The blog of author Dennis Cooper

Carrie McEnroe presents … Baked

Hi everybody. I love DC’s. I’m a designer and baker of macabre cakes as well as a collector of images of them who lives in Beckley, West Virginia. Dennis has kindly allowed me a day to share my strange passion with you. I hope you will enjoy the show. About a fourth of the cakes presented today were designed and made by me and the rest are personal favorites I found online during my relentless searches. My thanks go to all of you fine people. Sincerely, Carrie

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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p.s. Hey. A generous and very talented DC’s reader with an ultra-keen eye and an innate sense of what this blog needs has brought here back to complete life today with this glorious guest-post which I dare say you would have to be blind not to luxuriate within, no? Do that, please, and send some reactions Carrie’s way via the commenting arena, please. Thank you so, so much, Carrie! ** Ferdinand, Hey. Well, I’m just doing what any viewer of your booktube would spontaneously do. Ha ha, thanks for linking me to those tubes about my stuff. I’ll go self-indulge in a short bit. And thanks for linking folks up the Focus Creeps films. Hope all is spectacular with you. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, D. A late but sincerest happy birthday to you! Please keep the early 70s warm for me in your spare time. I don’t know Editions FVW, no, but that doesn’t mean anything. I just tried to find a website for them, but couldn’t find anything. I’ll ask friends who know French publishing a lot better than I do, and, if I hear anything, I’ll let you know. ** Sypha, Hi. Yeah, I went back and found the Joshi thing. Curious. Everyone says, and I believe them, that the French translations of Poe make his work much, much more fascinatingly written than the English originals, and, hence, the great love of his stuff among great writers in France. I like Poe, obviously, but his writing itself doesn’t interest me much. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Dourif does a fair amount of TV, so that ups the count. Pot cafes are only in the cities, and not in all that many of them. In the park, nah, not even alcohol. It was a Monday in the dead of winter so there were no lines at all, happily. I’ll see what I can make of your piece on the CMBYN actor. Everyone, Here are Steve’s thoughts on Michael Stuhlbarg’s CMBYM performance. Branca is still plenty talked about and respected and performed here in France at least. No, my interest in Tyler isn’t jailed within his narratives about sex and violence in fact. That wouldn’t be enough for me. I like the general layout and sonics and etc. of his work. ** Misanthrope, Hi. I don’t Google search myself, or extremely rarely. My big Dennis Cooper google search competitors are ‘Dennis Cooper the Harmaniac’ and the Dennis Cooper who wrote ‘Miami Vice’ and ‘Chicago Hope’ and other series and who I think directs kind of mainstream-y movies. I’ll probably search ‘PGL’ occasionally though once its life gets going. Yeah, the Memo thing is helpful., though I mostly use mine to write down my friends’ door codes. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. The Dutch adventure was gigantic fun, thanks! Yeah, I love those Terence Hannum drawings. I think I did a post about or heavily using them on the dead blog. I should go look for it. Ha ha, based on my non-impressed watching of a single episode of ‘Stranger Things’, it must be pretty bad. ** Jamie, Gooie dag, Jamie! Trip was great, thanks, pal. There were two new rides since I was last there. ‘Symbolica’, a pretty amazing technical feat of a trackless dark ride where you can choose one of three completely different versions of the same ride: Music, Heroes, or Treasure. I did all three, of course. Heroes was the best. And an excellent new roller coaster. The best ride at the park is ‘Droomvlucht’, which I linked you to a murky onside video of the other day. Ultra-genius. My plans are to get back to work and get seriously into the assigned script. Yeah, work-heaviness is my immediate future. What about you? Before I leave the reference point of Efteling forever, may Wednesday be as hungry to absorb any negativity in your life today and as grateful to unburden you thereof as this trash can. Heel mooie love, Dennis. ** Cal Graves, Hey, Cal. I’m not a ride screamer, I’m more of a laugher. Rapp’s voice was beautiful live, very fragile. That camping trip sounds really, really ace. Mm, ‘Try’ was a novel that really arose out of what was going on in my life at that time, more than the vast majority of my other novels. I had a young, close friend who was extremely strung out on heroin at the time, and I was very worried about him, and I kind of used what he was going through and how he talked about his high and his circumstances as an inspiration for those sequences you mention. And I also had a young close friend at