*
p.s. Hey. I’m kind of rattled by the fires in Los Angeles, but let’s do this. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Bright Eyes, yes, I knew it sounded familiar. As does love’s current quote, but … hm. Support the power of women use the power of man support the flower of women use the word fuck the word is love, G. ** Steeqhen, Hey. I wrote to you shortly ago, hopefully see you soon. I’ve never been to Dublin, but I can believe that. My French friends say there’s something very French about the Paris suburbs, but I’m not French enough to see it. On the other hand, something will happen, and I’ll say ‘That’s so French’, and my French friends will say ‘No it’s not’. ** kier, Hi, kier. Cool, a library doing its job. I had a scarf, but I left it somewhere, so I’ve been trying to survive without it, but the winter became too wintery, and I realised I’m a wuss without a scarf. Humbling. Those sound like challenging circumstances in which to make a show, but if anyone can, you can. Exciting! Again, like I said on FB, I’m so thrilled with what you did with my gif novel. It opens up a new way of presenting them that I hadn’t thought about. Thank you again so much. Alight, I will extra specially try to see ‘Hannibal’. No, no snow. It’s been cold enough for it, but the rain is somehow still sneaking through. Grr. Yesterday? I had a coffee with Martin and Karolina who do Infinity Land Press and met the writer Audrey Szasz who was with them, and I met up with my friend Alex, also visiting from the UK, and I have to get a visa so I was figuring out how to do that, and I was stressing out about the LA fires, which are growing and not all that far from where I live there at the moment. So, big day, I guess. Fierce but not to the point of breaking your ribs-style hug from me. ** Misanthrope, Right, I’ve been a Timberlands guy for, hm, two years now? They make walking feel more substantial. Okay, well, heavy emphasis on the leeriness if you want my opinion. ** jay, Hi, jay. Me too, about charismatic but non-informative dialogues. They’re tricky to make, but I’m always trying. The Ethel Cain is on my hard drive, and now I just have to poke it. ‘Hitman’, ah, so you’re shooting people in those locations or looking for someone to shoot, I suppose. I knew there had to be some kind of narrative. Any ‘Autoportrait’ feedback yet? ** _Black_Acrylic, Wow, -16, that’s serious. I don’t think we’ve gotten below -6, and that’s bone freezing enough. I’m gonna buy another scarf. ** James, I like commas. I don’t like semi-colons. I avoid them when I write like the veritable plague. Ugly disruptive little things. Ah, so your parents are money-over-comfort types with at least a slight sadistic streak. Um, I can only remember maybe two times in my life when I’ve felt guilty for something I did. Hopefully that means I’m mostly really nice and not mostly really callous. I hate pubs. I think I’d like London a whole lot more than I do if going to the pub wasn’t a habit that people there don’t want to break. Hm, I think my gaydar is pretty good. I’m a fairly objective person as opposed to being a horndog whose evaluations are poisoned by wishful thinking. It sounds like university is a good place for you, definitely. At least a good starting place. So, good, glad you’re heading there. I wouldn’t say Catwalk walks are fancy. Or maybe a fancy-ish version of military walking? Okay, your teacher sounds very promising indeed. You wrote and posted a story! How exciting! I’ll read it greedily, but I’m slow, so give me a bit. Cool! Everyone, the mighty James has published a short fiction by him on his substack that you can go read. I think this our first opportunity to peek into the talent of our friend James, so it’s pretty exciting. Anyway, read it if you will, and do so here. Congrats! Later gator. ** Tyler Ookami, ‘All Hail the New Puritan’ is great. Does that count as drag? I too feel like I was spoiled by the work of amazing artists who worked with drag as an element of their work: Ethel Eichelberger, Vaginal Davis, Leigh Bowery, in addition to the people you mention, all of whom I’m a big fan of. It seems like drag as a form has become so focused on fashion/attire, ironic interpretations of pop songs, and cattiness/’tude in recent times. There don’t seem to be many drag artists using the form to disrupt themselves or their audiences. But I guess that’s the case with most performative art in general nowadays, I don’t know. Anyway, agreed. I don’t know Seiko Oomori, but that sounds really interesting, and I’ll chase it. Thanks! ** Uday, Hi. A political year. Well, good timing. Much needed. I think your approach sounds very reasonable and theoretically productive, yes. My friends seem to be okay re: the fires so far, but