Disorder: An Interview with Dennis Cooper
by Aaron Nielsen
I'm not sure how to start this. Just the facts, that seems as good
a place as any, so here they are; Dennis Cooper is the author of the
George Miles cycle, a series of five interrelated novels which are
at once a monument to the memory of Dennis' deceased friend George
and also an obsessive meditation on psycho-sexual violence and desire.
The novels comprising the cycle, in order, are; Closer, Frisk, Try,
Guide and Period. In 2002 he published his first post-cycle novel,
My Loose Thread, inspired in part by the then recent school shootings,
My Loose Thread, is a stark journey into the mind of a violent and
sexually confused teenager. Rounding out Dennis' oeuvre are The
Dream Police which compiles over two decades of poems, Horror
Hospital Unplugged a graphic novel created in collaboration with Keith Mayerson, Jerk another collaboration this time with Nayland Blake and Wrong, a collection
of short stories. Aside from writing fiction and poetry Dennis is also
hard at work editing his Little House on The Bowery line, an imprint
of Akashic Books as well as writing for Spin and Artforum. He's a busy
guy. Despite his hectic schedule Dennis was kind enough to clear some
time to answer a few questions. These are those questions;
Aaron Nielsen: You have a few new projects waiting in the wings, what
are they and which will we see first?
Dennis Cooper: Well, I think the first thing is The
Ash Gray Proclamation.
It's a multimedia book/CD package that's being put together by Versus
Press and Substandard Records. It involves a wacky, post-9/11-themed
novella by me and a CD compilation of songs and musical works inspired
by my work in general. I think there are about fifteen bands and musical
artists contributing songs: Robert Pollard, Xiu Xiu, Richard Hell,
Pig Destroyer, and others. I think that comes out in the fall. I have
a novel called The Sluts coming out around December. It's a limited
edition thing, 1000 copies, from Void Books. I wrote The Sluts between
1994 and 2002. It's an explicit, extreme novel set mostly in cyberspace
and is kind of a weird cousin or black sheep relative of my 'George
Miles Cycle.' I'm writing a new novel called God Jr. It's quite different
from my earlier work, content-wise at least, and Grove Press will publish
that sometime next year. I'm also working on a theater piece in France
with director Giselle Vienne and composer Peter Rehberg. It's called
I Apologize, and it'll premiere at Festival d'Avignon, tour France
this fall, and maybe tour the US next spring.
AN: So The Sluts isn't a going to be
a book of poetry? For some reason I was under the impression that
it was. Is
there still a new book of
poems in the making?
DC: No, it's always been a novel. I'm finishing up a collection of
new poems, but that's called A Symphony of Confusion About the
People I Killed.
AN: My Loose Thread has been optioned. Do you
know anymore about the project? Is the film version of Horror
Hospital still going to happen
as well?
DC: The production company planning to make the My
Loose Thread film
has shot one scene and is showing to potential investors. Ever since
the Frisk movie disaster, I've been really wary of optioning my novels,
but these guys said the right things so I said okay. I haven't seen
the footage, but I'm hoping for the best. The Horror Hospital film
is still happening as far as I know. It'll be shot in Australia. Last
I heard, it was in pre-production.
AN: In your poem "The Faint", the narrator is
a ghost addressing someone he used to scare. Given that you're now
working on your second post-cycle
novel, the poem, I think, takes on an interesting connotation...
I don't know if I'm reading too much into it but is this how you feel
you are perceived now? I'm not sure how to exactly phrase this but
the poem seems to be about identity, or rather a changing/re-evaluation
of identity? Am I off base?
DC: No, you're right. That poem is me on my knees.
AN: "I Might (The Luxury Liners)" , this poem
really surprised me when I heard you read it. It's incredibly sad,
not that
your other work
isn't, but there's no drug use or violence, or violent sex in this
one, there's, it sounds cliché, but an emotional honesty I think
with this poem, and given the tone of "The Faint" I was wondering if
this is the direction your writing has been flowing towards lately?