the time whose name was actually Ziggy like the character. He wasn’t like the character in general ways — not gay, adopted but not by abusive males, etc. — but he was similarly very hyper and emotionally intense, etc., and I used him as the model for the character. In real life, he and the guy who Calhoun was modelled on didn’t know each other and never met, I don’t think, but imagining them together and what that would be like with certain imaginative leaps and subdividing my relationships with them and feelings about them and assigning those to the characters created the story, basically, if that makes any sense. Thank you for asking. How have your last four days been? ** KEaTON, My toes do need exercises, so thank you. And for your trip wishes. It was good, man. ** JM, Hey. You beat me back, dang. Actually, your little trip sounds pretty nice. Oh, if you look on the right hand side of the blog, you’ll see some links, including one that says ‘Zac’s Freight Elevator’. If you click that, you’ll be at the gif novel, and you can either look at it online or download it. Yeah, think when I try Henry James again, I’ll use the stories as the place to dip in. People have told me that the one I tried ages ago — ‘The Golden Bowl’ — is his toughest one. ‘Scott Pilgrim’ is a movie I’ve been wanting to see for multiple ages, and I always forget to actually watch it. Noted. Thanks! Good to see you, bud. ** Daniel Lemons, Hi, Daniel! Oh, wow, thank you for that info. Yeah, maybe I’ll write to that guy on Facebook and see if he would be willing to chat with me or meet up if he’s in Paris. Thanks very, very much! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. That does look bleak: ‘Threads’. Fantastic news about the distributor. Fingers completely crossed if you need them. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! We’re back! The interview was for an English-language magazine: AnOther Magazine. I think it’s based in the UK. I’m happy you had such a satisfying long weekend/early week! Final SCAB finessing! Awesome! My trip was great. We stayed in this silly.great theme room at the Efteling Hotel — The Hans Christian Andersen Suite. There are pix of it on my Facebook page. And Efteling lived up to its ranking in my head as the best theme park in the world. It was super great. The place was pretty deserted because it was a Monday in the winter, so we rode every single ride there, at least twice in a number of cases. So, yeah, it was fantastic! If you’re ever in southern Holland, you should go. Super great park! Now it’s back to work and the usual. That’s my Wednesday. How was yours? ** Bernard, Hi, B. I slightly expanded and improved the Nerval post in reposting it. Not that I guess it’s a huge difference. I haven’t seen ‘Double Lover’. Ozon seems really uneven to me, or to my tastes. But I haven’t seen that one. I definitely will. Never drunk ever? How interesting. But maybe you would find yourself thereby. Not that you need to be found, obviously. Yeah, never mind. I just had this vision of you drunk and thought it would be extremely interesting, amusing, consciousness-changing as a viewer … or something. But don’t mind me. ** Armando, Hi, man. I’m good, thanks. I did have tons of fun of Efteling. There was no snow. I don’t think it snows in Holland. It’s too flat, and I think a bunch of it is below sea level it’s so flat. Cool, glad the Nerval post hit home. Uh, the April 3rd thing is I’m booked to do a lecture and presentation about my ‘body of work’ at Art Center, the big LA art school. I’m actually really regretting saying yes since I never do that sort of thing and hate doing it. I think it’s for the students, but I think others can go, I’m not really sure. I definitely do not recommend it, ha ha. I’m just hoping I can struggle through it. Awesome that you loved the Collobert! Great! She’s amazing, I agree. Oh, man, I hope that wishing you a very happy birthday will lighten your birthday-related mood rather than the opposite! No, I haven’t seen ‘Elena’. Heard of it. I’ll venture to do more than that. ** Wolf, Mademoiselle Loup. Trip to Efteling was fantastic. I didn’t really take photos, or just a few. Oh, I took photos of my cool hotel room. They’re on Facebook. I think you sneak in there and see them if you want. Try this. I think I went to Kew Gardens in 1976. If so, they probably haven’t changed, right? Wait, they’re nature so they’ve completed changed. Never mind. Anyway, I am imagining you, crystal clear, wandering in the deep and obscured vagaries of my memories of there, and it’s nice, and you look like the opposite of a ghost, if you’re curious. Yep, yep, about Lydia Davis. Her translations of Blanchot are the best. For instance. I know: I would be utterly not myself and someone so much more boring and useless were it not for translators. My god, I don’t even know who or what I would be. Yikes. Big love! ** Make yourselves and Carrie happy today by scouring her post and telling her you did. See you tomorrow.

