Put together in secrecy during late 1980 until early 1982 GONE is a tour de force into Dennis Cooper’s most private obsessions and forbidden fantasies. We’ve never seen him exposed like this before, without leaning on (or hiding behind) his remarkable craft. Cooper mingles picture- and text collages, prose and poetry with news reports and pornography. The tabloid killings of William Bonin, Dean Corll and John Wayne Gacy – the victims catalogued repeatedly like Warholian icons – bleeds into late 70s/early 80s teen stars and anonymous, forgotten porn actors in a crude, yet rigorously composed collage of Sadeian proportions. This is the template of the inner drives that later would spawn the masterpiece “The George Miles Cycle”.
With a foreword and an interview with the artist, conducted by Martin Bladh.
Third Edition, 2021
Hardbound, 196 pages, 210x280mm
https://www.infinitylandpress.com/gone
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Inside
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Extract from the interview with the artist, conducted by Martin Bladh
DC in 1981
MB My first impression when I leafed through this book was that I had discovered some kind of forbidden zone – a tour de force into your darkest, most private obsessions, a world not meant to be seen by any outsider.
Today the scrapbook has been exhibited in Amsterdam and Basel as a conceptual piece of art, but you seem to have been ambivalent while putting it together; sometimes you’re addressing a reader while other parts seem to be very private, done for your sole pleasure?
DC When I was making the scrapbook, I never imagined that anyone but me would ever see it. I don’t think I would have made it at all if I’d thought it wasn’t an extremely private thing that I was doing. I made it to try to understand my relationship to the material I was interested in writing about at that time, which was largely the sex/violence/emotion axis that I had been preoccupied secretly and imaginatively with since I was a kid. At the time that I was making the scrapbook, that particular axis was being acted out and illustrated all around me via the concurrent spate of serial killers who were committing their acts and coming to light in that period. Also, back then, the ‘detective magazine’, which was a genre of periodical that covered crimes in a very lurid fashion and revealed information about the crimes from police reports and so on that was considered too disturbing to appear in mainstream media, was a popular thing, and there were a number of those kinds of magazines covering the killings that I was interested in, which gave me access to a lot of material to think about and to work with in the scrapbook. That scrapbook was specifically part of the experimenting I was doing to try to develop my writing so I could write the project that ended up being The George Miles Cycle.
MB How important is scrapbooking for your creative process?
DC It’s extremely important, and I’ve almost always made scrapbooks to help me develop a novel. The only times I haven’t, it was a decision to see what would happen to my writing if I didn’t fall back on that habit. I still make them, although now I create them online, usually on my blog, rather than in blank books with scissors and glue and so on.
MB The scrapbook originates from the time just after The Tenderness of Wolves came out. Did you ever have it in mind as prima materia for a specific work? I’m thinking about how it has been stitched together, the continuity with different leitmotivs that overlap each other, and it looks like you’ve gone back on some occasions and reworked the composition?
DC As I said, it was to help me figure how I could write the novel cycle that I had been dreaming of making since I was a teenager. I started making it because I had just had a small paying job that involved helping the man who, at that time, owned the William Burroughs archive, organize the papers. In the process, I was able to really study the scrapbooks that Burroughs had made while writing his early novels, and I was very inspired and influenced by the way Burroughs had combined texts, both original and found, with magazine images and photographs in a collage-like way, and I thought that trying to work out my ideas and sense of style and structure through that kind of multi-media approach without the pressure of having to start writing the novels might help me, and it really did.
MB How much time did you spend in the early 80s going through printed matters to find the specific material that you were looking for?
DC Quite a bit, I guess. Once I’d started the scrapbook, it became an important project to me, as important as actually writing a novel, which is pretty consuming state for me to be in. So, I spent a lot of time looking mainly for either detective magazines, teen idol-oriented magazines like Tiger Beat and so on, or pornography that I could use in my studies and ultimately in the scrapbook itself.
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MB There are several references to teen stars such as Scott Baio, Ricky Shroeder, Jimmy McNichol, Matthew Labourteaux, the Williams brothers and most notably Leif Garrett. Pictures of these boys have often been remodelled and put into a pornographic or sadistic context – some scenarios even end with them dying. Did you have a problem finding pornography that satisfied your taste and urges, so that you had to invent it yourself, get it down on paper and put the subject of your desire into a fictional, erotic context?
DC Mm, my fantasies and imaginative desires and so on were pretty complicated, and the representations of them that were around in pornography didn’t interest me very much other than as a dumb, failed, one-sided picture. I made the collages and juxtapositions to try to represent my fantasies in a way that was true to them as they were in my head, which meant trying to make things that were simultaneously disturbing, sexy, tragic, absurd, and, mostly unrealizable because I’m interested in how the sex/violence axis can only be illustrated in the imagination, or perhaps in the safe, hallucinogenic context of fiction, where people don’t really suffer or die or care if they die or care if they’re doing something completely unfair and unacceptable to someone else. I think the kinds of things I was interested in couldn’t be represented in photographs or movies or videos. For me, if they were going to be represented visually, they had to appear in the collage form where my hand and intentions were as important or more important than the acts that the collages were trying to represent.