After the cycle and My Loose Thread has the ghost of violence
that has haunted you/your work for so long begun to dissipate?
DC: Maybe. I'm trying to angle my work away from the subject matter
I concentrated on for so long. But it's a strange time for me because
I decided to be a writer when I was fifteen specifically to do the
work that wound up being the 'George Miles Cycle'. That was my mission
and I believed in it intensely. So my concentration was always on learning
the skills and developing my ideas in order to write that work. So
now I'm having to rethink the whole process of writing in a way, and
search for ideas that won't end up cluttering the world with fiction
that's decent enough but which doesn't really need to exist. Writing
poems again is sort of an attempt by me to go back to the beginning
and write in a pure space and maybe sort things out.
AN: Dodie mentioned to me that around the time you wrote Period you
were reading a lot of Carson McCullers, what impact, if any did she
have on your writing?
DC: Initially I wanted the novel that ended up being Period to be
a reinvention of Carson McCullers' The Heart is A Lonely Hunter. I
think that's still in there somewhere deep down, but it got overridden
by other strategies and ideas that were necessary to create the kind
of flawed disappearing act that the cycle's conclusion required and
which George Miles' suicide deserved.
AN: In Funeral Rites Genet wrote, "...the characters in my books
all resemble each other. They live, with minor variations, the same
moments, the same perils, and when I speak of them, my language, which
is inspired by them, repeats the same poems in the same tone." Funeral
Rites was Genet's lament for his dead lover, Jean...given the quote
and the subject matter I see Funeral Rites functioning in
a similar vein as your novel Period (i.e. the loss of a loved
one and the characters
who all resemble him.) Was Funeral Rites at all a point of
reference for you while writing Period? Or were you and Genet
just working from
the same space; sorrow?
DC: I love Funeral Rites, and it was surely an influence on me, but
I haven't read it in a long time. I'm sure it influenced my decision
long ago to write something that would be a monument to my friend George
Miles. It wasn't on my mind at all when I was writing Period. When
I wrote Period I was thinking a lot about how non-literary things worked
-- magic tricks, videogames, spooky houses, and films like Lynch's
Lost Highway.
AN: Period is dedicated to Vincent Fecteau... the house that Bob builds
in the novel, the description of it sounds like a Fecteau sculpture.
Was it modeled after one?
DC: Yeah, it was. Vince's work and his ideas about art were a big
influence on Period in general. To me, Period is a piece of sculpture.
Imagining the novel as a piece of sculpture made of narrative, language,
and form is really the only way to understand it. That was inspired
by knowing Vince and his work, and also by the work and ideas of other
sculptor friends of mine like Charles Ray, Evan Holloway, Liz Craft,
Jason Meadows and Torbjorn Vejvi.
AN: Have your parents read your books? I know John Waters' parents
still haven't seen Pink Flamingos, so I was just wondering
what the relationship with your work and parents is.
DC: I know my dad buys my books, but I doubt he reads them. My mom,
two brothers, and one sister barely acknowledge that I'm a writer at
all. When the subject comes up, they change it. The only person in
my family who's interested in my writing is my twelve year old nephew.
Obviously, he hasn't read my books and shouldn't for a while, but we're
really close, and he thinks it's cool that I'm an artist and well known
and all that. In fact, one of my goals with God Jr. is to write a novel
that he can read and maybe even like.
AN: So how is God Jr. going to differ
from your previous work?
DC: Well, there's no sex in it. The only violence happens in a videogame.
And there's only one gay character, and he's really peripheral. So
on the level of content, it's pretty different. Formally, it's an adventure,
so that's not so different. What the novel is about is kind of too
complicated to paraphrase, but I will say that I think it'll probably
surprise a lot of people who think they know what I'm about.
AN: So, you know I've been on this Kathy Acker trip for a while, and
it seems everyone who knew her has their own story/ memory of her.
What's yours?