16 Comments

  1. David Ehrenstein

    Bravo Carrie! Fantastic stuff
    Miss Billy The Graham just bought the farm so maybe you should do a cake of his corpse — with his scuzzball son Franklin nibbling at his toes.

    Can’t recommend “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World” highly enough, particularly for Kieran Culkin’s performance as “Wallace.”

  2. Steve Erickson

    It’s really astonishing to believe that all these cakes are edible and that they are, in fact, cakes. Some look like Mike Kelley projects.

    One thing I find interesting about Tyler’s trajectory is that he’s wound up in the exact opposite place from GOBLIN. Both lyrically and musically, FLOWER BOY is pretty positive and cheerful. Its commercial success happened in a year when half of mainstream hip-hop seemed to consist of downed-out songs about being depressed and getting high on prescription drugs. I wonder where he’ll go from here. Did you like FLOWER BOY?

  3. Bill

    This is brilliant work, Carrie! Wow. How much of the Damien Hirst cake is edible? And that octopus. And the deer skull. And on… If you were anywhere close to San Francisco, I’d be stopping by ASAP.

    That’s an awfully fine trash can. My day looks brighter already.

    Bill

  4. Bernard

    Eeek, I’m gonna feel responsible if you see “Double Lover” and hate it. It’s more a movie I liked scene by scene (and esp shot by shot) than as a whole. And it turns on one of my favorite personal obsessions. Yeah, Ozon is very uneven for sure, but in a way that often delights me-he goes with an enthusiasm and doesn’t worry about coherence or consistency. And now I’ve just heard from a friend who thought “DL” was “dull.”
    I just unearthed a bunch of old files (downsizing, decluttering) including some of our letters I hadn’t dug up in a while, plus a bunch of people you know–back when we all wrote letters. (I have been trying out writing some poems-as-letters, as I used to.)
    David E, I’m sorry I missed your birthday–via Facebook. I hope you ate cake and watched movies. Also I saw Kieran Culkin onstage in “This is Our Youth,” and he was astounding–just a real, completely immersed-in-it, star-quality performance. I have been hoping somebody knows what to do with him, when we’re kind of seeing a lot of half-actors get a lot of choice roles. He’s so good he might get that kind of response Laurette Taylor is said to have gotten: “That’s not acting. That must just be who she is.”
    Glad you got some nachos. xo

    • Steve Erickson

      I plan to see DOUBLE LOVER tonight, but it seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it film, so I don’t know what to expect. I do like the idea of Ozone paying homage to the “erotic thriller.”

  5. Dóra Grőber

    Hi!

    Welcome back! I’m really happy to hear your trip was so amazing! I saw the photos on facebook and I liked the whole design and atmosphere a lot! Ah, yes, very cool that you had such a fantastic time!!
    I looked up AnOther Magazine! I’d definitely like to read the article when it comes out!

    My Wednesday was okay. Nothing too huge but I went to see my father which was nice or almost comfortable. Otherwise, I’m still massively into the Sotos book and SCAB so my mind is a twisted place nowadays, haha.
    How was the day on your end? I hope this little break energized you and you can attack the must-do script work with renewed creativity!

    @ Carrie McEnroe: thank you for this collection, I thoroughly enjoyed it! I’d say my top three favs are the bed-pan, the roadkill and the herpes muffin, haha, but there are some other strong contestants!

