Looking Through The Mobius Strip
Where do I begin to describe the effect of Dennis Cooper's works? To explain the subtle nuances of a writer who's work is an illustration of the impossibilty of language, and art, to describe the multifold reality in which we are living. Is it a cop out to fail to write this piece? Am I taking the easy way out by not achieving what I set out to write? Or is this the best way to approach the works of a writer like Dennis Cooper? To affirm your failure and in doing so celebrate and rejoice in this? To embrace this natural and often ignored element of life. How do I explain every subtle emotion and discomfit and anger that Cooper's work brings up in me? How do I explain it all without resorting to saying something as simple and trite as go and pick up one of his books? Go and read the work for yourself. How do I explain? How do I? How do I?
These are but some of the questions that have been floating through my head these past few months as I've started and re-started this piece numerous times. Of course there's been other questions, other pressing reasons for my failure to write this piece, cowardice and paranioa being the two prominent ones amongst a myriad of others. But they're best left to the privacy of my own head than to hang it out in the world for all to see. But then writing is all about an opening into another world and it would be unfair of me not to let those feelings and experience permeate throughout this writing. So what to do then?
Well it only seems natural to begin at the start and work my way from there. Not at the very start when I found Cooper's writing on the shelf of Monash University and devoured the novels Closer, Frisk and the short story collection Wrong with the energy of a sugar ridden kid at a birthday party. No, no, no. It's best to begin with the original idea for this piece and work from there. And that is to start with a reading of Cooper's novel Try. For it is Try that I feel exemplifies the importance of Cooper's writing. It is Try that shows the emotional impact and venacity that Cooper's writing has on the reader. It is Try that is the heart of Cooper's writing. It is Try that in those three letters and one word exemplifies everything about Cooper's work.
The third novel in Cooper's George Miles Cycle Try story focuses on Ziggy, a seventeen year old Husker Du loving punk who lives in one of those sprawling Los Angeles suburbs. (Well at least I imagine the novel is set in one of the sprawling Los Angeles suburbs, Cooper for universality sake never actually locates the novel). Besides being a seventeen year old Husker Du loving punk, Ziggy is the sexual object of his two step-fathers and the writer of a zine 'I Apologise.' To make matters all the more complicated for Ziggy is that he is in love with Calhoun, his straight junkie friend who could write the greatest novel the world has ever seen if there wasn't a needle sticking in his arm.
And it is here that Cooper's prose shines. None of the characters are demonised. There's no division, no black and white (even though the emotion is always with Ziggy). Everything is given it's chance to breathe and work. It's fucked up. It's disturbing. It's fuckin' discomforting in parts. Particularly the letter Bob, one of Ziggy's step fathers, writes to Ziggy in which he describes the process of rimming his son. An act that becomes all the more chilling when Ziggy yells out in the middle of being fucked by Bob: “If you loved me you wouldn't fuck me when I'm crying.” It's challenging and confronting to say the least.
But that is why Cooper's writing is so great. Not just in Try which is the most realistic of his novels but in the other novels of the Cycle To. In Guide and Frisk he blurs the line between fiction and reality so well until the line blurs into nothing and you begin questioning the difference between your own factual experience and your own fantasy life. Until you learn that your real life is a shadow of your fantasy life. In Frisk this is demonstrated in Cooper's 'love' of 'snuff' films. Beginning with a description of five photographs Cooper loved and cherished as a kid, a series of photos presenting themselves as a snuff film, the novel follows Cooper through his fantasies of disembowelling his lovers and sexual objects from his teenage years in LA to his time in Amsterdam where in a drunken, drug induced binge he kills and disembowels a young dutch punk in a windmill. The story unfolds in a manner in which the fanatasies become more and more blurred until you actually believe that Dennis has murdered the boy. It's only at the end of the novel, wherein the five pictures are re-written and the images are shown to be fake that you realise that all of the stories themselves are fictions and fantasies and a way of Dennis himself being able to release himself from himself.
In Guide the novel takes the shape of an LSD trip. Starting from a Guided by Voice song the novels morphs and merges through memories as the main character Dennis goes to trendy bars, makes collages, writes an article for Rolling Stone about a squat in LA, takes esctasy, picks up guys in cruising lounges, backstage concerts. There's trendy art galleries, self-obsessed artists, debates over childhood pornography, paranioa over being a writer. It's trendy indie LA sans the simplified commercial Hollywood glamour. It's LA seen through the blearied wide opened eyes of a middle aged anarchist. It's a subversive novel that ends as it begins with a memory fading and fizzing out.