they’re growing fast, and a number of my LA friends had to evacuate over this past night, so it’s pretty scary. ** Cletus, Hey! It’s a beauty, that ILP Baudelaire book, yeah. I’m well, thank you, and you too, I hope and so it seems. We can maybe compare notes about ‘Lorelei’. I’m about, mm, a few days away from starting it. ** Charalampos, Hi. Like Barbara Pam in a way, yes, but, mm, more distanced or something. Efteling will happen, I’m not sure when yet. RP’s nose isn’t it, but it’s in the general area. Nice thinking about your drawings. I presume you’re drawing up a storm? Oh, sure, Nelson Sullivan’s videos are great and kind of invaluable. It would be really great if they were put online. I think they’re in the NYU archives, so I don’t know if that’ll happen. I’m in one of them for a fraction of a second. Love from P-ville. ** HaRpEr, Hi. I think my favorite Green is ‘Party Going’. Have you read that one? There was that era when the UK was producing the best writers in the world, the Green-Compton-Burnett-Quin-Rhys-Pym-etc. era, 95% of them women writers. What an amazing phase. And the vast majority of them were heavy on dialogue use, which is very interesting. Death stare because the lecturer knew you were right but was afraid to get his pre-planned plan derailed, my guess. The block of text has to explain the accompanying poem? Yuck. It can’t extenuate or obfuscate it in the guise of clarifying? ** Justin D, Hi. I’m most looking forward to seeing Will Guthrie, Entract, and a performance of Éliane Radigue’s ‘Occam’. I’ve been meaning to check out ‘Dragula’. Dominick recommended it to me ages ago. Okay, I’m going to make the move. Thank you. Do fill me in if you’re interestingly filled. Or even if not. Yes, the LA fires are extremely concerning. It’s getting very bad. ** dwt, Hey there, lovely to see you! Thank you so much about the posts. A few monthly freak outs sound doable. That’s about my rate, I think, and I’m serviceable. Totally agree with you about ‘The Lighthouse’. I need to find someone IRL who I respect who liked it that I can have a serious argument with. Take care! ** Lucas, Hi. I loved ‘Funeral Rites’, and it wouldn’t shock me if it influenced me. At one point I had to reject Genet because I didn’t want to write like him. The only argument I ever had with Kathy Acker was when she and I were on a panel together during my anti-Genet phase, and I went off about what I disliked about Genet’s stuff, and she got very upset that I would dare to criticise Genet, and she told me later that she had wanted to kill me. ** Dan Carroll, Hi. I’m glad you came back. The link worked. Thank you! I’ll investigate it and your work and your thoughts. The paintings at the top look great at a quick glance so far. Yeah, needless to say, max out the unemployment time while you’ve got it, which, you know, you’re doing. Enjoy the sun. We’ve had about, oh, 7 minutes of sun so far this year. My favorite thing about winter is how the sun becomes a valuable friend. Happy Thursday! ** Right. Today you get a fairly simple but ideally worthy thing to look over and consider. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
*
Nice post! So the library I’m working at is being renovated and we have a temporary pop-up right in a little shop area. Jackpot Records across from me has been quietly putting out killer reissues on their own little record label. So today I took a walk at lunch to avoid a chatty coworker and ended up coming back with a killer repress of the first Silver Apples record. They’ve done a wide variety of cool shit but I was super stoked to see Dr. John’s Gris Gris … one of my favs and my copy is scratched to shit.
Hi!!
My brother collects LPs, so this post makes me feel all warm and sentimental.
Obviously, L.A. has never been my home, so the current situation must be hitting us differently, but I so, so hope they manage to stop the flames as soon as possible. It’s devastating.
Love sent you some Hole lyrics yesterday, from “Reasons to Be Beautiful.” And yours today – Sonic Youth! Yes!!
Love is a mind control, Od.
Oo, revolving motion, so satisfying… I’m a square but even I have to admit snorting coke off a spinning record at least looks cool. I spy a Daft Punk record, I’ve been listening to them this morning. I spy an Arctic Monkeys record, too – their first two albums are their best, before they started trying to be Americans. I wish I had a gramophone. I spy a Kanye album too! That animated record player looks familiar. I’m a big fan of record scratches in music, I love a good wiki-wiki noise. I see Kendrick’s best album, too. And above that, a scene from Moonrise Kingdom, which I loved, I watched it with my grandmother as we ate nuts and drank cider. These are some seriously hypnotic GIFs.