  6. Ferdinand

    Amazing, those baby cakes sure look delectable, and the two heads sliced from behind, brilliant. Oh ho ho that sushi dog hahaha! Lately the cakes Ive been obliged to eat are ones where the cakes have these thick inedible slabs of white cardboard like icing that fall off from the sponge cake, pathetic. Save me a baby slice Carrie! Very entertaining.

  7. Jamie

    Carrie McEnroe, these cakes are outrageous! I’d be really interested to know just which ones are your own, but there are so many I guess it’d be a quite a list to write. If I had to pick a favourite, it’d have to be one that I’ll call Twink’s Ass, with that slice cheekily removed as if to prove that it’s really a cake. There’s another one with an American footballers head, and his expression and the way his face is cut off be the board are both amazing. Totally made me lol. Thanks so much for this post!

    God morgon, Dennis!
    Glad your favourite theme park lived up to your own personal hype. Do you get a wee post-theme-park comedown? I had a wee peek at the Symbolica videos on Youtube. What make the Heroes one ‘heroes’, if you know what I mean? I was expecting to maybe see Superman or Spidey, but no. And Droomvlucht looks totally excellent! Now something like that could seriously lure me on a ride. Do they have something like that at Parc Asterix?
    How did your day of scripting go? Did you crack on with the assigned script? I’m having a great experience with my own screenplay atm, easily the most rewarding writing experience I’ve ever had. Even when I hit problems or get stuck, solving things opens everything up and adds more layers. I went through everything I’d written a couple of evenings ago and whilst there was lots to change or remove, there was a very definite skeleton underneath that fitted together in pleasing and intriguing way. So, you were right to tell me to just keep on writing, thanks.
    One of the images from yesterday’s post has mysteriously become the wallpaper on my phone without me doing a thing. I’m keeping it, but that’s weird.
    May your day be like a stroll along a chilly beach with your favourite actor, author and comedian.
    Mycket mycket love,
    Jamie

  8. Ferdinand

    I saw this news on twitter of a Biography on Dennis Cooper coming up
    https://twitter.com/dehester/status/966039327498276864?ref_src=twcamp%5Eshare%7Ctwsrc%5Em5%7Ctwgr%5Eemail%7Ctwcon%5E7046%7Ctwterm%5E1

  9. JM

    If Carrie is around, what type of customers do you get for this sort of thing? I can’t imagine the types of requests you must get on a day-to-day basis….

    I don’t like Edgar Wright that much (Baby Driver was far too quiet for a film circling around music) but Scott Pilgrim is a bona-fide classic IMO. Thanks for the pointers to Freight Elevator! 🙂

  10. JM

    Reading the first chapter of ‘Freight Elevator’ was quite the experience. Did you create this stuff out of pre-existing gifs or were any created explicitly for the purposes of the fiction? I really like this so far, it’s a completely uninvented form (as of yet) and it’d be awesome to see how other authors – perhaps others more classically inclined? – would respond to the possibilities of it.

  11. Cal Graves

    Hey Carrie,

    What a fantastic collection! Birthdays need to macabre much more, that baby-crowing one would be perfect for all such birthery occasions. Would love to taste that snake one.

    Hey Dennis,

    The image of you snickering thru spooky rides like Droomvlucht is very warm.
    Re PBS are there any other folk/country/accoustica/acid folker stuff you enjoy? in a similar vein? (I may have asked that before, lol).
    Thanks for the info re Try. That adds a interesting angle to the text knowing that the two mains are based (however loosely) on actual people you knew…it adds a texture, ig? Im gonna have to chew on that. Try has a really reflective quality that I enjoy. Like variations on characters from other parts of the Cycle, or the other characters in Try, or just like ideas/archetypes of characters.
    My days have been dull/uninteresting. Moving very slowly thru the book. I might have a title tho. ‘Pyschopomp’. Still considering things. Maybe I should set a goal for when to have it finished, or a milestone passed. Hm.
    Anyway, have a good day, and good luck w yer work load!

    Most-Mostily
    Cal

  12. _Black_Acrylic

    @ Carrie, thank you for this marvellous, delicious-looking day!