DC: I was and am a huge fan of Kathy's. I had a lot of friends who
were close with her, and from what they told me, being friends with
Kathy produced a lot of psychodramas and fights and jealousy. So I
made a decision early on that I would deliberately avoid becoming good
friends with her because I wanted to preserve my relationship with
her work. I think she found my stand-offishness kind of odd, and we
never ended up being much more than acquaintances that admired each
other's work. I do remember this one time when we were on a panel together
at Cal Arts, and I kind of went off about what I thought was the problem
of too much egotism in Genet's work. Kathy was horrified that I would
criticize Genet, and we had a great, screaming fight about that in
the parking lot afterwards. That was memorable.
AN: I've been thinking about reading Peter Sotos,
from what I know of his writing he seems similar to Pierre Guyotat,
but some of his
critics make him sound more like a Boyd Rice-type misogynist/ misanthrope.
How do you feel about his work?
DC: Well, he's nothing like Pierre Guyotat, to my mind anyway. I don't
think they're coming from the same place at all. I also don't think
his work is the misogynist or misanthropic wank job that some people
seem to think. He works with material that has a coincidental relationship
to mine, so of course I'm interested in his approach and methodology.
He and I have different ideas about how to present that material, so
I read his work pretty critically but always with fascination. I do
think his newest book Selfish, Little is by far his best.
AN: Oh, okay. I guess the reason I kind of saw them as maybe being
similar is just the sheer brutality of the writing. I think Eden,
Eden, Eden is the most abusive book I've read, and the few snippets
of Sotos writing I've read seemed to me as visceral as Eden,
Eden, Eden so I
think that's where I saw them as being on par with each other.
DC: I understand what you're saying. But Guyotat is a high stylist
and his work is grounded in an examination of violence in relationship
to context -- violence generated out of desire, violence in the name
of nationalism, the rational, the irrational. Sotos' work, to my mind
at least, is more about articulating sexual fantasy and his relationship
to language is far more casual.
AN: So, you recently went to Moscow for the first time, what was that
like?
DC: Well, I went there for love. My boyfriend's Russian and lives
in Moscow at the moment. So that part of the trip was sublime, but
I doubt that's what you're asking. Being in Moscow was fascinating
and very disturbing. The feeling of hopeless and fatalism there is
overwhelming. Russians are a people whose past has been negated, but
whose future is unclear and a mess. Moscow is a grim, mostly dilapidated
Communist era city. It's deliberately oppressive and uninspiring, and,
apart from a few dabs of new color and imagination here and there,
it remains dull and emotionally abusive. To Russians, Vladimir Putin
seems looser than previous leaders, but he's basically a dictator dabbling
with democracy. Capitalism has inched into their system, but it's basically
a tool of the wealthy. The majority of Russians are very poor, but
everything in Russia is very expensive. The crime rate is insane. In
the US, it's common for teenagers to earn pocket money by working at
McDonalds or Carl's Jr. In Russia, they work as prostitutes. It's like
part of growing up. Russians' ability to travel abroad is very strictly
controlled, quite obviously so they won't get any funny ideas about
how freedom really feels. Basically, I felt like I was visiting my
boyfriend in a huge, city-shaped prison.
AN: If you don't mind talking about your relationship more, you can
totally elaborate. Because I'm sure there are a lot of people in relationships
where one partner lives in another country, so maybe it's comforting
to know that their plight isn't theirs alone. I mean I've been through
it; my ex is British, so I know how difficult it is.
DC: Yeah, it's really difficult. Yuriy -- that's my boyfriend's name
-- has been trying to get an American tourist visa for a year, but
in order to be granted one, Russians need to prove they're going to
return to Russia, and that's really hard to do. He might finally get
the visa this summer, but there's no guarantee. Basically the only
way I can see him is to go to Russia or meet up with him Europe where
tourist visas are far easier for Russians to obtain, so I'm having
to travel much more than I can really afford. It's infuriating and
bewildering that he can't even make a short little visit here. He wants
to live here, and I want that too, but we're facing a huge struggle
to make that happen. I've really come around on the whole gay marriage
issue as a result. As much I think it's stupid to adopt flawed heterosexual
models, the fact that marriage would allow him to live here, and that
we don't have that right, makes me sick. So, yeah, that part of the
relationship sucks, but everything else about it is just amazing.
