The blog of author Dennis Cooper

Month: November 2024 (Page 2 of 13)

Dupes

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In the 1970s and early ’80s, the East German Olympic program employed the electronic composer Martin Zeichnete to create workout soundtracks for the GDR’s teams — shimmering, motorik pulse-music that, in combination with a top-secret doping program, would aid the athletes in their goal to become the ultimate Menschen-Maschinen. Now, Edinburgh’s Unknown Capability Recordings has collected some of Zeichnete’s work as Kosmischer Läufer: Cosmic Music of the East German Olympic Program 1972-83. In an interview published in Slow Travel Berlin, Zeichnete discusses how he was influenced by West German artists like Kraftwerk, Cluster, and Neu!; he discovered the music — banned in the GDR — by listening to Düsseldorf radio broadcasts he managed to pick up in his native Dresden. As an amateur runner, he had the idea that hypnotic, repetitive music might help athletes focus. When, in 1972, the German-Brazilian inventor Andreas Pavel introduced the Stereobelt, a predecessor of the Walkman, Zeichnete knew how to make his dream a reality. Strangely, a Google search for “Martin Zeichnete” only turns up links related to the compilation; a Google search for German-language documents returns no results at all. (Indeed, “Zeichnete” — which is also the third-person preterite of “to draw” — doesn’t appear to be a common German surname, although “Drew” does happen to be the name of one of the label’s founders.) The interview published in Slow Travel Berlin turns out to have been published on Scribd.com by Unknown Capability Recordings, the label responsible for the anthology, back in February. Neither interview includes photographs of Zeichnete, and he doesn’t appear in a series of promotional videos for the release. And the more you listen to the music, the more it begins to sound both too pristine, given the tapes’ alleged age, and too stylistically perfect in its aping of Neu! and Kraftwerk.

 

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Very strange and bizarre footage which purports to show a weird stick-insect type creature, crawling down some buildings in Russia.

 

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A girl who was reported to have died after being hit in the head with a shovel is still alive – despite a hoax death article being posted on the internet. Last week, a video of a girl getting hit in the head with a metal shovel generated a whopping 500,000 views in the first two days of being uploaded online. Rumours circulated on the internet soon after that the teenage girl suffered serious head injuries and dropped dead while she was watching the movie Mean Girls at home. A now deleted iPhone clip shows two girls called Miranda and Emily fist fighting over Emily’s boyfriend, who threatens her rival with an air soft gun which shoots plastic BBs. Instead, when Miranda charges at her, Emily picks up a metal spade and throws it at her with full force. It hits Miranda in the back of the head, who then falls on the kerb, cracking the side of her skull on the road.

 

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Wrestling is fake

 

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Cast your mind back to 2003 and you’ll remember two Russian pop stars who dressed in school uniforms, sung about being lesbians and snogged on stage a lot. Yes, we are talking about t.A.T.u. and their Number 1 single “All The Things She Said”. Speaking on Russian TV, one half of the duo, Yulia Volkova, said that she would not accept her son as gay, because men are made to have sex with women and make babies and anyone who doesn’t is wrong. “Yes, I would condemn him” she said, “because I believe that a real man must be a real man. God created man for procreation, it is the nature. The man for me is the support, the strength of… I won’t accept a gay son.” But before you get on your high horse and say that fake lesbian Yulia doesn’t like gay people, she also says being homosexual is still “a little better than” killing people. “I just want my son to be a real man, not a fag,” she said. “I believe that being gay is all still better than murderers, thieves or drug addicts. If you choose out of all this, being gay a little better than the rest.”

 

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Hotelicopter

 

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In 2009, a strange Facebook account appeared out of nowhere and friended people en-masse. The name on the account was Junko Junsui, and she had a message for anyone willing to listen. Thus began a strange mystery that would continue for years to come, as countless people across the internet became enamored of Junsui, her story, and the shadowy organizations she claimed were hiding in plain sight. Some people actually accepted the seemingly random request, and, upon investigating further, found that Junko was not just a friendly Russian beauty, as her profile initially made it seem. Rather, she appeared to be a part of a weird alternate reality game involving a terrorist group called ‘The Junsui,’ Russia, and private military companies—all of which were warring with one another across the internet. Many found untangling Junko Junsui’s web to be a thrill, which makes sense: the confusing premise seemed as if it was lifted straight out of a Metal Gear Solid plot. Shadowy organizations, corrupt governments, overzealous groups defined by genetic modification, a huge conspiracy: Junko Junsui delivered on all fronts. But more than that, people found the entire thing disturbing, too. One of the most notable early clues in the ARG led players to discover video clips of a woman trapped inside of a room. If there was a “puppet master” behind it all, that person seemed particularly antagonistic toward people who participated. Junko Junsui is said to have became irate in her Facebook posts whenever people posted her communications on forums, sometimes allegedly outing anonymous participants who believed they were just playing a game. In the end, there was no grand conspiracy. There were no terrorist groups, and no shadowy government organizations. There was only a slick game that got out of hand, and players that desperately wanted to believe in something.

