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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Dennis Cooper: The Sluts

09:57 / 08.01.05

Dennis Cooper has a new book out. Kind of. It's maybe not exactly 'new', in the sense that he describes it as 'a black sheep cousin' to The George Miles Cycle, and it sounds closely related to Period in particular; and it's not exactly 'out', in the sense that it's being issued in a limited run of 550 copies without an ISBN number. You can pre-order it from Void Books, who describe it as follows:

Set largely on the pages of a website where gay male escorts are reviewed by their clients, and told through the postings, emails, and conversations of several dozen unreliable narrators, The Sluts chronicles the evolution of one young escort's date with a satisfied client into a metafiction of pornography, lies, half-truths, and myth.

People might also be interested to know that there is now an official Dennis Cooper website.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

16:27 / 08.01.05

God, I wish I could afford that. Cheers for the website link though!

04:28 / 10.01.05

Isn't Dennis C supposed to be writing a novel about the Columbine masssacre, though ? At least I can't help feeling that's the kind of thing he should be getting on with - having re-read the George Myles cycle recently, I'm not sure if it really progressed once George's ass was torn to pieces, for the first time.

ONLY NICE THINGS

07:27 / 10.01.05

I'm at work, so am a bit wary of hitting the website for this... how much does it cost?

11:35 / 10.01.05

He wrote the novel about the Columbine massacre a year or two ago - it's called My Loose Thread and it's possibly the best thing he's ever done (though I do love the George Miles cycle, especially Try, if that's the one with Ziggy in, Frisk and Guide - have only read Period once and don't quite have the hang of it yet).

The limited-edition Sluts novel is $50 with special discounted $5 overseas delivery, which works out at about thirty quid if you're in the UK (as I am). I don't really know what makes a website work-safe* - there aren't any explicit images on either, but the Void Books one features adverts for a book about Lesley Anne Downey (Moors murderee) which you might not want your colleagues seeing over your shoulder...

*ha ha, because the kind of job I have I can call anything research! ("No, I'm giving a paper on media representations of Lesley Anne Downey".)

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

11:45 / 10.01.05

My Loose Thread is indeed wonderful. I loved Period, though I, too, am unsure whether I got the hang of it first (or indeed second) time round.

15:28 / 16.01.05

I sort of had the feeling with Period that the key scene was the section where DC describes his teenage LSD* experiences, the house he attempted to build under the water with the real life inspiration for George Myles, etc - the book struck me as his attempt to bare the bones of his subconscious reality, in much the same way that a lot of his other stuff is to do with the everyday alternative, whether past or present, or God help him, so hopefully not, future.

* There's a terribly unkind, but also very funny, section about this in Confusion Incorporated by Stuart Home. It's called 'Dennis Cooper Does Drugs,' features lines like " As he stumbled into the cafe wearing an old jacket over a white t-shirt, a pair of cords and Timberlands, Dennis looked like he fronted an indie band, specifically The Fall, " and is a ( short ) epic of malice of which I think pretty much anyone who's a fan of Johnathan Swift would, justifiably, be very proud. I severely doubt that Stuart Home's life, or really anyone else's, would stand up to that kind of analysis, the authorial eye having gone so well past cold as to be positively Stone Age, but it's hard not to laugh, all the same -

" Cooper agreed to meet me if I'd plug the writing of his current boyfriend Michael Tolson, a twenty year-old junkie from Pittsburgh. Michael is looking to publish his novel 'Crap Hound' "

Or -

" It's weird to think that someone as spaced out as Dennis could get it together to write a novel. I asked him about this as we ampled down Artillery Row towards the site of Jack The Ripper's Dorset Street murder, now a multi-storey car park. "

17:08 / 20.01.05

My copy arrived a day or two ago. It's pretty, but where are the illustrations? I see the cover, and one more inside, and that's it. Am I missing something?

Read only part of it so far. It's very sad. I can't quite explain why this book seems so melancholy. You know. As opposed to his other, more cheerful books.

11:56 / 24.01.05

Mine arrived over the weekend while I was away and I started it last night. I'm a few sections through - it does indeed seem very lacking in illustrations (only for chapter headings?), though the illustrations are cute. Will post longer, more considered post later/when I've finished the book, but so far I think you're right, dwight (sorry, couldn't help it) - it is sadder, in a way - because the main character is so terribly absent, much more so than George Miles, somehow...

I have two main responses so far:

(1) Gibber, gibber, Dennis Cooper totally signed it, I am holding something Dennis Cooper touched, oh dear there is something wrong with my head to be so excited about this

(2) I really miss the Dennis character. Although I really loved My Loose Thread, in which the fictional novelist "Dennis COoper" does not appear, The Sluts is reminding me that one of the things I love best about the George Miles cycle is Dennis himself, and his Morrissey-like capacity to be self-obsesssed and interesting about it...