AN: I think for me as well, having been in a
relationship with someone from another country made me more political,
or at least more aware
of just how discriminatory the US is in regards to not only matters
of immigration but also towards gay people. Matt and I have been together
for almost two years now and we totally want to get married and its
not about the three tiered cake and a shitty DJ and grandma drinking
too much wine at the reception, its about being able to have the same
rights as any other couple. And yeah, I don't think I'd feel this way
about these things if I hadn't been in the relationship with the British
guy, or if I wasn't in a long term relationship now. If I were still
single, I don't think gay marriage would be such a big deal to me.
But, yeah I know how frustrating it is, and it must be like ten fold
for you and Yuriy since he can't even fucking come over here for a
visit, its stuff like this that shows just how unjust and flawed our "laws" are.
DC: Well, of course I agree with you about everything. The only good
thing about all of this is that a significant number of people who
happen to be gay in the US actually seem to give a shit about something
that isn't going to give them hard-ons or get them laid for the first
time in years.
AN: Do you vote? If not, are you going to vote this year?
DC: Yeah, I usually vote. I'm an anarchist, but I'm also pretty pragmatic.
Of course I'm going to vote this year. I think getting rid of the Bush
administration should be the top priority for every US citizen. Nothing
is more important than disempowering those vile scumbags.
AN: Why did you decide to become a vegetarian? Health reasons? Animal
rights? Or have you just lived in California too long?
DC: I've been a vegetarian since I was sixteen. At the time, I was
your standard young hippie pacifist type. So it was a moral thing initially.
Also I wanted to impress this vegetarian boy I was infatuated with.
At this point, my body has forgotten how to digest meat, and the few
times I've accidentally eaten something containing meat it's made me
really sick. Plus, meat is way too blatant tasting and smelling for
me now. The idea of eating something that harsh just doesn't compute.
AN: Do you have any pets? Are you more a dog or a cat person?
DC: I don't have any pets. I'm not a pet person at all. When I was
a kid, I had a series of dogs and one rabbit. They all died young and
tragically, and I decided that enough was enough. If I had to choose
between dogs and cats, I'd choose dogs.
AN: So I know you're friends with Peter Christopherson of Coil...the
next time you talk to him, could you ask him if Coil could please play
California? Him'n Jon are fans of yours, they might listen to you...
DC: I'll do that.
AN: What was the last CD you bought/ movie you watched/book you read
and concert you went to?
DC: If you mean the last CD I paid for, I bought three simultaneously:
Hecker's Pv Trecks, Graham Coxon's Happiness in Magazines, and Robert
Pollard's Fiction Man. If you mean the last movie I watched in a theater:
The Day After Tomorrow. If you mean the last movie I watched on TV:
Pitch Black. If you mean the last movie I rented: Songs
From The Second Floor. The last book I read that wasn't a manuscript submitted for
my Little House on the Bowery imprint: Olivier Cadiot's Future,
Former, Fugitive. My last concert was Destroyer and Frog Eyes at Spaceland.
and finally,
AN: What's the next thing you're looking forward to? (It can be small,
like having lunch or taking a nap or whatever.)
DC: My friend John just got a hold of a baseball autographed by Eric
Gagne, and he's coming over tonight to show me. So I'm looking forward
to seeing and touching something that was handled by a god.
For more information about Dennis Cooper, visit him online at: DennisCooper.net
This interview originally appeared online in Suspect
Thoughts.
Aaron Nielsen holds a BA in English Literature from San Francisco
State University, where he is currently pursuing an MFA in creative
writing. His fiction and poetry have previously appeared in Velvet
Mafia, Outsider Ink, The
Chabot Review, Mirage and the UK magazine,
The Egg Box. He has also interviewed Poppy Z. Brite for the 'zine Serendipity?.
Aaron is the 2001 recipient of the Fredrick C. Fallon award for poetry.
He and his boyfriend Matt have been together going on two years. Aaron
is 25 years old.