Vinyl as a form of media – not sure how I feel. I have a record player and a Miles Davis and Pink Floyd album, but I still haven’t set either up, as they were an unexpected birthday present. It’s an expensive hobby, and is the music quality really that much better? I’m fine with my .mp3s. I don’t even see the fuss about .FLACs, either.
The fires are obviously not a good thing, and fingers crossed they will soon stop being (bad).
Hurray for commas – I’m afraid to say I’m a semicolon junkie. I try to avoid them in my fiction, but in essays I abuse the everliving shit out of them. No sentence too long, no syntax too dense… any essay I write is Clauseville, population: far too high. I just slip into using them out of habit. I’m addicted.
Money-over-comfort it seems. My family are relatively well-off and yet the town they chose to raise me in does not always seem like the kind of place for affluence. Parents say it’s good that I grow up in a crappy small town because then it makes me want to explore, and that I’d hate wherever I grew up – but to me, they’re full of bullshit, on this. This town sucks full-time for free. It’s like a slave no one even wants, and not cute, or a boy, because it’s an ugly (sub)urban environment. Sigh.
It’s real sick, enacting your sadism by making your child grow up in a town he hates for 17 years. Playing the long game. The bastards.
Talk of guilt makes me remember sooo many things I feel guilty about. I do not mean to dredge up unpleasant memories. You seem – and most others report you as being really nice, so the evidence is in your favour. Those who see you as callous certainly seem less common, or are at least less verbal.
I don’t go to the drinking kind of pub, because, I don’t really like drinking, but much of my life has been spent having lunches in pubs on days out. And that’s an experience I quite like.
London scares and disgusts me. I’ve only been there like, twice in my life. Far too many people. Quite dangerous. However – Chinatown, good god the food there is incredible. I have had my greatest birthday lunches in London’s Chinatown.
My gaydar is terribly silent over here. Life is so boringly ungay at the moment.
Your objectivity showed through in a comment I read a few posts back in which you were talking to someone about how you consider pornography.
Sometimes it’s hard to go full libido mode, I find that a lot of porn forces the viewer to confront how pathetic they actually are, or that the porn itself is just so totally ridiculous that it forces the viewer to become self-aware. And astute self-awareness is so incredibly unarousing.
Some porn I have found is just. Like. The kind that makes me need to close the laptop and sit like Rodin’s The Thinker to wonder why the fuck said porn was made. Seeing a guy get fucked in a ‘Please be patient, I have autism’ cap and describing the other guy’s dick as ‘poggers’ was a pretty jarring moment for me. Seeing internet/meme culture infiltrate real life sexual intimacy… thought-provoking, for sure.
I have been told by my parents since the start of secondary school that my brain is better-suited to university (and my ex history teacher said my coursework was completed ‘to an undergraduate standard’), and my family acknowledge and outright have told me that I am ‘not normal’ – they believe I’m more likely to find ‘my tribe’ at university. I.e., people who like literature the way I do. Of which there are basically none in this town. Also other gay people hopefully, which aren’t teenage girls which are loud and obnoxious and who intrusively probe me regarding my sexuality/’love life.’
I am glad, too. Uni can’t come soon enough. But 1) financially I’ll be screwed probably and 2) I still have to get A Levels out the way and not fuck those up.
There is something military about catwalks, isn’t there? A sense of stringency and uniformity, definitely. Now I want to see soldiers on the runway and drag queens on military parade.
Will next be seeing the teacher tomorrow. Almost the weekend. Thursdays suck too. Argh T_T
Oo, thank you an awful lot for your nice words on the story. I’m sure you have a lot of things on your to-read list at the moment, new year and all. I hope this comment conveys nonchalance and does not betray my outrageous giddiness at receiving encouragement from Dennis Cooper, but I’m not trying to sound all grovelling and ingratiating and idolising etc. So I’ll just leave it at a thanks! A very sincerely meant one.
Still have no idea how you embed links in these comments.
In a while, crocodile.
