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The blog of author Dennis Cooper

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Little House on the Bowery (2003 – 2011), a checklist

Imprint Editor-in-Chief: Dennis Cooper
Publisher: Akashic Books
Covers designer: Joel Westendorf

 

Introducing ‘Little House On The Bowery’
by Dennis Cooper

When I first began to read and write fiction, contemporary literature seemed a venue of originality, boldness, and adventure. It was the late ’60s, a very different time in culture and publishing. One could walk into any suburban chain bookstore and find hordes of novels and short story collections offering the prospect of entertainment, emotional and/or intellectual enlightenment, and an anarchic literary spirit. Prominent publishers like New Directions and Grove Press were reliable sources of fresh and fascinating fiction. I knew I could buy any book from these presses and have at the very least an unusual and very engrossing reading experience. In those days, the feeling that innovation and personal vision were the goals of contemporary literature was a pervasive one, and this impression shaped the expectations of my generation of writers and book lovers.

It’s no news that things have changed drastically since that time. Major presses have become extremely timid when it comes to taking chances on writers whose work doesn’t fit within their predetermined marketing strategies. What was once known optimistically as “avant-garde fiction” has been marginalized into the more demeaning category of “experimental fiction,” and a gulf has grown between “commercial fiction” and fiction with challenges to the reader, which is now deemed a chancy investment. There are small publishing houses that champion difficult work, and large houses that occasionally release books with unusual content and style so long as their form and structure pose no real threat to the predilections of conventional book buyers. But the general literary climate in the United States today is not a friendly one to readers and writers who seek in fiction an experience of a unique and startling nature. It’s no surprise that young adventurers have all but abandoned literature in favor of more accessible and apparently vital art forms like movies and popular music.

Because my own novels are both radical and somewhat prominent, I’m often given work by young writers who see my achievement as a sign that their unusual, autonomous fiction could be published and respected, and might find some kind of audience. Once in a while, these writers are truly extraordinary, and I do my best to encourage their efforts and help them succeed. What they don’t realize is that my work is something of an anomaly in mainstream publishing, and that the opportunities for writers like myself come only very occasionally. After years of trying to use my limited powers to help these writers into print with rare success, I decided to initiate a line of books to showcase the best of these authors. Thanks to the generosity and enthusiasm of Akashic Books, readers will now have every opportunity to discover some of these amazing new talents.

LITTLE HOUSE ON THE BOWERY will be a line of fiction books in the tradition of the young New Directions and Grove Press. Its concentration will be on younger North American writers who believe that fiction can be as entertaining, challenging, revelatory, and, in a word, important as any other medium. I hope Little House on the Bowery will be a reliable source for readers who want literature to be an adventure on the levels of content and style. I also want it to be an oasis for people who have come to see contemporary literature as a spotty, conservative medium. I want to create a forum for a wide variety of younger writers whose tremendous gifts and personal vision warrant a broad readership, and whose work holds the possibility of impacting the future of American fiction. I believe these authors are important new voices whose novels and story collections offer what should be the prerequisite of literature: a meaningful, pleasurable, and very impressive surprise. Beginning in the spring of 2003, Little House on the Bowery will begin publishing two titles per year. I hope that critics and readers will give these books careful attention. As their editor, I promise in turn to select works with enough wisdom and daring to deserve the attention and support. — 2003

 

The Books

Travis Jeppesen Victims (2003)

“This book marks the debut of an author who will surely become a major voice in alternative literary fiction . . . rich, lyrical language reminiscent of a modern-day Faulkner informed by the postmodern narrative strategies of Dennis Cooper.” — Library Journal (starred review)

Victims is a novel about the final days of a religious cult called The Overcomers. Like the infamous Heaven’s Gate cult, whose mass suicide gained world media attention in the 1990s, they are a small group of lost souls guided by the teachings of a charismatic leader, Martin Jones. The Overcomers go about their lives preparing for the cosmic event that will signal the end of their time on earth. Their struggles to reconcile their faith in Jones’s teachings with the emotional ups and downs of their relationships, jobs, and interactions with the natural world form the subject of this exquisitely written and highly original novel.

Based on extensive research into the rhetoric of religious cults, Victims is a novel of ideas in the tradition of modernist works like Magic Mountain and The Plague. Author Travis Jeppesen uses an episodic narrative, an elegantly direct style, and a quirky, sympathetic group of characters to ponder a question raised by Jones’s teachings: If friendship and love are just systems to instill comfort in our lives, are all human interactions acts of manipulation?

Victims is set in a rural America of the imagination informed by classic American values—and cleansed of the mundane distractions that characterize American culture. Travis Jeppesen has written a novel with a philosophical bravura rarely seen in the work of contemporary American writers.