Oh, and (3) I only ordered mine recently and I have copy no. 166 of 550 - surely there can't be that few deranged Cooper fans who can get $50 together?

Goodness Gracious Meme

15:56 / 27.01.05

*turns green, drips with jealousy, wishes ze could find it within hirself to hate Deva and Dwight*

17:26 / 27.01.05

Don't hate, participate. I took in a lot of recycling and had a week's worth of ramen lunches to pay for this -- might that work for you?

17:26 / 27.01.05

If not, let's have a bake sale!

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

21:54 / 27.01.05

Hmm... I did just get paid...

Goodness Gracious Meme

17:17 / 28.01.05

Ooh, I like the idea of sharing stories of ritual denial in honour of acquiring 'The Sluts'.

But on the other hand, I have just remembered that it's my 30th birthday Very Soon Indeed. Way to mark the big number, eh?

16:33 / 31.01.05

Finished the book last night. Not sure what to say. Am I getting old? The gruesomeness really bothered me. Thinking of revisting Sade and Bataille to see if it's a general increase in intolerance for gore or if the spark is missing from this book. The funnier he gets the less sincere it seems to me, and the less I can see something fragile and worthwhile in all the damage.

--

01:42 / 03.02.05

Void Books is one of my favorite new publishers, they really put a lot of care into their products: Each release is like a pornographic work-of-art. At the moment, they've only done two books. The first one came out last March or so, it was called "Selfish, Little: The Annoted Lesley Anne Downey", by noted transgressive author Peter Sotos (who I've had a thread on in this forum: I really would like to comment on that book one day as its probably his best one yet, and it appears Cooper is in agreeance with me). That book cost about $60 but in came in a deluxe over-sized hardcover edition that was also signed by the author. Recently, like last month, it was released in paperback, which I also got.

As you can imagine, I was estatic when I found out they were printing a book by Dennis Cooper. Two of my favorite transgressive novelists, now releasing books for the same publisher! I didn't balk at the high price, it was autographed and I'm used to spending ridiculous sums of money on books anyway. Haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I'm re-reading all the books in the George Miles cycle this month so I hope to get to it soon, it looks pretty intruiging (and the Dennis Cooper website is really ace).
My copy of the Sluts is #72, so I must of been one of the first 100!

As for the illustrations, I assume they just meant the ones at the start of each chapter... A little misleading, to be sure.

I think I read on the website that their next book will be another Sotos. Come to think of it, Creation Books is due to release a big-ass Sotos anthology of a lot of his out-of-print books sometime this April or so, and the first people who order will get a CD recorded between Sotos and Steve Albini. Better get my credit card handy...

16:05 / 04.02.05

Dennis Cooper and Wayne Koestenbaum
Launch Event for Dennis Cooper’s ‘The Sluts’ and WK’s ‘Moira Orfei’

There will be a reading and book signing

February 12th, 7:30 pm
Skylight Books
1818 N. Vermont Avenue
Los Angeles
www.skylightbooks.com

17:10 / 08.02.05

Am I getting old? The gruesomeness really bothered me.

Me too. I have had a really low tolerance for violence in movies lately - it took me a few hours to calm down from Sean of the Dead, and most of the night from American History X, so I wondered whether I was getting old, but... don't know.

I've been trying to pinpoint what I didn't-quite-like as much as usual about this book, and at first I thought it was that I missed the "Dennis Cooper" character (I love Guide). But then tangent pointed out that Dennis isn't in My Loose Thread, and I really love that one, so it can't just be that. Also, I think my favourite book in the George Miles cycle is probably Try (do I mean Try? Damn those one-word titles. The one with Ziggy in), which is also the funniest and also the one mostly from the point-of-view of the 'victim', which were two things notably absent from The Sluts - the former, I don't know why (did anyone else find it funny?); the latter, because of the, you know, clever structural thing it was doing. But I don't know whether that total removal of the central character from the story worked.

I mean, I think I know what DC was trying to do - leave that blank space for us to see our own reflection in, as it were; make us think about why we needed to hear from Brad, what we needed to hear from him, and all like that - and I think that was part of what made me so incredibly sad. Which is a good thing, I suppose, but... I don't know. You people talk more, and I'll see if it sparks anything else.

Have you talked more about the Lesley Anne book in the Sotos thread, person-whose-name-I-can't-remember, sorry? I was really intrigued by that, but I should go talk about it somewhere where it'll be on-topic, I guess.

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04:39 / 09.02.05

I may revive the thread to post my comments on that book, as it really does give a lot of insight into Sotos' character (of which misinformation abounds.... some people still see him as the Nazi/Serial killer fan boy he imagined himself to be in the 80's).