Hey chilly D:)) the wildfires look so fucking terrifying, i can’t imagine what that’s like for the people there. i really hope it stops soon and won’t reach your place. must be surreal for you to see from a distance. nice stack today. do you have a record player? i haven’t in years, but i really regret getting rid of it. having some analog way of playing music would be healthy for me i think. it’s been pretty cold here, we had -12 degrees last week, but now thankfully we’re just a little below zero. there’s tractors all the city trying to scoop the massive amounts of snow into giant heaps here and there so the roads are traversable. if that’s a word.
what are you getting the visa for? i’m at the gallery again, wearing an insane amout of clothes. today i’m gonna do a bunch of smaller detail things around the exhibition, because the installation is starting to come together pretty well. then going to a few openings tonight with friends. i’m so happy you like the gif-presentation so far, it does work really well i think too! how was your thursday?
kisses from someone who will gladly take a few bruised ribs for a high quality hug,xxx
oh and happy birthday when you read this!!!!
Ah, pretty post. Reminds me of the ‘records’ one you made a while back in, like, June. I don’t have a record player i.e I don’t listen to vinyl, but I have a decently sized CD collection. It’s mostly classic rock/60s stuff. Wow, that’s a really interesting anecdote about your anti-Genet phase. What did you go off about that you didn’t like about him? Do you still feel that way? Wanting to kill you is a bit far but I can see Acker feeling frustrated, I guess. I really liked the part where she talks with Genet in ‘Blood And Guts in High School.’ I’m feeling randomly sort of depressed today but I’m trying to write a new little prose thing. My brain must be fried because I’m like really questioning my capabilities again but I think I’m doing fine, actually. It’ll be tomorrow when you’re reading this, so happy birthday, Dennis:-). See you then.
I have a fondness for vinyl as you may well know. The majority of my collection is made up of 12″ singles but there’s a few LPs dotted around the place, that’s for sure. One I will play today is this 2019 reissue of Mort Garson – Mother Earth’s Plantasia that seems good for the soul. Green vinyl too, and I would make a gif out of that if I could.
Hey Dennis,
It was lovely to meet you in person, you’re as interesting as I believed you to be. Thanks for the illustration, definitely going into the collage!
I used to be into collecting records, but prices have hiked up and I found myself more of a CD collector, though apparently they too are coming back into fashion.
I forgot to mention my friend Cian today, he’s a big fan of yours too, from Cork. When I told him I’d be meeting up with you he was in awe. Your Cork fanbase is slowly, but surely, growing!
Hey Dennis, hope you’re doing okay given everything. Records are cool, but CDs are so much more crazy, I think. The portable CD player I had growing up was so emblazoned with warnings and disclaimers (“CAN CAUSE PERMANENT BLINDNESS, etc.) that it sort of became a useful but terrifying object to me – like a nuclear power plant, or something. I don’t know if record players have enough weird moving parts and lasers to facilitate that kind of thing, for me at least.
Super cool you met Audrey Szasz, she’s so incredible – I particularly thought her work in Philip Best’s “Human Rights” was like, the best “serious” sci-fi I’ve read for ages, although that whole collection is so overwhelmingly good that it’s hard to actually make headway in. Did she wear that usual Addams Family-ish get-up, or was she a bit more (trying to think of the word) … normal looking? I always really wonder that about artists with really specific looks/aesthetics…
“Autoportrait” has been really well recieved actually – we had a great conversation about it while I cooked my dinner, about how comforting it was to recognise incredibly banal parts of yourself in other people/bits of writing, he had some really interesting things to say. As a kind of reciprocation for him reading that, we ended up watching a really funny anime he likes about a group of friends in school that has these like, four or five minute repeated hypnotic physical comedy interludes with zero progression, in camera or plot or content. Anyway, super happy birthday for tomorrow, best wishes!
Sorry to hear about the fires, hope they’re steering clear of your neck of the woods. If u want some vinyl (or books) to add fuel to the fires (or replace ones lost), let me know and i’ll send you some. Was also wondering if u’d be interested in blurbing the next Calamari book, think u’d dig it: https://calamaripress.com/For_disobeying.htm
+ sasha wd be super geeked out if you did. I tried to email u but seems it’s an old email, not sure what your current email is.
happy birthday!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DENNIS! I hope it’s a good one! These GIFs are very hypnotic. It does seem like physical media is having a bit of a renaissance at the moment. I totally get it—a tactile experience really can’t be beat.