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Excerpt
Interview

 

Benjamin Weissman Headless (2004)

“Brilliant. Wildly inventive, profane, and hilarious. Benjamin Weissman is a master stylist who in story after story keeps scoring effortlessly. Beneath the deadpan absurdity these virtuoso comic monologues describe—with more intense accuracy than just about anyone else around—what it means to be male.” — Bret Easton Ellis

The author of the acclaimed transgressive cult classic Dear Dead Person returns with this long awaited second collection of brilliantly written, outrageously imaginative and comedic short stories. Benjamin Weissman is one of the true originals in contemporary American fiction. In Headless, he turns his daredevil wit and fearless storytelling gifts on subjects ranging from Hitler’s secret life as a skier to the philosophical musings of identical twin porn stars to the travails of the world’s most sitcom-defying family. Weissman’s dysfunctional, hilarious, and strangely moving tales of life in contemporary America are a real and unique treasure.

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Excerpt
Interview

 

Derek McCormack Grab Bag (2004)

“Grab Bag culls the best of the perverse and innocent world of Derek McCormack. The mystery of objects, the lyricism of neglected lives, the menace and nostalgia of the past—these are all ingredients in this weird and beautiful parallel universe.” — Edmund White

“Boy, can Dennis Cooper find ’em! Grab Bag will grab you, all right; plain, simple, and hard.” — John Waters

Grab Bag is comprised of two interrelated novels, Dark Rides and Wish Book, from one of Canada’s most important young writers. Both books are set in the same small rural city, in different eras (1950s, 1930s), each characterized by McCormack’s spare and elliptical prose.

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Excerpt
Interview

 

Martha Kinney The Fall of Heartless Horse (2004)

“Tumultuous and beautiful, an emotional inquiry into writing and the nature of illusion, so highly pleasurable, a surprise and triumph for the American novel.” — Claude Simon

“I love this book. How Martha Kinney created this utterly unique and powerful piece of writing—a family saga about sex, love, money, power, and inheritance (among other themes) that blends the best agendas of prose and poetry in its operatic narrative arc, beautifully fuses the diction of historical epic and postmodern friskiness, and is bursting with drama, satire, comedy, absurdity, wit, intrigue, and intense emotion—is beyond me. As a grateful and admiring reader I can only thank her for this work and eagerly await more.” — Amy Gerstler

The Fall of Heartless Horse is a postmodern multigenerational family drama that is dark, hilarious, moving, and wildly original. By turns lyric, comic, and tragic, it deals with greed, inheritance, heroism, capitalism, sex, and the intertwining of public and private histories. Kinney has brought to life an amazing cast of characters with a “novella in verse” combining elements from ancient Scottish sagas, songs, legal documents, new age literature, and interviews. This startling, inventive debut, which draws on traditions of both poetry and prose, has been compared with the works of Lewis Carroll and Anne Carson, and evokes qualities of opera, epic, and melodrama as well. A soaring energetic, one-of-a-kind text, The Fall of Heartless Horse explodes different forms, gutting and reanimating them. Here is a deeply affecting tale of ruthlessness, loss, rivalry, and the difficulty of finding one’s place in the world.

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Excerpt

 

Richard Hell Godlike (2005)

“Vile, scabrous, unforgivable, and deserving of the widest possible audience.” — William Gibson

“From the beginning, Richard Hell has burned with the same blue flame of misfit insight and desperate beauty.” — Jerry Stahl

Godlike, Hell’s second novel, is a stunning achievement, and quite likely his most important work in any medium to date. Combining the grit, wit, and invention of Go Now with the charged lyricism and emotional implosiveness of his groundbreaking music, Godlike is brilliant in form as well as dazzling in its heartwrenching tale of one whose values in life are the values of poetry. Set largely in the early ’70s, but structured as a middle-aged poet’s 1997 notebooks and drafts for a memoir-novel, the book recounts the story of a young man’s affair with a remarkable teenage poet. Godlike is a novel of compelling originality and transcendent beauty.

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Excerpt

 

Trinie Dalton Wide Eyed (2005)

“These charming stories vibrate with innocence and awe. Trinie Dalton is an effortless purveyor of wonder, strangeness, and love. She is a writer of high spirits and unguarded vision, and this debut collection is an absolute pleasure to read.” — Ben Marcus

In Trinie Dalton’s tweaked vision of reality, psychic communications between herself and Mick Jagger, The Flaming Lips, Marc Bolan, Lou Reed, and Pavement are daily occurrences. Animals also populate this book: beavers, hamsters, salamanders, black widows, owls, llamas, bats, and many more are characters who befriend the narrator. This collection of stories is told by a woman compelled to divulge her secrets, fantasies, and obsessions with native Californian animals, glam rock icons, and horror movies, among other things. With a setting rooted in urban Los Angeles but colored by mythic tales of beauty borrowed from medieval times, Shakespeare, and Grimm’s fairy tales, Wide Eyed makes the difficulties of surviving in a contemporary American city more palatable by showing the reader that magic and escape is always possible.
Stories include “Hummingbird Moonshine,” in which the narrator’s frustrated hunt for authentic religion in botanicas and science books culminates in a spiritual connection made with a hummingbird. In “Oceanic,” she resolves to marry a manatee after a drunken pre-party for her best friend’s wedding. In “Tiles,” four vignettes about bloody accidents in tiled bathrooms intermingle with scenes from Dalton’s favorite scary movies.