 

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This photo, taken by Jim Templeton, shows his daughter sitting in a marsh in the north of the UK. However, what makes this photo interesting is the fact that Templeton claims there was no one standing behind his daughter when he took the picture. It is clear to see that in the photo, which Kodak have examined and confirmed has not been tampered with, there is a figure which seems to resemble a ‘spaceman’ in full astronaut clothing. This has lead to many ‘believers’ claiming that Solway Firth, the location the picture was taken, could be an area of ”space-time displacement” that allows ‘non-Earthlings’ to be seen and captured on film. The most likely explanation is that photographer’s wife is stood in the background, with her back towards the camera and her blue dress appearing white due to overexposure.

 

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In 1770, an astonishing robot was unveiled that possessed the artificial intelligence needed to defeat any human players in a game of chess. Nicknamed “The Turk,” this animatronic chess champion was created by Wolfgang von Kempelen, and it toured Europe and America until it was destroyed in a fire in 1854. That’s when it was revealed it wasn’t a robot at all, but an elaborate hoax, with a human chess master hiding inside The Turk all along.

 

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Irena Kolokov was caught off guard when she turned up to meet her boyfriend, Alexey Bykov, 30, but found what appeared to be a horrific car accident when she arrived. “We’d arranged to meet at a certain place, but when I arrived there were mangled cars everywhere, ambulances, smoke, and carnage,” Kolokov told Orange News. “When I saw Alexey covered in blood lying in the road, a paramedic told me he was dead, and I just broke down in tears.” His face covered in fake blood and his head wrapped in gauze, Bykov staggered up to his love, who was so distraught that when her boyfriend approached her she shoved him off while crying uncontrollably. “I wanted her to realize how empty her life would be without me and how life would have no meaning without me. I think it worked,” he said.

 

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This is a Moon Melon, scientifically known as asidus. This fruit grows in some parts of Japan and it’s know for its weird blue color. What you probably don’t know about this fruit is that it can switch flavors after you eat it. Everything sour will taste sweet, and everything salty will taste bitter, and it gives water a strong orange-like taste. This fruit is very expensive. It costs about 16000 JPY (which is about 200 dollars).

 

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Naked Came the Stranger is a 1969 novel written as a literary hoax poking fun at contemporary American culture. Though credited to “Penelope Ashe”, it was in fact written by a group of twenty-four journalists led by Newsday columnist Mike McGrady. McGrady’s intention was to write a deliberately terrible book with a lot of sex, to illustrate the point that popular American literary culture had become mindlessly vulgar. The group wrote the book as a deliberately inconsistent and mediocre hodge-podge, with each chapter written by a different author. The book was submitted for publication under the pseudonym “Penelope Ashe” (portrayed by McGrady’s sister-in-law for photographs and meetings with publishers). The publisher, Lyle Stuart, was an independent publisher then known for controversial books, many with sexual content. According to Stuart, he appropriated the cover photo (a kneeling nude woman with very long hair down her back, photographed from behind) from a Hungarian nudist magazine. By the end of the year, the book had spent 13 weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller List. As of May 2012, the book’s publisher reported the book had sold 400,000 copies.

 

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A 1931 photo in the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung showing the US Navy airship “Los Angeles,” blown by a gust of wind, lifting a ship into the air.

 

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Erik Nordenankar’s self-portrait – which straddles the entire globe – was allegedly created by tracing the route taken by the specially-primed case on its 55-day journey around the world. The artist claimed he gave the case to DHL, the package delivery firm, with exact co-ordinates detailing the stages of its tour. When the package was returned to Stockholm he claimed he downloaded the GPS’s route memory to produce the enormous drawing above. It is composed of a single 110,00km-long line that passes through six continents and 62 countries. But after bloggers pointed out holes in Nordenankar’s claim, DHL confirmed that the artwork was an “entirely fictional project”.

 

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Michael Jackson is alive


Memorial Strangeness


Michael Jackson This is it backwards


Michael Jackson Death Hoax – LaToya’s best slip ups


MICHAEL JACKSON IS ALIVE, I SAW HIM IN PARIS !

 

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In June of 1972, a woman appeared in Cedar Sinai hospital in nothing but a white, blood-covered gown. Now this, in itself, should not be too surprising as people often have accidents nearby and come to the nearest hospital for medical attention, but there were two things that caused people who saw her to vomit and flee in terror.The first being that she wasn’t exactly human. she resembled something close to a mannequin, but had the dexterity and fluidity of a normal human being. Her face, was as flawless as a mannequins, devoid of eyebrows and smeared in make-up. From the moment she stepped through the entrance to when she was taken to a hospital room and cleaned up before being prepped for sedation, she was completely calm, expressionless and motionless. The doctors thought it best to restrain her until the authorities could arrive and she did not protest. They were unable to get any kind of response from her and most staff members felt too uncomfortable to look directly at her for more than a few seconds. But the second the staff tried to sedate her, she fought back with extreme force. Two members of staff had to hold her down as her body rose up on the bed with that same, blank expression. She eventually fought herself free, causing serious injuries to the staff members, then walked out of the hospital. There was never a sighting of her again.