That said Guide is not the most difficult of Cooper's novels. Not by far, that monkier goes to Period the final of Cooper's Georges Miles cycle. The novel is essentially that. A period, a bloody full stop. It is the end of the cycle. The end of fifteen years of his life, of twenty-five years of drug taking, prostitution and experiementation. It is also perhaps most importantly the end of language. The inevitable failure of it to describe anything to do with violence and emotion. The novels plot, if a word like that can be used here, focuses on two Satan loving teens who decide to murder the local deaf/dumb kid in order to bring them closer to Satan. If the violence of earlier Cooper novels is psychotic and paranoid this violence is more terrifying for it's minimalism. In the way in which through short, terse, one/two word sentences he is able to depict the fear and the sounds and sights of this deaf/dumb kid. If reading the early novels left one frenzied for a killing spree this novel leaves one cold like they've seen a ghost.
It is the natural conclusion to a cycle that begun some eighteen years earlier with Closer. In this novel, it's title stolen from the Joy Division album of the same name, Cooper pieces together five loosely related stories around the themes of self-obsession and violent sexual fantasies. Nihilistic in their nature and outcomes, they offer an insight into the self-destructive mindframe of a group of young confused men in late 70's LA. Like all novels in the cylce the focal point of the novel is George Miles. In this novel Georges is a skeleton of a character. A skeleton who his friends are drawn to as the object of their violent sexual fantasies, as a muse for their artwork or just as someone to share. The beauty of this novel is the way in which it shows the self-obsessed nihilistic tendency of that period to be ultimately hollow and quite shallow. Once there fanatasies are reached the characters become nothing themselves. Become quiet empty and hollow. This is evident in the story of David. Obsessed with the idea of being a famous singer David goes through his life fantasy about his own stage performance. So wrapped up he is in his own world he doesn't even hear the car turning the corner and crashing into the garage party he's attending. Doesn't hear the car until it crashes into him and he finds himself dead and buried. His fantasies left like that.
Of course Cooper's writing is not just limited to the cycle and the five novels that make this up. Since finishing Period in 2000 he has published three more novels. In 2002 he published My Loose Thread a novel based around the diaries of Kip Kinkle, the killer who murdered his parents before undertaking killing spree on his school colleagues. In 2004 he publishedThe Sluts- the one novel of his I've yet to read- a novel set in a gay cruising lounge where Johns rate and talk about everything they've done to Brad, the best arse in town. And last year he published God Jnr a novel in which the central character is a father mourning the loss of the son he killed in a car crash. A novel which in spite of the lack of sexual violent themes of Cooper's other work is still a powerful mediatation on grief and loss. Another illustration of the way we handle the inevitable circumstances of failure and the often fucked up ways (for example Jim the father milking a job by pretending to be crippled) in which we live and bring guilt upon others.
More recently Cooper has started blogging his life on www.denniscooper.net. It is the latest attempt in breaking down the barrier between writer and author, artist and audience. Here you can read about past lovers, find info about new artists, get into debates about labeling and privacy, as well as reading the works of other aspiring artists and writers from around the globe. There's been an open mic night, a portrait day, an artist collection day, poetry competitions, giveaways. All circular. It's damn addictive and pretty voyueristic but fits in perfect. It's also something of an odd antidote to his fiction world where the characters ultimately can be seen to be spiralling to their own death - metaphorically and literally – whereas the online community seems to be expanding further and further. Exploding rather than imploding. And that's where we all should be heading. Exploding out in balls of chaos rather than turning inwards in movements of self-doubt. So have I suceeded? I don't know. And somehow I don't think it really matters that much.
Where do I begin to describe the effect of Dennis Cooper's works? To explain the subtle nuances of a writer who's work is an illustration of the impossibilty of language, and art, to describe the multifold reality in which we are living. Is it a cop out to fail to write this piece? Am I taking the easy way out by not achieving what I set out to write? Or is this the best way to approach the works of a writer like Dennis Cooper? To affirm your failure and in doing so celebrate and rejoice in this? To embrace this natural and often ignored element of life. How do I explain every subtle emotion and discomfit and anger that Cooper's work brings up in me? How do I explain it all without resorting to saying something as simple and trite as go and pick up one of his books? Go and read the work for yourself. How do I explain? How do I? How do I?
These are but some of the questions that have been floating through my head these past few months as I've started and re-started this piece numerous times. Of course there's been other questions, other pressing reasons for my failure to write this piece, cowardice and paranioa being the two prominent ones amongst a myriad of others. But they're best left to the privacy of my own head than to hang it out in the world for all to see. But then writing is all about an opening into another world and it would be unfair of me not to let those feelings and experience permeate throughout this writing. So what to do then?