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MB Where would you draw the line between art and pornography?
DC I guess it would be a matter of the intention. Obviously, there’s art that employs a resemblance to pornography in hopes of creating a purely titillating-like effect within its larger context, and there’s art that draws on pornography’s single-minded intention and power in a subversive way. And there’s pornography that tries to borrow from art or that attempts to infringe on the kinds of decision making that artists use in hopes of complicating or enlarging the genre. In the late 70s and early 80s, there were a number of directors making gay pornography – Jason Sato, Peter De Rome, Jean Daniel Cadinot, and others – who tried to make serious, artful porn films with varying degrees of success. But the huge majority of porn is just porn, I think, and the things that sometimes seem interesting about it are accidental and extracurricular, usually to do with the performers’ discomfort or inability to succeed at the job of being mere sex objects.
MB There is a certain idolisation of the victims, raising them to the level of stardom. Of all the victims being listed you show a particular interest in Gacy’s last kill Robert Piest. What makes him so special to you?
DC I was very interested in ‘the teen idol’ at the time. I was very interested by the way those boys were emptied out of meaning by the media and by their image-makers – how their lives and personalities were fictionalized, and how they were rendered for the public as ideal, utopian potential sex partners or boyfriends. In equating the boys that were victims of the killers with Leif Garrett and Shaun Cassidy and all the rest of the popular teen idols of the time, I was trying to see if, by using the extremely limited personal information there was available about them, and by reducing them to their looks, I could make them into stars and, thereby, locate an imaginative viewpoint on them that would make committing forcible sex acts against them and murdering them seem like as logical and as called-for a conclusion to the game that the media was playing them as, say, sleeping with or marrying the teen idols was the natural reaction in their cases. I was trying to find a way into the killer’s mind and p.o.v., basically. I don’t remember why Robert Piest was especially important to me. It probably had to do with the way his death happened or was reported to have happened at the time. I think I also thought he was very cute, and I suppose that probably had something to do with it as well. I guess that, in his case, there was a particularly potent combination of feeling confused and sad and shocked by what had happened to him and feeling sexually attracted to him at the same time. I guess made him especially helpful to me in trying to locate my honest relationship to the killings.
MB Correct me if I’m wrong, but Georges Miles hadn’t become your prime muse and main source of inspiration at the time when the scrapbook was being put together? I know that you’ve said that when Miles became your guiding light it helped you to explore extreme sex and violence without being cruel. Is the scrapbook a proof of that cruelty?
DC George Miles was my dearest friend and the most important person in my life beginning at the age of 15 when first I met him. For most of the time that I was making that scrapbook, he and I were going through a period of not communicating or seeing one another. So, the scrapbook really has nothing to do with George. It wasn’t until I had finished or given up on the scrapbook that I got the idea of making George the subject and guiding figure and recipient of the Cycle as a way for me to find my place in the material because I loved him very much, and I knew I would never wish anything bad to happen to him. Making the books about and for George created a barrier between my imagination, where I have always let anything happen and where there is no cruelty, but rather only innocent explorations, and the real world, where there are autonomous people and consequences. George was both my guide in writing the novels and my protection too.
MB There’s a ten page gap in the book destroyed by Fales Library due to its ‘potentially illegal’ subject matter. This section starts out with a handwritten introduction where you describe a series of pictures from the first “real porno magazine” you ever bought that had a particular erotic importance to you. although you give a thorough explanation of this piece, I’m still curious why Fales thought this section was so disturbing that they tore out ten pages of the book. Do you have any recollection of this series today?
DC There are actually quite a number of pages that were defaced and censored by Fales Library. I don’t have an intricate memory of that porn sequence itself. I assume the pages were removed because, in the porn narrative that was tacked on to the pictures, one of the models was said to be 14 years old. As far as I can remember, the model in question was clearly not that young, and that magazine was widely available and sold openly in porn shops for years, so it doesn’t seem likely that he was underage, but I guess Fales decided that the narrative’s designation of the model’s age was reason enough to remove the pages. I think that in the photo sequence the two models just had the usual kind of sex, and I think the images were softcore with no actual penetration shown, which was pretty typical of porn magazines of that era. I’m not sure why 10 whole pages were removed because the sequence wouldn’t have taken up that much space, so there must have been other things removed as well, but I don’t remember what they would have been.