Featuring oddball prose in the traditions of Dalton’s literary heroes—Denton Welch, Robert Walser, and Jane Bowles—these stories have a dreamy, imaginative quality that reveal a peculiar state of mental ecstasy. To be inside the mind of Trinie Dalton is to be escorted into bliss.

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Excerpt

 

James Greer Artificial Light (2006)

Artificial Light skates on the purity of confession. It’s a brutal reveal; an Abyss Narrative with hooks. Read it in a rush of abomination and rise above, rise above.” — Stephen Malkmus

In 1994, a young woman named Fiat Lux donates twenty-one notebooks full of her writings to a university library and then disappears. It’s only later that her close relationship with a well known rock musician who had recently committed suicide is discovered, and the notebook’s contents become the subject of growing fascination, conjecture, and gossip. Intending to satisfy the public’s insatiable curiosity about the rock star and throw light on the author’s rumored involvement in his now infamous death, and, more importantly, hoping to make a case for her remarkable writings as a work of literature, the university’s press has decided to publish her notebooks in a single volume under the title she had given them, Artificial Light.

Set in the mythological land of Dayton, Ohio, Artificial Light is part historical novel, part science fiction, part sociological study, part murder mystery. Stunningly written in prose that is poetic, gripping, and highly adventurous, Artificial Light may be the first American novel to successfully treat the alternative rock scene of the 1990s as a subject for serious literature. James Greer has written a novel at once completely original in its form, composition, and outlook and yet as classically pleasurable and informative as any work of contemporary fiction in memory.

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Excerpt

 

Userlands: New Fiction from the Blogging Underground (2007)

Editor: Dennis Cooper
Contributors: Mark Doten * Garrison Taylor * Zac German * Bett Williams * Joshua Dalton * Jeff Jackson * Marc Andreottola * Nick Hudson * Sean Pajot * Angela Tavares * Jose Alvarado Lopez * David Estornell * Mike Kitchell * Nick Cacioppo * James Champagne * Mark Gluth * Eddie Beverage * M.A.D. * Jack Dickson * Joseph Marcure * Cody Carvel * Melissa Musser * Callum James * Charles Quiroz * Josh Feola * Robert Siek * Steven T. Hanley * Chris von Steiner * Jack Shamama * Nicholas Messing * Nicholas Rhoades * T.P. Kendall * Patrick deWitt * Mike Kascel * Justin Taylor * Stanya Kahn * Jago Pallabazzer * Aaron Nielsen * Frankie P. * Will Fabro * Matthew Williams

“In the early ’90s, I edited an anthology called Discontents (Amethyst Press, 1994) that documented the amazing creativity of the young writers and artists involved in the then-exploding queer zine phenomenon. The book, now considered a classic, is currently being taught in numerous universities and features a number of new writers who have since gone on to be well-known and important figures: David Sedaris, Dale Peck, Dorothy Allison, Scott Heim, Eileen Myles, and others. With the advent of the Internet, the energy and talent that produced the zine movement gradually moved online, and that same vitality now fuels the similarly grassroots—if higher-tech—phenomenon of blogging, with individual blogs forming the early-21st-century equivalent of the zine. The blog has provided a new kind of forum for new writers to disseminate their work and form mutually interested and supportive communities outside the major publishing industry, whose conservatism and biases toward university-trained fiction writers is well-known.

“This anthology intends to bring to light some of the new fiction writers who are using the Internet’s labyrinthine array of blogs and personal web pages to expose, test, and develop their work. The contributors range in age from sixteen to early forties. They are gay, straight, and in some cases still searching for their identities. They live in North America’s cities and small towns as well as in countries as physically far afield as Norway, Italy, Spain, Denmark, France, and the UK. Their fiction ranges in character from adventurous literary works to pieces that are astonishingly emotional, sexual, and/or personally revealing. What unifies them is their extraordinary talent, their daring and highly individualistic approaches to composing fiction, and the breathtaking freshness, charge, and skill of their prose. Somewhere in this anthology’s collection of mostly unknown, exciting voices are the next important writers of English language fiction.” — Dennis Cooper