 

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A living Wooly Mammoth shot by a German camera man in 1943 while being transported to Siberia.

 

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It seems almost incredible that Ursula Bogner’s musical talents should have remained undiscovered until now. Yet in view of her biography, this might have been just as inevitable. It was on a flight to Vilnius that I met Sebastian Bogner, Ursula’s son, who told me he was on a business trip for a pharmaceutical company. The usual small talk soon led to the topic of his mother Ursula, who also ‘liked to play around with synthesizers’, albeit purely on an amateur level and in a dedicated music room fitted especially for this purpose in the parental home. In the late 1960s, Ursula Bogner started to record her own music on reel-to-reel tapes. With some of these titles, we only found individual tracks of pieces recorded on a four-track-recorder – in these cases, I had to recombine the separate tracks to recreate the original piece. Unfortunately, I could not involve Ursula Bogner in the mixing process as she passed away in 1994. Invoking the original’s authenticity might seem insensitive, yet there was no other way to release them in their entirety. Ultimately, only three of the tracks featured on this CD/LP are such ‘reworkings’. All other titles were taken straight from the original reels. Covering a fairly short period of her creative career, they also convey a peculiar coherence in both form and content. A coherence that reflects her accessible, rhythmic and sometimes even ‘poppy’ side. Naturally, my own preference played a part in the selection process. All my personal favourites made it on the CD/LP, and whenever I listen to this collection, I invariably succumb to the titles’ light-hearted nonchalance. This might leave many hours of undiscovered gems, but a further compilation is already in the works.

 

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Miscellaneous

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

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Donald Charles Alfred Crowhurst (1932–1969) was a British businessman and amateur sailor who died while competing in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world yacht race. Crowhurst had entered the race in hopes of winning a cash prize from The Sunday Times to aid his failing business. Instead, he encountered difficulty early in the voyage, and secretly abandoned the race while reporting false positions, in an attempt to appear to complete a circumnavigation without actually circling the world. Evidence found after his disappearance indicates that this attempt ended in insanity and suicide.

 

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We found out recently, through conducting customer surveys, that the crust is overwhelmingly the most popular part of the pizza experience, and also that the majority of Domino’s devotees crave extra crust once they’ve finished their meal. These findings, along with our love of surprising people and pushing boundaries, led us to the Edibox. With every future Domino’s delivery, you’ll see the Edibox upgrade option: double the dough to enjoy alongside double the glorious garlic and herb dip. And the best bit? You won’t have to fight to fit that square box into a round bin – this is a waste-free dining experience.

 

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When three young men in Georgia claimed to have run over an alien in 1953, they caused a media frenzy. The 2ft hairless, creature with eerie, dark eyes was quickly confiscated and taken to Emory University to be examined. Experts revealed it was in fact a Capuchin monkey that had been made to look alien by having its tail cut off and fur its removed with depilatory cream. It was then the boys confessed that they’d come up with the idea over a card game. One of them bet his friends $10 he could get himself in the local paper within a week. He bought the poor monkey at a petshop, gave it a lethal dose of chloroform before removing its hair and tail.

 

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Nat Tate was an imaginary person, invented by writer William Boyd and created as “an abstract expressionist who destroyed ‘99%’ of his work and leapt to his death from the Staten Island ferry. His body was never found.” Boyd published a book about Nat Tate as a real biography. Gore Vidal, John Richardson (Picasso’s biographer), and David Bowie were all participants in the hoax. “Nat Tate” is a combination of the names of two London art galleries, the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery. Boyd and his conspirators set about convincing the New York glitterati (social elites) that the reputation of this influential abstract expressionist needed to be re-evaluated. Bowie held a launch party on April Fool’s Day eve, 1998, and read extracts from the book, while Richardson talked about Tate’s friendships with both Picasso and Braque.

 

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Ashley Casey Martin reportedly posted photos of herself with what appeared to be injuries — or at least what she thought appeared to be injuries. What she posted with the photos led to her post going viral. In fact, the use of makeup (in particular, black eyeliner and shadow) appears to be more than a little obvious. In fact, it looks similar to the eye makeup used by at least one member of the band The Misfits. Are they her inspiration for this harebrained hoax?

 

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This incredible video of an eagle swooping down and snatching a toddler with its talons from a Montreal park has been watched more than 1.2 million times. Social media verification experts at Storyful point to evidence of fakery, including Twitter user @thornae’s animated GIF showing inconsistencies with the eagle’s shadow. New Statesman writer Alex Hern also points out that “there is the slightly odd motion of the child after the eagle lets go of it. Not only does it carry on going up — which would just be momentum — but its ascent actually speeds up a bit before falling.”

 

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While cleaning up after the 1959 Tulare County Art League exhibit in Visalia, California, a group of janitors and maintenance men remarked to each that they could make “modern art” that was just as good. So the next year, they set out to prove it. They took a piece of scrap metal from which holes had been cut for door latches, and they painted it black. One of the group remarked that the metal vaguely resembled the shape and size of a cat. So they titled the piece “Peterfid Tomcat” — deliberately misspelling the word “petrified.” And as a finishing touch, they put a $350 price tag on their creation. Then they snuck their piece into the display area of the exhibit. Its presence raised no eyebrows. In fact, it was promptly awarded a ribbon for merit.