I asked ChatGPT to write a birthday greeting in the style of you, and this is what it came up with:
I guess it’s your birthday. It’s strange to think about that because who are you really? Just another year older, the same as the last, the same as the one before. Time’s funny like that—it piles up without ever letting you breathe. But hey, I guess today’s as good as any to remind you that you’re still here, still breathing, even if you’re not sure why.
Maybe this year will be the one where you find something, or maybe it’ll just pass like all the others—empty, full of noise that drowns out the silence you’ve been trying to get to. Whatever happens, I hope you remember that even in the mess of it all, you’re still someone worth noticing.
Happy birthday. I think you know what I mean.
My conclusion: AI is garbage.
Dennis, Indeed. Yeah, I just have a hard time cutting off 23 years of friendship, you know? Otherwise, she’s been a very good friend. This is out of the blue. I don’t know what’s going on. I guess I’d rather just have it out eventually and get past it—or not—and let the chips fall where they may. Something like this comes up again and I’ll confront her and hash it out one way or another. Really, if she’s decided not to be supportive, especially after having been over-the-top supportive, then I’ll have no problems being done with her.
And I thank you for listening to me and giving me your opinion on the matter. You know that matters to me. Now to get a little weird: remember when my brother died and you were like, well, I’ll be your big brother? I’ve always thought of you like that since and have always appreciated your support and friendship.
I’m the same re: my Doc Martens. The original air soles, right? I put them on and can walk for days. I wish I’d gotten them earlier.
LPs! I need to get a regular record player and get some LPs. I got Kayla one for Christmas years ago and she’s loved it. They rock.
testing
Great! I can post here without a VPN.
The scale of the fires is so overwhelming and horrifying. After watching news footage of them, I can’t stop crying. My best wishes for your friends there and the safety of your apartment building. Have you been able to get in touch with the people you know in Los Angeles?
I’m continuing work on the BRAIN ROT ep, but the songs aren’t really coming out the way I originally intended. I wonder if sampling TikTok memes means that the music will be instantly dated. I plan to write a song with slow, stately strings and high-pitched voices saying “rizz” and “skibidi.”
Tjena Dennis!
I just want to take the moment to say that I just love this blog. Although I’ve gotten worse at commenting here, since I’ve had so little time lately, I go on here every morning and get in a good mood. And to answer your questions about my New Year’s Eve: I partied with some sketchy ass liquor that we got from some dealer IN A FUCKING PLASTIC BAG, IM NOT KIDDING YOU. It’s a really long story, and I was dumb to even drink that shit (it could have been methanol or something) but I think the problem was just that I drank very much in very little time because I was in a pretty bad mood. And yes, I hope I’ll get to meet the girl who I accidentally ghosted again.
By the way, today at Zita I worked with a girl who told me she also worked at stiftelsen filmform. She didn’t think I would know what it was, but since you told me about the fact that you held a screening of ‘Permanent Green Light’ with them, I was like “oh my god you were the people that showed Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley’s film here a couple years ago” and she was so shocked I knew about it, since I was like 13 then haha. She was actually one of the people that arranged it! Then I told her that you told me that you really enjoyed that whole event, and she was so happy. Then we went on to talk about your books, so it was a really good day at work.
Have you watched the Evangelion rebuilds btw? I just rewatched them, and I actually adored them this time around, especially the last one. It got my mom to cry actual floods, haha!
Hope everything is great with you. Been up to anything creative and fun lately? How is January treating you?
xo, Måns
Can’t say I’m that into records lately. My bf got me a whole record/cd/radio/bluetooth player for my birthday a couple years ago, and I’ve gotten really into cds. Mostly because all vinyl these days is like 30$ and you can still find good CDs in bargain bins. I don’t have to flip them every 20 minutes either. I think the CD bubble is gonna burst soon, though. I see some new releases being sold at like $15+.
This morning in my alley I also found these two seven-foot tall white panels of that particle board/fake ikea wood stuff, so I’ve been painting on them out on the porch. It’s by far the biggest canvas I’ve had which is exciting. It’s keeping me out in the fresh air, too. I’m pretty good at slipping into the winter season and the early dark, maybe because I was born around that time, but I’ve been getting up at like 1pm lately so the sun’s been slipping away quick.