Well it only seems natural to begin at the start and work my way from there. Not at the very start when I found Cooper's writing on the shelf of Monash University and devoured the novels Closer, Frisk and the short story collection Wrong with the energy of a sugar ridden kid at a birthday party. No, no, no. It's best to begin with the original idea for this piece and work from there. And that is to start with a reading of Cooper's novel Try. For it is Try that I feel exemplifies the importance of Cooper's writing. It is Try that shows the emotional impact and venacity that Cooper's writing has on the reader. It is Try that is the heart of Cooper's writing. It is Try that in those three letters and one word exemplifies everything about Cooper's work.
The third novel in Cooper's George Miles Cycle Try story focuses on Ziggy, a seventeen year old Husker Du loving punk who lives in one of those sprawling Los Angeles suburbs. (Well at least I imagine the novel is set in one of the sprawling Los Angeles suburbs, Cooper for universality sake never actually locates the novel). Besides being a seventeen year old Husker Du loving punk, Ziggy is the sexual object of his two step-fathers and the writer of a zine 'I Apologise.' To make matters all the more complicated for Ziggy is that he is in love with Calhoun, his straight junkie friend who could write the greatest novel the world has ever seen if there wasn't a needle sticking in his arm.
And it is here that Cooper's prose shines. None of the characters are demonised. There's no division, no black and white (even though the emotion is always with Ziggy). Everything is given it's chance to breathe and work. It's fucked up. It's disturbing. It's fuckin' discomforting in parts. Particularly the letter Bob, one of Ziggy's step fathers, writes to Ziggy in which he describes the process of rimming his son. An act that becomes all the more chilling when Ziggy yells out in the middle of being fucked by Bob: “If you loved me you wouldn't fuck me when I'm crying.” It's challenging and confronting to say the least.
But that is why Cooper's writing is so great. Not just in Try which is the most realistic of his novels but in the other novels of the Cycle To. In Guide and Frisk he blurs the line between fiction and reality so well until the line blurs into nothing and you begin questioning the difference between your own factual experience and your own fantasy life. Until you learn that your real life is a shadow of your fantasy life. In Frisk this is demonstrated in Cooper's 'love' of 'snuff' films. Beginning with a description of five photographs Cooper loved and cherished as a kid, a series of photos presenting themselves as a snuff film, the novel follows Cooper through his fantasies of disembowelling his lovers and sexual objects from his teenage years in LA to his time in Amsterdam where in a drunken, drug induced binge he kills and disembowels a young dutch punk in a windmill. The story unfolds in a manner in which the fanatasies become more and more blurred until you actually believe that Dennis has murdered the boy. It's only at the end of the novel, wherein the five pictures are re-written and the images are shown to be fake that you realise that all of the stories themselves are fictions and fantasies and a way of Dennis himself being able to release himself from himself.
In Guide the novel takes the shape of an LSD trip. Starting from a Guided by Voice song the novels morphs and merges through memories as the main character Dennis goes to trendy bars, makes collages, writes an article for Rolling Stone about a squat in LA, takes esctasy, picks up guys in cruising lounges, backstage concerts. There's trendy art galleries, self-obsessed artists, debates over childhood pornography, paranioa over being a writer. It's trendy indie LA sans the simplified commercial Hollywood glamour. It's LA seen through the blearied wide opened eyes of a middle aged anarchist. It's a subversive novel that ends as it begins with a memory fading and fizzing out.
That said Guide is not the most difficult of Cooper's novels. Not by far, that monkier goes to Period the final of Cooper's Georges Miles cycle. The novel is essentially that. A period, a bloody full stop. It is the end of the cycle. The end of fifteen years of his life, of twenty-five years of drug taking, prostitution and experiementation. It is also perhaps most importantly the end of language. The inevitable failure of it to describe anything to do with violence and emotion. The novels plot, if a word like that can be used here, focuses on two Satan loving teens who decide to murder the local deaf/dumb kid in order to bring them closer to Satan. If the violence of earlier Cooper novels is psychotic and paranoid this violence is more terrifying for it's minimalism. In the way in which through short, terse, one/two word sentences he is able to depict the fear and the sounds and sights of this deaf/dumb kid. If reading the early novels left one frenzied for a killing spree this novel leaves one cold like they've seen a ghost.