 

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This photo shows the Cooper family sitting around a table, just days after they had moved into their new family house in Texas. What the family was unaware of is that when the photograph was developed, the image of what appears to be a falling body emerged in the left hand side of the room. Although the photo has been cropped, hence the family not appearing in the centre of the image, it was examined by experts, and deemed to be genuine. But as film was so expensive in the 1950s, it was common for people to re-use film. This meant that two separate images could be developed on top of one another.

 

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A video apparently showing an cocky Italian teenager lying under a speeding train has tuned out to be a fake. The 26-second YouTube clip shows the prankster seemingly lying down on tracks in Perugia, Italy, before goading an oncoming locomotive as it races towards him. Seconds later he lies flat on the track as the train appears to whizz over him at high speed.

Watch it here

 

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In September, 1726 Mary Toft began to give birth to rabbits. The local surgeon, John Howard, responded to her family’s summons and hurried to Mary’s house where, to his amazement, he helped her deliver nine of the animals. They were all born dead, and they were actually rabbit parts rather than whole rabbits. Nevertheless, this didn’t lessen the amazing fact that she was giving birth to them. Then, when a famous London physician, Sir Richard Manningham, threatened that he might have to surgically examine Mary’s uterus in the name of science, she wisely decided to confess. She explained that she had simply inserted the dead rabbits inside her womb when no one was looking, motivated by a desire for fame and the hope of receiving a pension from the King.

 

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Since his suicide in 1991, the literary reputation of Jerzy Kosinski has continued to sink. At one time he was one of the most promising writers on the American scene, pounding out three hits in a row-the cult classic The Painted Bird, Steps (winner of the 1969 National Book Award), and Being There (filmed in 1980 with Peter Sellers in the starring role). With their grisly violence and a sexuality bordering upon the sadomasochistic, the books raised Kosinski into the ranks of America’s celebrity class. He appeared repeatedly on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, played the role of Lenin’s stooge Grigory Zinoviev in Warren Beatty’s film Reds, posed for the cover of the New York Times Magazine, and presented the Oscar for screenwriting in the spring of 1982, watched by 600 million people. Even as his star was ascending, however, Kosinski was all but finished as a writer. His last six books became progressively more trivial, self-absorbed, and unreadable; and there drew closer the day of his exposure as a literary fraud. In June 1982, the Village Voice revealed that Kosinski (for whom English was a second language) had made extensive use of translators and collaborators to write all his books, and then had concealed the fact. George Reavey, a poet who was embittered by his own lack of literary success, complained to anyone who would listen that he wrote The Painted Bird. But Reavey was only one of several who could have made the same complaint, and not only about The Painted Bird. Being There so closely resembled a prewar Polish bestseller called The Career of Nikodem Dyzma as to deserve the charge of plagiarism. Kosinski never fully recovered from the Voice’s expose. The remainder of his life, as he himself said, was spent running from it.

 

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Are certain of the fake actors of the Sandy Hook hoax directly connected to the Rockefeller cabal? They are, regardless, all fakes and hucksters, that is those who claim that the event was real and testify to the same. There are no exceptions. All the people involved at the most crucial levels in Sandy Hook are actors playing a pre-determined role.

 

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This photo seems to depict a man in what would be described as modern-day hipster clothing – in 1940s Canada. Sceptics were quick to attack the image, claiming it must be photoshopped, however, after much research it was confirmed that copies of the same picture are kept at the Bralorne Pioneer Museum in British Columbia, Canada. So is this guy a time-traveler or just a very modern looking 1940s man? Well its hard to tell. His clothes, sunglasses and modern looking camera could all have technically been made in 1940, however, historians have said it would have been extremely unusual to see a man walking around looking like this at the time. Kodak have confirmed that small cameras, like the one our ‘hipster’ appears to be holding were available in 1940, however were rare due to their high cost.

 

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Benjamin Vanderford is a 22 year old banker who in his spare time enjoys video art, as well as music; Ben is also known as The Great White Hype on the label Record Label Records. He is an experimental freestyle rap artist, who records all his rapping in one take Last August, Vanderford was seen being decapitated on a tape which was quickly picked up by an Islamic website and then disseminated around the net and western media. The fact that the entire event was staged by a group of San Francisco friends was only made apparent when Reuters showed up at Ben’s apartment complex. For his side, Ben faulted the mass media for publicizing the stunt without first verifying that the video was genuine.