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Excerpt

 

Matthew Stokoe High Life (2008)

“Matthew Stokoe’s brutal novel High Life explores the lengths oneman will go to for a shot at stardom, and to say those lengths are extremewould be an understatement. From Raymond Chandler to Nathanael West to JamesEllroy, the “dark underbelly of L.A.”novel has always been an exercise in one-upmanship, to see who can create thestarkest contrast between the surface of Hollywoodglitz and the sheer depravity that lies beneath it. Stokoe’s protagonist isJack, a fully confirmed acolyte of the Hollywood Dream whose holy writ are theprint and video tabloids . . . [T]he novel never strays far from its centralpurpose, to force the reader to consider the price he or she might pay for theultimate prize. As we watch the various threads of Jack’s life come together ina truly devastating series of events that raise the stakes ever higher, thequestion of how much hell any of us would endure for the promise of heaven isas poignant here as it is in anything by Dante.” — PopMatters

Hollywood. The City of Dreams at the end of the nineties. Jack has one ambition – to get famous. He doesn’t care how. He just wants to be like the people he sees in tabloid magazines and on TV: Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Tom and Nicole, Arnie, Bruce, Sly…. But the desire for fame has a dark side and he finds himself in a world of drugs and crime, whores, snuff shows, incest, deceit and despair. When his wife is found dead – murdered and disemboweled – and the search for her killer leads him to the femme fatale of all femmes fatales, he sees a chance to make his dreams of money and fame come true. But the City of Dreams can also be the City of Nightmares and it’s going to be a long, dark ride before Jack wakes up.

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Reading Matthew Stokoe’s High Life

 

Derek McCormack The Show That Smells (2009)

“Derek McCormack has written a mini-masterpiece that keeps swelling with invention long after you’ve put it down.” — Guy Maddin

McCormack begins his quirky Tod Browning–inspired tale with a disclaimer: “This book is a work of fiction. It is a parody. It is a phantasmagoria . . . Elsa Schiaparelli was never a vampire. Shocking! by Schiaparelli never contained blood.” The work of Schiaparelli, a 1930s Italian fashion designer, was influenced by Surrealist Salvador Dalí, and the same spirit permeates The Show that Smells, which is set in a maze of mirrors. Schiaparelli dresses introduced playfulness and a sense of “anything goes” to the fashion industry. She branched into perfume and became designer to a number of film stars. In addition to Schiaparelli, this tale is about Jimmie Rodgers, a country music–singer dying of tuberculosis, and his wife, Carrie, who tries to save him by selling her soul to a devil who designs haute couture clothing.

Starring a host of Hollywood’s brightest stars, including Schiaparelli’s real-life rival Coco Chanel, character actor Lon Chaney, Joan Crawford, and the Carter Family (as red state vampire hunters, no less), The Show that Smells is a thrilling tale of hillbillies, high fashion, and horror. An invitation to adults to make-believe, it is sure to please fashion connoisseurs, fans of classic and cult cinema, and freaks everywhere. In McCormack’s world, the power of death can be bottled and sold, and it certainly smells.

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Read about it

 

Mark Gluth The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis (2010)

“In short, impressionistic sentences that soon become hypnotic, Gluth captures [an] atmosphere brilliantly and leaves the reader in awe of his ability. Readers looking for something different will appreciate this work—and, given his writing style, might wish that he also applied his talents to poetry in the future.” — Library Journal

The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis begins during the later days of Margaret Kroftis’s life. She is a writer, living alone. As she experiences a personal tragedy the narrative moves forward in an emotionally coherent manner that exists separately from linear time. Themes of loss and grief cycle and repeat and build upon each other. They affect the text and create a complex structure of crosshatched narratives within narratives. These mirror each other while also telling unique stories of loss that are both separate from Margaret’s as well as deeply intertwined.

This groundbreaking debut demonstrates an affinity with the work of such contemporary European writers as Agota Kristof and Marie Redonnet, while existing in a place and time that is uniquely American. Composed in brief paragraphs and structured as a series of vignettes, pieces of fiction, and autobiography, The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis creates a world in which a woman’s life is refracted through dreamlike logic. Coupled with the spare language in which it is written, this logic distorts and heightens the emotional truths the characters come to terms with, while elevating them beyond the simply literal.

