childhood, and scammed writers like Dennis Cooper and Bruce Benderson by exploiting the trauma they've endured due to witnessing their queer friends dying for years: She contacted those writers, posing as a desperate, AIDS-stricken teenager, in order to prompt them to support her career. By doing so, she created a hoax that made her rich and famous. Also, her whole fake persona and her literary characters are stolen from Cooper's George Miles Cycle.
When you consider this to be some kind of funny stunt, you're officially a terrible person. And no, I haven't read the book, but seeing the reviews here treating the whole affair as a smart play and ignoring or even laughing about the people she hurt, I just wanted to put it out there that capitalizing on queer trauma and deadly disease is, in fact, bad. Thanks for coming to my TED talk....more
Hester delivers on what he promises: This critical biography connects Cooper's life to his work, and then gives an extensive theoretical framework forHester delivers on what he promises: This critical biography connects Cooper's life to his work, and then gives an extensive theoretical framework for interpretation, which, let's face it, is crucial to really understanding what this complex transgressive author is doing. After reading The Sluts and the first three installments of the Georgs Miles Cycle, I was captivated (and lost three nights of sleep because I was haunted by the contents of Try), but couldn't really place some aspects of what I read - and Hester came to my rescue. He starts out with Cooper's troubled childhood, his early influences (Marquis de Sade, Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Bresson), his roots in the punk and zine scene, his connections to the New York School and Beyond Baroque, and his start in poetry.
Then, Hester moves on to the prose works, naturally with a focus on the George Miles Cycle, but he also gives a lot of space to the discussion of Safe, My Loose Thread, The Sluts, and The Marbled Swarm (as Hester's book was published in 2020, we learn about the first, failed attempts to craft what would later become I Wished, but the final product was published in 2021 and is thus not included). As Cooper is not limited to the printed page, Hester also dissects his works with artist and theater director Gisèle Vienne, his blog and the scandal around it, his GIF art, plus the films he made with Franco-Canadian director Zac Farley.
I was captivated by Hester's obvious joy in researching and interpreting Cooper's works, and I applaud him for taking several deep dives into connected schools of thought and works of art - there are pages after pages in which none of Cooper's works are even mentioned, and then, ha!, Hester connects the threads and shows how the hermeneutic framework relates to what Cooper does. It's insightful and, at least for fans of literary discourse, highly entertaining when Hester ponders concepts like "transgressive" (after Michael Silverblatt) or "New French Extremity", or brings Robbe-Grillet and Deleuze into the mix. I was also in awe how many other writers he connects to Cooper, from serious collaborators and friends like Bruce Benderson and Robert Glück to frauds like J.T. LeRoy. Hester also explores major themes of Cooper, like youth, friendship, and fandom. What takes a backseat though is the most obviously extreme feature in Cooper's writing: The detailed depiction of sexualized violence. Hester does connect it to de Sade, most notably The 120 Days of Sodom and the objectification of humans it shows, but I feel like the abject in Cooper's work could have been explored more deeply.
But all in all, this is one of the most insightful and well-written interpretative works I have read in a long time, although it deals with a particularly difficult topic - kudos to Hester.
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