 

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UFOs

 

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John Ernst Worrell Keely was a US inventor from Philadelphia who claimed to have discovered a new motive power which was originally described as “vaporic” or “etheric” force, and later as an unnamed force based on “vibratory sympathy”, by which he produced “interatomic ether” from water and air. Despite numerous requests from the stockholders of the Keely Motor Company, which had been established to produce a practicable motor based on his work, he consistently refused to reveal to them the principles on which his motor operated, and also repeatedly refused demands to produce a marketable product by claiming that he needed to perform more experiments.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi. ‘IYIP’ is one of those books I feel like everyone should read even though everyone should do whatever they want obviously. It’s kind of sublime though. I agree, that’s why I’m rarely drawn to films that have a premise, and more to films whose premises just state the setting or world of the films. Like ‘A family builds a haunted attraction in their home’, to use our film’s example. Something open-ended, and the film’s world is either charismatic to you or not. Exceptions being disaster films, I do love those. Failed goals, yes, totally. All of Zac’s and my films are about characters having ambitious goals and their failure to achieve them, and that carries through to the films themselves, although the films’ ‘failure’ is the point, not a mistake. When I get into that ROM world, I will share my thoughts. Thanks! Happy not having to celebrate Thanksgiving! ** _Black_Acrylic, It’s so good. I think you’ll really like it: ‘IYIP’. Ouch, I hope your dental surgery is as ‘whatever’ as that root canal I had a couple years ago. Sounded so intimidating but was just a mere slight hassle. Mickey Mouse ears! Dude, so extremely stylin’ (in my book)! ** Misanthrope, One can only hope their Walter Mitty-ish, power mongering dreams will clash with reality and practicality long before their fingers have a chance to get dirty. Happy Thanksgiving. I don’t know what the Greene Turtle is, obviously, but that extra ‘e’ on Green intrigues. Thanks about ‘Flunker’, man. ** James, I really recommend you go ahead and read the novel. I can’t begin to imagine you’ll be sorry. Nice you read the journal excerpts so closely. Never say never on publishing. You just never know. Who’d have thought my stuff would get in print. You can call me D-Dawg if you like. It would be a first, and that’s a plus. I think exploitation films are still in-process, but the term is too cancellable to be applied? I guess sub-shoulders hair would qualify as hippie-ish, although I guess if it’s just below the shoulders it’s maybe more skater-ish or, in some cases, ‘fem’? I wanted to make films as a teen, but then I took a filmmaking class in college and realised I didn’t have that talent on my own. Then for years and years I wanted to make the ‘Citizen Kane’ of porn films, but then Zac and I made our faux-porn or porn-addressing first film ‘LCTG’, and I realised I didn’t have that talent for either and that quite possibly no one does. Only time will tell is a cliche, but it’s true. Wait and see. I have two or three novels in manuscript that people sent me to read that I’ve been supposed to read for ages and haven’t, so I’ll read those. ‘Til Friday then, yes. ** Steve, No, I never had any contact with the Best Deaths guys. Happy your parents have company on Thanksgiving. ‘The End’, okay, interesting. I’ll look for it. ** Justin D, Read it. It’s great. I swear you’ll love it. I hope your Thanksgiving get together stays civil if not even, dare I hope, joyful? I’m so happy to be over here and have Thanksgiving as an increasingly distant memory. Never went well. I’ll listen to that track, thank you! Trauma Ray is a nice name. I’ll try to find some addictive track and share it back with you. Enjoy the … turkey, I guess? I’m near-lifelong veg, so I only ever ate the mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie myself. ** Steeqhen, Hi, S. Oh, cool about UCC. Score on the 10 books. Anything particularly mouth watering? High hopes and fingers scrunched/crossed re: you and the prestigious journal. I’m waiting to hear if Zac’s and my new film get into a prestigious film festival, so maybe we’ll give each other luck. Weather’s nice here if you like cold-ish weather. It’s not burdensome cold yet. Brisk. A little too wet, but hey. It used to get scary cold here years ago, but it hasn’t in recent years. There’s no predicting anymore though, I guess. Stay warm. Sit near the fireplace. ** Lucas, Oops. Right, just pass and don’t worry about it. I did that in high school, i.e. aim for D’s or maybe C’s because I wasn’t hoping to go Yale or Harvard or anything. Zac and I wandered all over the 10th and the Marais checking out as much art as time allowed. Highlight was the big Arte Povera show at Pinault Collection. Pretty great. Otherwise, some good stuff, nothing that blew our heads off. Amazing dinner though. If one is veg, Potager du Marais is kind of heaven. Ooh, a tiny novella. I like the sound of that. I’ve noted it. Do read the Welch novel. It’s so good, I’m sure you’ll like it. Today I’m going to check out the Xmas carnival in the Tuileries. The dark ride is cool because they just take a usual ‘scary’ dark ride and put Santa Claus hats on the mechanical monsters and play slowed down Xmas music instead of the usual Death Metal, and it’s usually pretty ridiculous aka fun. And this and that. How was your Thursday? ** HaRpEr, It’s a great favorite book. It’s one of mine. And, yes, the secretiveness is key to its greatness, and how the prose acts so innocent. I think the first, like, three-quarters of ‘A Voice Through a Cloud’ is astonishing, but then you can really feel him fading out and dying, which is interesting, but also sad to watch the glory sort of conk out. Wow, that’s fantastic about the Dahl/Welch punishment. Wow. ** Uday, Yes! The great and powerful and weak and tender and sneaky Mr. Welch! I lustrously await your email and blog ideas. Thank you so much again. Honored. I’m going to a Xmas Fun Fair today so I might actually frolick and not just mentally. ** Joe, Hey, Joe! I know, so great, that book. Singular. Yes, I am infinitely sorry for being out of touch. I’m kind of really mentally swamped in recent times. But I’m getting better. We’re possibly on the cusp of solving our film’s biggest problem, and, if that works, life and attentiveness will improve immensely, and if doesn’t, … I don’t even want to think about. Anyway, so sorry, really, and I’ll get to you as soon as I possibly can. I hope you and our surroundings are at their best. ** Right. Today I present a whole bunch of hoaxes to you, and the cool thing is that all of them predate AI, so no need to feel suspicious due to that. See you tomorrow.