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Excerpt

 

Matthew Stokoe Cows (2011)

“The word is out that Cows is every bit as dark and deranged as Iain Banks’ classic The Wasp Factory. It’s not: it’s even more so. Possibly the most visceral novel ever written.” — Kerrang!​

In a decaying apartment: a mother, a son and a paralysed dog. Monstrously fat and murderously driven, referred to only as The Hagbeast, the mother employs her own unique version of dinnertime cuisine as she attempts to bring about the demise of her only child.​

Steven sickens slowly, holed up in his room, watching perfect lives on TV, dreaming of what it would be like to be safe, to be happy, to be loved…. Dreaming of Brady Bunch perfection. His only companion Dog, the loyal canine his mother crippled with a brick.​

In the apartment upstairs Lucy spends her nights searching for the toxins she knows are collecting inside her body, desperate to rid herself of them. When she enlists Steven’s help to manipulate a piece of invasive medical apparatus, he begins to see that a better life might indeed be possible. Lucy could be his partner, they could make a home together, they could have a baby. They could be just like the folks on TV.​

But that would mean surviving his nightly poisonings. That would mean killing his mother – no mean feat after a lifetime of smack-downs. Fortunately, a new job at the local slaughterhouse introduces him to Cripps, an insane foreman who preaches the gospel of self-empowerment through killing. Steven figures the way ahead is clear, figures it’s goodbye Mommy. But there are cows living under the city, and when they come for Steven, he sets his sights a whole lot higher.​

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Is COWS the Most Disgusting Horror Novel Ever Written?

 

Lonely Christopher The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse (2011)

“Praise seems superfluous for a book as accomplished, cohesive, and devastating as Lonely Christopher’s debut collection, so consider these words admiration instead, and admonishment: if you still think fiction counts for anything, then you should buy this book right now.” — Dale Peck

“Lonely Christopher, as his name suggests, knows despair as only a hobo or a clown can. This knowledge animates his fiction and provides each story with a humor that belies the terrible things that happen to his men, women, children, and animals. His formal experimentation will reward readers who have been craving a Huysmans sort of Nick Drake sort of Andy Kaufman killer writer. These readers will, like all good boys and girls, go to bed happy at last.” — Kevin Killian

Two boys lie on a bed, one of them is already dead; they listen to Glenn Gould playing Bach and talk about suicide and love. A lonely narrator mourns the end of a relationship and the disappearance of a mysterious object as a frustrated artist jumps out of a moving car on his birthday and runs for the last streetlamp in the universe. Awkward parents and angsty teens negotiate a dark suburban landscape, searching for something they can’t name, spelling out balletic sentences of failure and shame. Helicopters menace the night sky, a horse is murdered in a kitchen, victims go missing in swamps of ambiguity, and everybody waits for what the construction of a new road into town will bring: the end of the world or something worse.

The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, a radical map of shortcomings in our daily experiences in the form of a debut story collection, presents thematically related windows into serious emotional trouble and monstrous love. Lonely Christopher combines a striking emotional grammar with an unyielding imagination in the lovely-ugly architecture of his stories.

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Excerpt

 

3 books that got away

Lawrence Braithwaite More at 7:30
This really brilliant novel was intended to be the first book in the Little House on the Bowery series. The author Lawrence was a very difficult person both personally and professionally. I knew Lawrence and was used to dealing with that, but his interactions with Johnny Temple, head of LHotB’s publishing home Akashic Books, were so combustible that Johnny made me cancel the book. Several years later, after Lawrence committed suicide, I asked Johnny again if I could publish the book, but his feelings about Lawrence were still so sore that he said no. The novel remains unpublished, and it really needs to be.

 

Michael Gira The Consumer
Johnny Temple and I tried to get the rights to reprint Michael Gira’s (of Swans) terrific book of short fiction, which was (and remains) out of print. I can’t remember whether Michael was uninterested or if the price he asked was too large for my series, but it never happened.

 

