Reading About Dennis Cooper

 

No one discovers the work of Dennis Cooper by accident, at least in my opinion. His books have never sold well and one is unlikely to find them in any small or medium sized public library. Even in a large library, I doubt they would prominently displayed.

Cooper is a writer, editor, and, perhaps, performance artist whose work has been described as transgressive. His work can be said to be at the intersection of experimental writing, queerness (although Cooper does not see himself as a queer writer finding the idea reductive and finding too much of the community devoted to mindless hedonism. His work has been compared to Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs. Most people, including people who read serious literature, would not enjoy much of Cooper's work. However, I have heard his name and at least one interview with Cooper in recent years and I was curious to go beyond what I could read on Wikipedia and Diarmuid Hester's book gave me the opportunity.

Let me just say by way of assessment, that I learned a great deal from reading Hester's book, but it seems too much like a doctoral dissertation that needed more editing; it is rather theory heavy and tends to go into too much detail and background. Still, there is not much secondary literature about Dennis Cooper and, overall, I am glad to have read the book, even if I did find myself skimming large sections.

Cooper is probably best known for three things:

1. his George Miles cycle of books
2. his association with JT LeRoy
3. his blog and gif novels.

 

Casey Michael Henry in the New Yorker described the George Miles books as

a sequence of novels called the George Miles Cycle, published between 1989 and 2000, which follow damaged characters who seek the cipher-like figure of Miles, an actual person from Cooper’s life, who appears both as a character called “George Miles” and as a kind of abstraction—a symbol for the youthful purity that is inevitably ravaged by the needs of those who desire it.

 

Cooper's George Miles books probably led to his connection with JT LeRoy. Hester describes how LeRoy became involved with Cooper:

An unusual name surfaces ... before vanishing forever from Cooper's oeuvre: Terminator. The alias of a teen writer and sometime hustler who contacted Cooper in 1995 and was friends with him for seven or eight years after that, the appearance of Terminator [in Cooper’s work] marks the beginning of one of the strangest and most controversial episodes in Cooper’s career. The encounter between Cooper and this young teenage fan set in motion a series of events that would see the latter gain a cult following among devotees of transgressive writing and eventually propel him to international superstardom as the transgressive novelist JT LeRoy. Before it was over, Cooper, his writer friends, and innumerable others who were similarly touched by the inspiring story of a poor, abused teen’s triumphant survival would be involuntarily implicated in one of the most successful literary hoaxes in a generation (kindle location 3181-3186).

Eventually, Stephen Beachy, in an  article published in New York magazine in 2005, showed that JT LerRoy was a fraud orchested by Laura Albert. Here is the section of the article that concerns Dennis Cooper.

... JT also reached out to other literary figures by fax: In 1994, he got in touch with Dennis Cooper by faxing a request through Cooper’s agent, Ira Silverberg. He struck up a telephone friendship with Cooper, who introduced him to the writer Bruce Benderson, through whom he contacted novelist Joel Rose, writer Laurie Stone, editor Karen Rinaldi, and agent Henry Dunow. By the age of 16, he was being published in Nerve, the New York Press, Spin, and various anthologies, and by 17, he had a book deal, brokered by Rinaldi and Dunow, at Crown. That novel, Sarah, was followed by a collection of stories in 2001 that was recently made into a film by Asia Argento. Still just in his twenties, JT had been translated into twenty languages, was making movie deals, and was writing the lyrics for a band, Thistle.

As for Cooper, his emotions concerning JT are complicated. He’d been souring on JT for years already. Even when he believed that JT was a boy, he had become disgusted with the fame-mongering. He believes my scenario, he says, but he couldn’t say he’s 100 percent convinced. He feels foolish, he says, but considers it his own fault, and he’s begun a process of reassessing. How good are those books, really? He does express anger, however, about how these revelations might affect JT’s fans. “I know how much this whole JT thing means to some kids,” he says. “He’s their idol. What makes me angry is they used this, played the whole abuse thing. Kids who really are abused, how shocked they’ll be.”

Cooper began to be suspicious of JT LeRoy well before Beachy's article was published and stopped interacting with the person who he first knew as Terminator.

Having talked about the George Miles books and JT LeRoy, let us now move on to a discussion of Dennis Cooper's blog and his internet writing.