Spotlight on … Denton Welch In Youth is Pleasure (1945)

 

‘There are some voices which reach out from the past because they feel so alive with mischievous humour and a startlingly singular point of view. Prose can strongly encapsulate such a sensibility when it’s written with as much feeling and precision as Denton Welch used to embody his 15 year-old character Orvil’s perspective. We follow him during his idle summer holiday spent at a hotel with his aloof father and older brothers. The slim novel “In Youth is Pleasure” was first published in 1945 and its author only lived for a few more years (dying when he was 33 years old), but this text is still breathing and giving us the side-eye.

‘Orvil does a lot of looking, a lot of observing and a lot of judging in this story. He could be classified as a voyeur as he watches from behind a bush some boys and their schoolmaster out on a peculiar boat trip where “Jane Eyre” is read aloud. In another scene he spies from the shadows his eldest brother making love to a woman. From a window he looks through another window at a man dancing to music and dressing after his ablutions. There’s a safety found in his solitary observations where he can silently appraise some people as “rather fat” or certain behaviour as “vulgar”. He seems to be equally harsh on himself as it is stated “He was afraid that now, at fifteen, he was beginning to lose his good looks.”

‘Through his gaze the world is transformed in a brutally bizarre and imaginative way. For instance, he describes a man’s flabby pecs as “so gay and ridiculous; like two little animated castle-puddings” and a woman’s breasts become “miniature volcanoes with holes at the top, out of which poured clouds of milky-white smoke, and sometimes long, thin, shivering tongues of fire”. Bodies morph into absurdities, but he also regards people with a kind of detached fascination so that we understand the sharp barrier between him and the world. When this barrier is removed it elicits terror and violence but also ecstatic jubilation. In doing so, Welch captures Orvil’s intensely solitary state where he longs to be with other people but is also repulsed by them.

‘Orvil’s father seldom figures in his days as there is a mutual disinterest and he’s wary of spending much time with his brothers. The figure he really longs for is his mother who died a few years ago, but he maintains vivid and sometimes disturbing memories of her. Two individuals he meets appear to be kinds of parental replacements. He forms a sweet attachment to his eldest brother Charles’ maternal friend Aphra. He also has a few encounters with the mysterious, nameless schoolmaster who seems to alternately fill the roles of father, teacher, persecutor and a fairy tale witch. Their interactions are so curious it makes me wonder if this is even a real person or a figure that Orvil has simply conjured as part of his imaginative games.

‘As Edmund White observes in his astute introduction to the new edition of this novel, Orvil is “strangely attracted to filth”. Though he has a desire for what is refined such as a trip to lunch at the Ritz he can’t help but envision the flowing filth of the city accumulating beneath the civilized surface. I think the allure of what’s repulsive isn’t so much about revelling in being gross, but an attraction for what’s transgressive as a way to question the values and morals of the society he feels detached from. He is also fascinated by and sees beauty in things which have been discarded or broken. The way he relates to and values very particular objects movingly demonstrates the distinctive way he sees the world.

‘Orvil has a unique aesthetic, but there’s also a poignancy in this depiction of a boy at a stage in his life where he has the sensibility of an adult and the imagination of a child. A lot of his wanderings include losing himself in fantasies where he can indulge in pretensions or revel in sado-masochistic desires. In one private game he wraps himself in chains and violently flogs his own back. In such mental spaces he can also playfully explore the boundaries of gender. He steals of a tube of lipstick to secretly paint his lips and other parts of his body. At other times he strips down naked outside as an act of transgression and liberation. The way that Denton writes about these experiences makes them feel more natural than they are perverse because they are freed from a general morality and merely reflect the proclivities of an utterly unique teenage boy. I absolutely adored this book and its tender spirit of youthful curiosity which casually dances through fantasies and nightmares.’ — Lonesome Reader

 

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Further

A VOICE THROUGH A CLOUD: Discovering Denton Welch
The art of Denton Welch, 1915–1948
Denton Welch @ goodreads
Austerity in colour
In Youth Is Suffering: Denton Welch and the Literature of Convalescence
Denton Welch: An Inventory of His Papers
‘No mouse or man after a hundred years’: a note on Denton Welch
Denton Welch: Wonder, and Wounds, in the Weald
Podcast: The Pleasures and Pains of Denton Welch
Bright glimpses of a lost existence
Beyond Gay: Denton Welch’s In Youth is Pleasure
That Rare Being, a Born Writer: DENTON WELCH
The journals of Denton Welch @ Internet Archive
Delighting in the gruesome
Writing Beyond the Grave: William Burroughs and Denton Welch
Through a Cloud
Buy ‘In Youth is Pleasure’