Zac German Eat When You Feel Sad
This would have been the final novel in the LHotB series. I really love Eat When You Feel Sad and Zac’s writing in general, and I really wanted to publish it. I lobbied hard, but the powerhouse indie publisher Melville House wanted it too, and they rightfully won out.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. I did a checklist post for my old literary venture Little Caesar Press a while back, and, for whatever reason, I thought I would do the same for my more recent publishing imprint Little House on the Bowery. If it’s of interest and you have any questions or anything, please feel free. Also, novelist and d.l. Jeff Jackson has written a piece for The Poetry Foundation site that’s ostensibly about Diarmuid Hester’s WRONG but is mostly about my poetry, which is pretty rare occurrence these days. It’s very thoughtful and rich, and I’m honored by it. If you’d like to read it, it’s here. ** JM, Hi, J. Yeah, crazy no? I was super thrilled and hopeful, as you can well imagine. It would have been part-animation (the game) and part-live action. It didn’t happen because they never quite figured out how to do that combo satisfactorily. Ever since the disastrous (in my opinion) ‘Frisk’ film back in the early 90s, I’ve been very cautious about selling the film rights to my novels. I’ve only said yes once to a director who wanted to make a film of ‘Closer’ and whose ideas about how to do that interested me, but it never came about. I basically think that my novels are novels, and that they’re about how language and reading work, and they’re aren’t adaptable to a visual presentation. If some interesting director had an exciting idea about how to reinvent a novel in a cinematic space, I would be into considering it. I have let a number of young filmmakers and film students make short films based on my short fiction and poetry. I almost always say yes to that and let them do it carte blanche. I used to have a fantasy that Terrence Malick would adapt ‘My Loose Thread’ because his films were a big influence on that novel. Zac and I would never adapt my novels. The only current ‘filmmaker’ I can think of off the top of my head who I would say yes to in almost any circumstance is Ryan Trecartin, but that’s mostly because it’s such an impossible combination and he would never even think to do it, I think. Thanks for asking and all of that, pal. ** David Ehrenstein, Ha ha. Thank you for your analysis of me. Very interesting. Just so you know, every French person I know here thinks that I personally and my work are extremely American and extremely not French, which they seem to like about me. Anyway, you are very kind, thank you. ** Sypha, ‘Eaux d’Artifice’. Ah, gotcha. About your squeamishness being animal abuse oriented. Very understandable. And the realness of the cat sacrifice in ‘Period’, like almost everything else in ‘Period’, is highly questionable. ** Brendan, Hi, Brendan! Ha ha, so true. Yes, your email is in my box, and I’ve been waiting for a bit of distracting craziness to end so I can open it in the clear, which should be today since it’s Bastille Day and everyone should be all but asleep here. Wow, it will be so nice if baseball restarts. I assume the re-lockdown order yesterday won’t prevent that since it’s outdoors? That sounds heavenly. Anyway, thank you in advance for sending me your new work, and I will write to you very soon. Oh, did you see that I re-upped your old Oxbow post the other week? Love, me. ** _Black_Acrylic, I am in agreement with you there. ** Misanthrope, Oh, yeah, tax time, err … I’ll see if I can not miss yet another year. Between you and me, obvs. Yeek, to work in a situation where Mnuchin is somehow that work’s recipient is trippy and, well, yeek. Yeah, I’ve joined the bean paste cult. Well, chocolate is still doable. And cake too, sure, but not compressed sugar disguised as cake. ** Bill, Thank you. I thought that post might be a palate cleanser of sorts. I think the dancing Cleveland boy won the fountain contest. Yes, I’ve heard from h (now j). Looks like there’s some hope that ugly bullshit might be nipped in the bud. Ah, a suggestion by you that I actually know for once! Yeah, ‘The Northerners’, very charming. Fun director (mostly), that guy. ** Corey Heiferman, Good, gallons was what I was going for. Thanks. I used to have a friend who collected those little plug-in fountains you can buy at nurseries and hippie home furnishing places and such. The walls of his bedroom were filled, practically floor to ceiling, with gurgling, flowing little fountains. It was very impressive. I hope to recreate that in a film sometime when the budget allows for such a thing. That Dizengoff fountain maybe looks better at night? I’ve seen Fountain of Time. Yeah, it’s a cooly. What an odd and deceptively unassuming fountain, that Rome one of your choice. Never done a Bokanowski Day, no. I’ll look into it. Light Cone is great. Its oeuvre and so reasonable prices allow for the existence of a few of the best cinemas in Paris. I was still in LA when the Balls were happening, and I don’t think LA had Balls, or not within my radar. ** h (now j), HI. Well, I’m severely crossing my fingers that all the states and institutions suing the government will stop that destructive, evil, stupid Trump order from ever beginning to begin. It feels hopeful. Very scared by the COVID situation in the US. And feeling lucky beyond belief about the situation here so far. Take very good care. ** Okay. Post introduced. Happy Bastille Day! See you tomorrow.

Fountains 2


In Doug Aitken’s “Sonic Fountain” water drips from 5 rods suspended from the ceiling, falling into a concrete crater dug out of the gallery floor. The flow of water itself is controlled so as to create specific rhythmic patterns that will morph, collapse and overlap in shifting combinations of speed and volume, lending the physical phenomenon the variable symphonic structure of song. The water itself appears milky white, as if imbued and chemically altered by its aural properties, a basic substance turned supernatural. The amplified sound of droplets conjures the arrhythmia of breathing, and along with the pool’s primordial glow, the fountain creates its own sonic system of tracking time.

 


Howard, Kansas

 


weird ass water fountain

 


Christopher Madden: A very short video capturing the motion of water as it is ejected in pulses from a conventional garden hose spray nozzle with the head set to different spray modes. The brevity of the water pulses makes it possible to see patterns in the spray that are normally concealed or are absent when the water is ejected as a constant flow.