Hey, oh damn happy birthday! With the fires and all I know this must be a crazy time right now, but I’m manifesting you the calmest of days through the screen.
‘Party Going’, no I haven’t gotten to that one yet unfortunately. That’s supposed to be his best from what I hear, or at least a particular favourite among many. I got a lot of his books from a charity shop one time but they had some random early ones.
Speaking of things I haven’t read, I’ve had ‘Berg’ by Ann Quin for some time now. I really don’t know why I haven’t gotten to that yet. Also, interesting that you bring up Barbara Pym, I read ‘Excellent Women’ some time ago now and thought it pretty amusing but wasn’t particularly compelled to read another. Should I rectify that?
Oh yeah, that period spawned a lot of great writers in the UK. And yes, most of them were women. I wonder what was in the air to make so many greats. I think it’s that eccentricity goes in and out of favour or something, although I don’t exactly know what I mean by that. The Bright Young Things were in a kind of aristocratic bubble where being an eccentric was kind of like a status symbol, but the UK has had its fair share of working class eccentrics as well. I don’t really know what I’m talking about but it’s really interesting to think about. Jean Rhys and people were definitely heavily influenced by European writers, particularly French. I do really like that start of the century boom of interesting writers just before modernism. Firbank for example. I think I do like those in-between moments a lot generally. Denton Welch is like my favourite writer probably and he was writing in the 40s which in my opinion generated a lot of great writers (the aforementioned as well as Jane Bowles, Christina Stead, Genet, and so on) but it’s never looked back on that fondly from a critical standpoint. Probably because it was a terrible time to be alive. But in my opinion, who better is there to observe wartime from the perspective of than the bedridden and the people who stayed at home?
Oh yeah, for the chapbook I thought of doing a ‘Pale Fire’ thing where the narrator of the descriptors is misreading the poems and thinks that the poems are about something they privately discussed with the author. We’ve been instructed in the past to not do anything to ‘bamboozle’ the markers. In the past I had a friend who wanted to submit a corrupted file and then would write a fake email to whoever was marking it while pretending to be a character they made up to say that the file is cursed or something and would give them pdf files of a lost manuscript they apparently found which may help them solve the puzzle. But they weren’t allowed to do that.
I’ve been collecting records since I was seven years old. My first was a 7 inch of Paul McCartney doing ‘The Frog Chorus’ which is from a Rupert Bear movie. I was in a charity shop and made my mum get it for me. My record player and records are at my parents house, so I haven’t really been buying them lately. They get more expensive by the year, though. My collection has never been that indicative of my taste anyway because I was just seeing what I could get from the thriftiest of record stores and junk shops.
Happy birthday Dennis! Hope you have a great one. Tried to comment a second ago but I think the site ate it.
Re: your last message (I know I comment super infrequently lol), yeah, the week leading up to a test I pretty much do nothing but study. Med school is a lot of work. I also happened to catch a terrible stomach bug this week that put me a few days behind, so I’m gonna be playing catch-up this weekend. Efteling looks really nice. Did you ever decide when to go? One of the more enviable things about living in Europe to me is how easy it is to travel to other countries.
About records, years ago I lived with an ex who had a fancy audiophile setup so I used to listen to vinyl pretty often, but now it’s too much work and expense. I mostly buy CDs now, partially because used CDs are cheap and also because CDs (and tapes to a lesser extent) are kind of the standard format for extreme metal nowadays. I also have an old collection of pirated FLACs that I’ve just started adding more stuff to recently. Do you listen to a lot of physical music?
Very sorry to hear about the LA fires. I hope everything turns out okay for you and yours.
Oh nice. I’ll probably start L and Laser Eyes pretty soon as well. I need a new game to play. I’m stuck on Elden Ring right now :(. Also most likely going to be snowed in for the next few days so it could be a nice distraction. I need to watch some of those Strand movies from a previous post. As far as books go I finished Baudelaire letters now im on to SHAME. Great so far. My copy included some postcards which are very cool. They freaked out my partner who is not faint of heart so that was interesting. I had to put one out of eye sight haha. Gotta find somebody to send them to which might be a fun quest in and of itself.