  13. Misanthrope

    Carrie, I love these. I’d eat everyone. Btw, do they taste good? I’m assuming they do. Probably even better than actually are because of how they look, though I think they’re lovely.

    Dennis, Welcome back. I’m glad you had a good time. Btw, Try is probably my number 2 of yours. So much heart in that book. I’m a sap, what can I say?

    My week has been awful. LPS is in a huge amount of trouble.

    Had words with a boy over the weekend via text about something boy said about LPS and his girlfriend. LPS kept trying to get the boy to meet him to fight. The boy wanted nothing of it. So LPS found him in school and went on the attack. The video, of course, has gone viral amongst his classmates.

    The other boy never threw a punch. LPS has been suspended to the Superintendent, who will either expel him or put him in alternative school for 45 days or put him in evening high school. Also, he’s facing three counts of 2nd degree assault, two on teachers who were trying to break up the fight. He kept running back to try and hit the boy, who had stopped fighting and wanted no more of it. There’s also a charge of school disruption. And the theft charge from last year will come back into play. We see the Superintendent next Thursday and have to wait for the court summons.

    During the fight, they got to wrestling -the boy just grabbed him (I guess to get him to stop or until someone could break it up)- and they went to the floor. LPS’s head hit either a locker or the floor and split open. Four internal stitches and 11 staples. He got a chipped tooth when one of the teachers intervened and accidentally hit his mouth with his arm.

    I guess the funny thing is that he looks the worse for wear, even though he got all the shots in and the other boy didn’t even throw a punch. Serves him right, if you ask me.

    Otherwise, things are good.

  14. JM

    Hooo. Have you read any Arno Schmidt, Dennis? My monster-copy of BOTTOM’S DREAM arrived in the mail today and it is monstrously large.

  15. Nik

    Hi Carrie!

    I totally love these! My favorites are the cake for Scott, sushi dog, and the one of the baby being born, which is the perfect amount of too much for me. I’d love to get one of these sometime, I’ll try and see if there’s a place that sells these in the east coast. Thank you for sharing this passion.

    Hi Dennis!

    Wanna mention the amps post yesterday, mainly that I loved it. Experiments with sound like that have always excited me, and some of those installations look like they’d sound incredible.
    Really glad you’re gonna be doing more with the gif work, there’s definitely more to explore there, I think. How’s that process been so far? I remember your recent gif work has been effective in a much more complex, sort of learned way, if that makes any sense. Are you trying to move more in that direction? An opera for 2020 is nuts, are you allowed to share anything about it?
    There weren’t really riots, just a bunch of drunk Philadelphians dancing on main street. That part was kind of fun. There was a parade on Thursday to celebrate, and thats why they shut down campus. It was a major blow and a totally ridiculous, reactionary shut down on the schools part. We got by fine though.
    The play was originally called “The Fire Raisers” or “The Firebugs”. It was written as this absurdist allegory for Nazism, and is usually put on as sort of a screwball comedy. We put it on to be this really harsh, dark production, which, from what I’ve read about the show, is closer to the show Max Frisch actually hoped to see. Essentially, the plot is about this bourgeois family, the Biedermanns, who are terrified of these arsonists that have been burning down towns, but are manipulated by two guys who are obviously arsonists into letting them to stay in their house and, by the end of the show, they burn it down. My hope, and what I think the last two of the three performances accomplished, was essentially the effect of the real danger feeling literally like it was outside the theater (which could be whatever people wanted to imagine it was. It was funny, older audience members identified with Biedermann and felt like the Arsonists were these Trump-y alt right guys, while the younger audience members thought the opposite), and making them feel a strong love for these both of these characters extremes rather than laughing at them in detachment, which is the Three Stooges screwball approach a lot of people end up doing. I’ve always really hated shows that had clean cut “bad guys” and idiots and stuff like that, for all sorts of reasons, namely my feeling that “everyones serving a system” and “intentions constantly cancel themselves out” kind of stuff. I don’t know if any of this makes sense, but that’s kind of the nutshell version of the discoveries in preachy, jumbled language.
    What’s your week looking like? Good luck with all those projects!

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