 

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Extras


The writings of Denton Welch Part I


A chat with Edmund White about Denton Welch’s “In Youth is Pleasure”


R.B. Russell recommends Denton Welch’s ‘In Youth is Pleasure’

 

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In his own hand

 

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from his Journals

 

8 January 1944
‘I have been ill now and in bed for over two weeks. That is why I have written nothing. And the new doctor gave me M. & B. tablets which, I suppose, made me feel even worse – black, dead, inhuman as a boulder – telescoped into myself till nothing could come forward.’

11 February 1944
‘This evening I bicycled to Penshurst. I climbed up the hill easily because I was with a man who worked at the railway and he talked all the time about the last war.

At the top, he said good-bye and I went on, on, down the hill past a soldier and the old neurotic home, ‘Swaylands’, which is now a military hospital. Two idle loosely hanging soldiers stood at the lodge waiting for something to be brought to them. They looked at me lazily and curiously as I sped past . . .

Nothing can make up for the fact that my very early youth was so clouded with illness and unhappiness. I feel cheated as if I never had that fiercely thrilling time when the fears of childhood have left one and no other thing has swamped one. The cheek is plump and smooth, the eye and the teeth are bright and one feels that one would lie down and die if these first essentials were ever taken away . . .

When I passed the ‘Fleur de Lys’ at Leigh, again I thought of Eric, for he told me that he used often to get tight there.

Curious to think that all this time while Eric worked on the farm, hated it, was utterly lonely, got tight as often as possible just for something to do, I was only a few minutes away in Tonbridge, walking the streets in my restlessness, trying to make myself iller and iller by any foolishness, wanting to die.

And we never met and all the years in between, seven, eight, we knew nothing of each other, they all melted away and wasted.’

21 April 1944
‘This morning I had a book, Planet and Glow-worm, from Edith Sitwell and a letter with her love. Then I went out in the sun and, feeling so much better, I lay on the top of a haystack and sunned myself and ate and actually fell asleep, and I forgot unhappiness and trouble and only felt in a daze with hot sun and cool wind on my face.

Edith mentioned my Horizon story which appeared on Wednesday. Cyril Connolly sent me fourteen guineas and said Hamish Hamilton wanted to know if I had a book of them in mind, because if so he’d like to publish it.

Lately I have a poem in the Spectator and two in Life and Letters and a story in New Writing and one in English Story.

Also I have sold two little pictures to a Mrs. Serocold

It is happiness to have things liked, but when I’m ill as I was on Wednesday and other days lately everything pales to nothing and I want to die more than anything on earth.

I think all I can do is to keep my work going as long as I can. And if I can no longer, then I will die . .

8 May 1944
‘When you long with all your heart for someone to love you, a madness grows there that shakes all sense from the trees and the water and the earth. And nothing lives for you, except the long deep bitter want. And this is what everyone feels from birth to death.’

9 April 1945
‘I have said nothing about In Youth is Pleasure, and it has been out since February 22nd (I think). So far everything is so much better than I thought it might be – good reviews, except for Kate O’Brien in the Spectator, and quite long ones and lots. It was all sold out before publication, so now they are bringing it out again.’

30 May 1945
‘When I read about William Blake, I know what I am for. I must never be afraid of my foolishness, or of any pretension. And whatever I have I must use, painting, poetry, prose – not proudly thinking it is not good enough and so lock it inside for fear or laughing, sneering.’

26 August 1945
‘I have been ill now and in bed for over two weeks. That is why I have written nothing. And the new doctor gave me M. & B. tablets which, I suppose, made me feel even worse – black, dead, inhuman as a boulder – telescoped into myself till nothing could come forward. Now I am better, and so the other state seems unbelievable, but it is waiting for me again.’

29 January 1947
‘There were frost flowers thick all over the panes this morning and the milk was frozen. The pipes were frozen too, and the snow thicker than ever. I have not got out of bed, and will not till I hear the pipes thawing. I have been writing here, then eating chocolate as a reward. The panes are all dripping and splashing in the sunshine now. Eric has gone for a walk in the snow, and I wish I could go too. It is the most snow I think I have known in England.’