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RIP: 4 of the censored/destroyed pages
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Background
Dennis Cooper Interviewed in Paris (American Suburb X exclusive)
William Bonin
Leif Garrett
Robert Piest
Dean Corll
The Williams Twins
Steven Stayner
John Wayne Gacy
Scott Baio
Larry Eyler
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p.s. Hey. The fine people at Infinity Land Press have brought ‘GONE’, the scrapbook I made the early 80s while developing my George Miles Cycle books, back into print, this time in a swanky hardcover edition, and they asked if I would mark the occasion by letting them roll out the blog’s red carpet function, and … I have. ** JM, Hi, Josiah. I’m so sorry to hear about the emotional roughness. So many people I know are going through a lot of emotional turbulence right now. Not that that will make you feel any less down and alone. Obviously, all of my fingers are crossed for a swift upswing. But at least your work is going well. I’m very happy to hear that and cursing my inability to see it due to the cruel distancing device known as internationality. Hang in there, enjoy everything you can. xoxo ** Montse, Hi, Montse! You’re not alone in getting the posts a day late, and I’ve never been able to figure out why that happens to some people or how I could fix that lag. Wow, ‘Eden Eden Eden’ in Spanish must be something. Wait, I’ve only read it in English, ha ha, so what do I know. The weather’s sweet here, maybe a little too nice/warm, but you know me and *upside down cross* heat. Hm, maybe I could come to Primavera. Hm. Let me think/scheme about that. Oh, no, you’re stuck at home! Now of all times! Are you nearing the all-clear point? ‘The Magic Kingdom’, wow. I haven’t thought about that novel in forever. Yes, I read back in the 80s. I don’t remember a whole lot about it. Obviously, you can guess why I jumped at reading it. I think I remember it being really fun while, naturally, having quibbles about what a novel about an amusement park should ideally be like. Anyway, that’s so cool that you translated it. I haven’t heard or read anyone discuss that book in such a long time. Maybe I should spotlight it. Hm. And you love it? Okay, I’ll seriously look into that. Trivia: At one point the title of my novel ‘Closer’ was going to be ‘George Miles’, and the main reason I changed it is because, at that time, there was a reasonably well known novel by Elkin called ‘George Mills’. So great to see you, my buddy! Feel completely perfect ASAP, and I hope I’ll get see you here and then elsewhere again really soon. ** Dominik, Hi, D!!! Sounds like a pretty topnotch weekend. You probably know that France is supposedly the country where Placebo is the most popular in the world. The last they played here, which was quite a while ago, they sold out five nights at this huge concert venue in Paris where even, like, Madonna only sold out two nights. My weekend was okay enough. Not as lively as I had hoped, but solid in the end. Maybe SCAB can start a line of merch with a dolphin buttplug as the first product. Or maybe third after, you know, the official t-shirt and button. Now that is quite a sizeable love right there. Thank you, and I’ll prepare my orifices accordingly. Love wracking his brains trying to figure out what a cooler version of Liberace would look like, G. ** Misanthrope, I’m not sure that slave had his bead on the zeitgeist, but you never know. I’m guessing you have now finessed the final finesse-needing bits and MD is over on this side of the pond sprouting illustrations. Muscle spasms suck! I mostly get them in my calves for some reason. There aren’t enough crossable fingers in the world. ** Bill, Law of averages says I doubt it. But … ? I’ll look for those docs. I’m on a doc binge too, and the ones on my go-to pirate site are dwindling. ** jamie, I think the fact that the slave profile at the top was so downbeat kind of colored the others. In fact, I deliberately put it at the top to see what the effect might be on the others. I.e., I’m such a nerd. The slave never have locales or stats or anything, just the escorts, yeah. Also, escort pix at the top, slave pix at the bottom. Otherwise, they could be twinsies, sort of. I do so highly recommend you go to Phantasialand when the occasion arises. And stay in one of the park’s theme hotels if you can spring for the extra bucks. And the park is not really so far from you, a pretty easy day trip by train. And I’ll shut up now, ha ha. Cool, just let me know if you need more whatever about the GIFs issue. Monday wasn’t amazing, but it fulfilled its basic requirements. I’m hoping Tuesday will kick its boring ass down the road, but we’ll see, and, of course, I hope your Tuesday goes Godzilla on your Monday. So … did it? ** Damien Ark, Hi, Damien! Good to see you! Balloon popper was cool. There are much worse ways to spend one’s time. Every once in a while I come across slaves whose fetish is balloons. Strangely, I more frequently come across slaves whose fetish is having their stomachs inflated like balloons. Happy to have to have hit your mark with the Sion Sono post, of course. You good or way, way better than good, I hope? Hugs from over here. ** Okay. If you want to peek inside ‘GONE’, today’s your day. In any case, yes, I’ll see you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
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