As I said, the third important project Cooper has been involved with has been his internet work, specifically his blog and, later, his gif novels. Cooper's blog, in 2016, gained notice among people concerned by the ways that technology companies, particularly google, might censor people's work. In July 2016, Jennifer Krasinski wrote about Cooper in the New Yorker:

In the early afternoon of June 27th, the writer Dennis Cooper was working on his computer, at his home in Paris, when his Gmail suddenly reloaded and logged him out of his account. When he tried to sign back in he found that he couldn’t. Instead of his inbox, a message appeared informing him that his account had been disabled. “It was so bizarre,” Cooper told me during a Skype call late last week. He immediately checked DC’s, his blog of ten years, and discovered that it, too, had been taken down. Its splash page had been replaced by yet another message, this time from Blogger, the Google-owned self-publishing platform that hosts his site:

 

Blog has been removed.

 

Baffled, Cooper clicked a link that was included in the message, only to receive yet another message stating that the suspension was due to a violation of Blogger’s terms of service. But what violation? And what could he do to get his e-mail and blog back up and running?

In his attempts to answer these questions, Cooper has submitted numerous requests for information via the channels that Google has put in place, but all of them have been ignored. He has worked with a Google employee, who attempted to launch an internal investigation on the writer’s behalf, but found herself stonewalled and unable to help. He enlisted a lawyer, who contacted the Google legal team on his behalf. According to Cooper, the company lawyer’s reply was, “I’m sure they’ll get back to him.” “I still haven’t heard anything,” Cooper told me. “I mean, not a single word.”

Roxanne Gay, in the New York Times, argued for the literary value of Cooper's blog. 

The spectacles of life, sex and death are the mainstay of Dennis Cooper’s blog, DC’s Blog. I never know what to expect when I read it, but I always know I will be provoked, challenged and intrigued. Over the years, Mr. Cooper, an artist and writer, has curated any number of collections of ideas and images, revealing an inexhaustible curiosity about art and the human condition. He has unfailingly championed small-press writers, and particularly those who experiment with language, narrative and form.

 

I am especially drawn to Mr. Cooper’s posts on sex, death and violence — the things we do with and to human bodies. Often times, the work he shares is grotesque but impossible to ignore. Twice a month, he posts personal ads from international male escorts, young men detailing what they like to do sexually, what they will allow to be done to them, a display that is hypnotic and disturbing.

 

Then there are the collections of interesting things — demolished mansions, revolving restaurants, ruined flesh, miniature golf courses, fireworks displays, dioramas, amusement park rides. It’s never just a handful of images — it’s 40, 50, more. The sheer quantity becomes thrilling. Mr. Cooper’s blog also hosts one of the best comment sections on the internet, with a real community of people who engage one another and the art, with none of the blunt ignorance found in most comment sections.

After a long period, Google did, eventually, return Cooper's data. He continues to have an internet presence hosted elsewhere.

 

One project that started on Cooper's blog and has continued is his gif novels like Zac's Haunted House. In the New Yorker, Casey Michael Henry describes the book:

 

his GIF “novel,” “Zac’s Haunted House.” The regulars at DC’s quickly took to the project, despite, or perhaps because of, its strangeness. Some critics have written appreciatively about it, too, though labelling the work has proven a challenge. In Bookforum, Paige K. Bradley wrote, “You could call Zac’s Haunted House many things: net art, a glorified Tumblr, a visual novel, a mood board, or a dark night of the Internet’s soul.”

In our Google Hangout, Cooper explained that, in his view, the GIF works complete an inversion begun by “The Marbled Swarm,” his previous book. The labyrinthine quality of that mystery emphasizes structure over narrative, and makes “characters” no more important than other things that recur: tropes, references, motifs. Cooper told the Paris Review that he wanted the reader’s experience of that novel to be “three-dimensional,” as if the reader were “chasing different story lines and recurring ideas as they waver and scamper about and hide inside the prose.”

In “Zac’s Haunted House,” recognizable characters, so far as they exist at all, serve an ancillary function to patterns and themes; they mostly help to illustrate the claustrophobic logic of the house. Frightened, similar-looking adolescents are tossed forcefully down stairs or dragged into the shadows. The novel contains five chapters, as well as a preface and afterword; you can read it carefully in about thirty minutes.

 

 

If you are curious, Zac's Hauned House can be viewed here. Be aware that this is NOT family friendly content.

By way of a conclusion, after having finished Hester's book I feel like I know much more about Cooper. But I also realize that Cooper is not really the writer for me.