 

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Book

Denton Welch In Youth is Pleasure
Penguin Books

‘First published in 1945, In Youth Is Pleasure recounts a summer in the life of 15-year-old Orvil Pym, who is holidaying with his father and brothers in a Kentish hotel, with little to do but explore the countryside and surrounding area. ‘I don’t understand what to do, how to live’: so says the 15-year-old Orvil – who, as a boy who glories and suffers in the agonies of adolescence, dissecting the teenage years with an acuity, stands as a clear (marvelously British) ancestor of The Catcher In The Rye’s Holden Caulfield. A delicate coming-of-age novel, shot through with humour, In Youth Is Pleasure, has long achieved cult status, and earned admirers ranging from Alan Bennett to William Burroughs, Edith Sitwell to John Waters. ‘Maybe there is no better novel in the world that is Denton Welch’s In Youth Is Pleasure,’ wrote Waters. ‘Just holding it my hands… is enough to make illiteracy a worse crime than hunger.’’ — Penguin Books

Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** jay, My pleasure. If only that film were as good as its premise, but the lacks are fun, true. I wonder if the Best Deaths’ cheesiness is deliberate or not. The models having fun is certainly the priority. There’s something kind of heterosexual about their stuff that made me curious. It has this closeted vibe that’s definitely part of its appeal, to me, I mean. ‘Studio amateur’ is where it’s at these days, yeah. Thanks a lot for the link, I’ll check that out. And I’ll set my mind to skim mode. Real Only Mind is quite a good moniker. Enjoy Wednesday by whatever means. ** Misanthrope, Oh, shit, I feared so. We seem to be about to be in the grip of a bunch of sadistic idealists. Here’s hoping the whole thing collapses before it begins. Are you off for Thanksgiving now? Isn’t it tomorrow? Isn’t it always on a Thursday? I don’t even remember. ** James, Apparently. I think there are still people like Wishman but they don’t get much further than some tinily known spot on YouTube. Uh, I don’t know, post-wise I just keep my eyes open and follow my instincts. The material is out there, it just takes a lot of searching and saving and copying and pasting and stuff. Laborious but not such a challenge otherwise. Clay Anker … oh, I thought you meant long like hippie-long. Cadinot’s early porns are semiotics based and/or referencing. Few others that I know of. I’m very into writing for films right now. It’s a big challenge. I like that it’s just an initial ingredient and that when you’re writing a script you’re always imagining what it will be when it’s fleshed out and trying to write it accordingly and somewhat subserviently to the upcoming visuals. Zac’s shy, but he reads the blog. I wrote very shitty fiction for years before it very gradually started getting less shitty and then hopefully non-shitty. Patience + obsessiveness. I just read those books that were in the post the other day, and I haven’t started anything new yet. It doesn’t sound like some kind of fetishization necessarily. ** Lucas, Hi. It’s almost like the balance finds you rather than vice versa, if that makes any sense. As a dude who does or tries to do (and needs to do) heavy pre-structuring before I write fiction, I hear you. D+, eek, but oh well, right? Dust in the wind? I’ve never read a novel in German, of course, so I don’t know what that’s like or if I would like the German writers I like as much if I read their originals. But probably. Anyway, I just think of the obvious, like Bernhard, Sebald, … Eating good is key, I think, so I hope you’re treating yourself. I’m fine, going to spend the day seeing art and eating at Paris’s great vegan restaurant Potager du Marais. Score. You, yours? ** seb 🦠, seb! How great to see you and your green blotch! Welcome out from under the boulder. I’ve been mostly pretty good with the usual glitches. Sorry about your break-up, but happy that its ass is whomped. The name Ivo de Jager looks familiar. I’ll check. Huh. Dos games, nice. Tempting. I’m just whacking away at my Switch these days. There are a handful of sites making staged death videos, but they’re all hetero and mega-misogynist. Haha, your friend’s description of France is hilarious. I don’t know what she looks like, obviously, but I will do my best to bump into her. Thanks, bud. ** HaRpEr, Hey! Very interesting. ‘Straight men have started being weird around me’: my friend who I mentioned the other day said the exact same thing. Me too, it’s gotten so coffee is just one of my bodily fluids. Very excited by that ‘your interior monologue is one incredibly long sentence …’ description. Wow, and as a fellow former acidhead, I think I know exactly what you mean. Beautiful. Yes, the art of the Xmas bouche is taken very seriously by the patisseries here. A good batch again this year, as you’ll see. I’m saving up my euros. ** iwishiwasanon, Hey. Maybe I’ll try to carry myself like a cool guy when I’m out and about now. I’m not sure I know how, but I’ll figure it out. Shit accent: I think another reason I haven’t tried to learnt French is that hearing American tourists here speak French or try to while the French people they’re talking to cringe is massively embarrassing to me. I don’t keep a journal, no. I don’t read on the metro either, no. On the metro I just surreptitiously study everyone around me, and I find that quite exciting. I’ll of course let you know when the film shows in Paris. We’re working on something. Yes, you can write to me at [email protected]. I hope your day (and mine) stops being rained on before too long. ** Steeqhen, Oh, cool. It’s fun. I’m stuck on a very tough Boss right now — a giant evil origami turtle — but I’ll kill him somehow. Um, the conference thing was in 2010, I think? It was sponsored by University College Cork and it happened at some place called Granary Theater? I just put my email address in my comment just above, so you can use it. Thank you, I look forward to it. ** Uday, Not to be confused, for sure. In the States, people like to name their cows Doris, I don’t know why. Yes, I would be happy and grateful if you want to make a post for the blog. That would be great. Thank you, U! ** Okay. There are few if any novels written in English that are as beautiful as ‘In Youth is Pleasure’, and if you haven’t read it, strong encouragement to do that. See you tomorrow.

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