It is the natural conclusion to a cycle that begun some eighteen years earlier with Closer. In this novel, it's title stolen from the Joy Division album of the same name, Cooper pieces together five loosely related stories around the themes of self-obsession and violent sexual fantasies. Nihilistic in their nature and outcomes, they offer an insight into the self-destructive mindframe of a group of young confused men in late 70's LA. Like all novels in the cylce the focal point of the novel is George Miles. In this novel Georges is a skeleton of a character. A skeleton who his friends are drawn to as the object of their violent sexual fantasies, as a muse for their artwork or just as someone to share. The beauty of this novel is the way in which it shows the self-obsessed nihilistic tendency of that period to be ultimately hollow and quite shallow. Once there fanatasies are reached the characters become nothing themselves. Become quiet empty and hollow. This is evident in the story of David. Obsessed with the idea of being a famous singer David goes through his life fantasy about his own stage performance. So wrapped up he is in his own world he doesn't even hear the car turning the corner and crashing into the garage party he's attending. Doesn't hear the car until it crashes into him and he finds himself dead and buried. His fantasies left like that.
Of course Cooper's writing is not just limited to the cycle and the five novels that make this up. Since finishing Period in 2000 he has published three more novels. In 2002 he published My Loose Thread a novel based around the diaries of Kip Kinkle, the killer who murdered his parents before undertaking killing spree on his school colleagues. In 2004 he publishedThe Sluts- the one novel of his I've yet to read- a novel set in a gay cruising lounge where Johns rate and talk about everything they've done to Brad, the best arse in town. And last year he published God Jnr a novel in which the central character is a father mourning the loss of the son he killed in a car crash. A novel which in spite of the lack of sexual violent themes of Cooper's other work is still a powerful mediatation on grief and loss. Another illustration of the way we handle the inevitable circumstances of failure and the often fucked up ways (for example Jim the father milking a job by pretending to be crippled) in which we live and bring guilt upon others.
More recently Cooper has started blogging his life on www.denniscooper.net. It is the latest attempt in breaking down the barrier between writer and author, artist and audience. Here you can read about past lovers, find info about new artists, get into debates about labeling and privacy, as well as reading the works of other aspiring artists and writers from around the globe. There's been an open mic night, a portrait day, an artist collection day, poetry competitions, giveaways. All circular. It's damn addictive and pretty voyueristic but fits in perfect. It's also something of an odd antidote to his fiction world where the characters ultimately can be seen to be spiralling to their own death - metaphorically and literally – whereas the online community seems to be expanding further and further. Exploding rather than imploding. And that's where we all should be heading. Exploding out in balls of chaos rather than turning inwards in movements of self-doubt. So have I suceeded? I don't know. And somehow I don't think it really matters that much.
posted by paradigm at 10:22 PM
3 Comments:
Having just read all the major Coop books in a week (except Sluts like you!) this was a welcome overview. I was going to buy the Enter At Your Own Risk book but it costs a fortune (like all those University press books).
I'd go along with most of what you said , though I think probably Try is the weakest of them all for me but I don't know why! Just seemed less 'tight' than the others. I think probably Guide/Frisk/Period and God Jr are my faves.
I like it best when he takes the narrative to strange places - as in say God Jr - but with Period I admit I couldn't completely keep track of all the alter-egos. I'm going to read it again and again until I do!
So thanks again, really interesting to read an other view -I think we should have a Dennis Cooper Day, where everybody gives their opinions of the books...
thanks joe and atheist. i like try and my loose thread from favourite coopers work. i like them mainly just becuase i indentify most with the main character. or part of me indentifies. i mean i haven't been sexually abused before but i still find ziggy one of the best characters coopers written and yeah rob and brice are demonised and not totally sympathetic. i actually think there's some hyperbole there. in the article that is. i can forget little nuances now and then going for a wider brush strokes.
as for my loose thread i find the voice of the narrator- whose name i've forgotten now- so great that he actually ends up living with you. what i admire most about my loose thread is that the character is not entirley gay. i think that's what i identify in ziggy and -shit i've forgotten the name- that they're not 100% gay. that there's an opening to explore that and that the struggle that they have is that they feel that they have to be forced to identify as one of the binaries when in reality people fluctuate between the two. to me that's what these two novels are about the difficulty of living in that middle ground.
When I say 'Try' is my least favourite - well I still really like it - but something has to be last.
I think what's really interesting is that DC's last book, God Jr, is so different from what went before - and then he stops! I think it's great that he's proved he can write about middle-age/hetro marriage etc. He doesn't ever have to do it again - but I hope he does because that was one of my faves of his.
I hope he's aware of this little confab - we definitley need to get a DC day up and going -I know that's selfish on my part since I just read all the books - but I'm a bit obsessional like that - I'd so love to read what all the bloggers think/rate the books - I mean how else did we get here?
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