 


Klaus Weber’s fountain installation titled ‘The Big Giving’ was set up at the Southbank Centre in London, UK, in the autumn of 2007. The fountain includes a group of different figures displaying a variety of human bodily functions including sweating copiously from the armpits, urinating, and post-nasal drip.

 


‘Evil Eye of Water’, Longwood Gardens, Pennsylvania

 


Virginia Overton, “Untitled (Cement Mixer / Water Fountain)” 2019

 


Blood Fountain, Swansea, Wales

 


Cleveland, Ohio

 


If you’re in New York this summer there’s a rare chance to see one of Bruce Nauman’s largest ever sculptures. ‘One Hundred Fish Fountain’ is a fully functional fountain comprising 97 bronze casts of fish suspended throughout the air which noisily shoot water out of their mouths into a large basin below. Measuring 25 feet and 28 feet on its sides, the sheer scale of the work alone is impressive.

 


Maha Mustafa, Black Fountain, Wood and water fountain, 2009-10

 


Entrance of the Swarovski Headquarters, Austria

 


Suddenly, a 9-meter Sand fountain (geyser) apparead, in the Al-Ahsae City, Eastern Saudi Arabia. Immediately, Armaco geological teams and scientists hurry to deal with this strange phenomenon, but they did not succeed in explaining what happened.

 


Osaka, Japan

 


On a small square paved with dark basalt stone in front of a house built in 1763 Ettore Spalletti erected a fountain made of white marble. The fountain’s slender conical stem brought to mind Spalletti’s abstract vase-forms from previous years. Looking more closely, one could see that around the top rim of the column the artist had built a model architectural stage-set of a fictional piazza. Eleven simplified and tightly packed gabled houses encircled a round hollow with a miniature fountain bubbling at its centre.

 


WHAM-O Water Wiggle

 


Revolution (Martini Fountain), Alicia Frankovich, 2010, Martini Rosso, pool lining, tray, pump, piping, fixtures, silicon

 


Rome, Italy

 


Boise, Idaho

 


‘Electric Fountain’ is a public artwork by acclaimed British artists Tim Noble & Sue Webster. Inspired by the Plaza at Rockefeller Center, this 3-D light sculpture is in the form of a monumental fountain measuring 35’ in height and 30’ in diameter. The design and sequencing of the work, fabricated from 3,390 LED bulbs and 527 meters of neon tubing, replicates the movement of water.

 



The ‘Kindlifresserbrunnen’ (Child Eater Fountain, in German) or Ogre Fountain dates from 1544 and is one of many Gothic fountains dating from Bern’s golden age. The ogre that sits atop a tall tower is depicted biting hungrily into the head of a squirming baby while other fearful infants peek out from the bag slung over his shoulder.

 


Alexandria, Egypt

 


teamLab, 2014, Digital Installation, Continuous Loop, H: 19000 mm

 


‘Piss Fountain’ displays two men with rotating dongs on either side while urinating. This statue is installed just in front of the Kafka Museum entrance in Prague. The robotic dongs make shapes in the water below in a pond that has the shape of the map of Czech Republic. You can get your own phrase or message typed in the water if you message on a special number.

 


Bedside water fountain

 


Duisburg, Germany

 


Et pour finir en beauté, l’artiste japonais Fujiko Nakaya a réalisé une installation atmosphérique dans les bassins du square Jean Perrin, devant le musée. Son outil: des brumisateurs d’eau potable à haute pression qui pulvérisent de minuscules gouttelettes pour créer cette sculpture de brume. Retrouvez toutes ces œuvres au Grand-Palais à Paris dès maintenant et jusqu’au 22 juillet 2013.

 


‘Fontana del Facchino’, Rome

 


‘Shit Fountain’, Chicago, Illinois

 


‘Water Fountain of Burj Dubai Lake’ is the world’s most expensive and largest water fountain. It is over 900 feet (275 m) long and can spray jets up to 500 (150 m) feet high. The fountain can spray as much as 22,000 gallons (83,000 l) of water in the air. It has 6,000 super lights and 25 color projectors.

 


La Canada, California

 


‘The Neptune Fountain’, Bologna, Italy

 


Lisbon, Portugal

 


Nicolas Couturieux Untitled (Rome) (2016)

 


Plovdiv, Bulgaria

 


GTA weird fountain cheat

 


Chocolate fountain, Jean-Philippe Patisserie, Las Vegas

 


‘Nation for Itself Forever’ also known as ‘Narod sobe navzdy’ created by David Cerny is located in Prague atop the national theater. It was placed there in 2002 and shows the sculpture pleasuring itself and spraying water all over the city below.

 


Amazing Indoor Water Features Water fountains indoor for the home create the very best water fountains indoor that optional based on preferences in how to design and decorate home interior spaces. Outdoor water fountains for the home are now applicable into indoor home spaces and purchasing at Walmart will give you the very best references.

 


‘Charybdis’ is an unusual inverted fountain designed by William Pye for Seaham Hall in Sunderland, England. It is made of a massive transparent acrylic cylinder filled with water flowing in a circular movement, which forms an air-core vortex in the centre. One appears to be looking at a solid uncontained block of water as the acrylic seems to have no substance.

 


Arctic conditions have turned a geyser at Letchworth State Park in western New York into a five-story “ice volcano”.

 


Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, Canada

 


Quilpue, Chile

 


Greenville, Kentucky

 


Bern, Switzerland

 


‘Troika Rope Fountain’ by Eva Rucki, Conny Freyer and Sebastien Noel in the Hoog Catharijne mall, Utrecht, Holland.

 


Kosice, Slovakia

 

 


‘Mustangs at Las Colinas’ is a fountain by Robert Glen, that decorates Williams Square in Las Colinas in Irving, Texas. It portrays a group of wild Mustangs at 1.5 times life size, running through a watercourse, with fountains giving the effect of water splashed by the animals’ hooves.

 


Waterfall fountain at Dubai mall

 


Highway 71, Ohio

 


When I was driving across the greenest part of Holland, I stumbled upon a great piece of Bronze art by accident. Right there in a pond stood 4 statues of famous Dictators like Stalin, Franco, Louis XIV.. and they are all spitting in each others faces in a symbolic way by using water from the pond. The Spanish artist Fernando Sanchez Castillo is responsible.

 


Rafael Ferrer ‘Deflected Fountain for Marcel Duchamp’, 1970: He diverts the spray of an outdoor fountain at set times, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

 


Donetsk, Ukraine

 

 


Recirculating ketchup fountain at Ronald’s McMansion, Dayton, Ohio

 


The University of California, San Diego (UCSD) recently lost one of its campus’s most subtle and unusual piece of public art. An untitled fountain by the late conceptual artist Michael Asher, created for the university’s Stuart Collection of site-specific art, was reduced to rubble earlier this month when a masked vigilante wielding a sledgehammer rampaged through the campus, San Diego 6 reported. During his spree, the perpetrator also broke eight surveillance cameras surrounding the campus’ Mandeville Center and left behind a message scrawled in golden spray paint that read: “YOU CAN PAINT OVER ME YOU CAN CATCH ME YOU CAN EXPELL [sic] ME I WILL STILL BE HERE.” The sculpture, a granite and steel replica of a generic indoor drinking fountain, subverted the conventions of outdoor fountain design while also serving a practical function for thirsty students.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. There are a couple of new things online about Diarmuid Hester’s WRONG, if anyone’s interested. (1) An excellent piece about the book by Emily Colucci @ Filthy Dreams here. (2) The very fine writer Grant Maierhofer (subject of a recent ‘welcome to the world’ post here), interviews Diarmuid about the book here. ** JM, Hi, pal. No, I’ve never heard of Tender Wolves Society. The title ‘Tenderness of the Wolves’ was swiped from an old (1973) film of the same name by Ulli Lommel about a German serial killer. Begin your week inimitably! ** David Ehrenstein, Howdy. ** Sypha, If you play Mario Kart online you’ve probably raced against my friend Joel Westendorf who has been playing MK online several times a day for about 14 years. I can’t remember his player name. My obvious pleasure about the restoration. Seemed like it needed to be alive for all the fans and curiosity seekers out there. You’ve become so squeamish, James. Amazing that my books and you are still friends, ha ha. A few folks had comments directed to you over the weekend in case you didn’t see them. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. I heard the album Krazy Karl was out and have been naturally intrigued as I quite like NNAMDÏ, but I’ve yet to crease his new one. Will do. He seems almost, or sort of almost, as prolific as Pollard. Thank you, bud. And, really, thank you so, so much for those great words about ‘Zac’s Drug Binge’. The things you say about it are exactly the things that excited me about making it and that I hope are visible and exciting in some way to people reading it. Amazing, thank you, and so amazing to hear that from coming from the great you. I’m infinitely bouncy in my seat! Ha ha, if you know Zac, that title has an extra charming wrongness. Yes, the French citizens’ thus far dutiful behavior — the government just lifted the long state of emergency on Friday, which is quite something — will definitely be tested come Bastille Day. Eek. Very best of luck with the seemingly never ending nightmare of your version. Jesus. ** cal, Hi, Cal. It’s been ages since I read ‘OtR’, but I distinctly remember that the particular charge of his rushy, rambling prose ran out of charge pretty quickly, and I don’t think I made it through the whole thing, actually. I don’t know that book by his lover. I’ll see what I can find. Evicted, urgh, yeah, went through that the last place I lived. Super stressful, but it’ll be fine, I’m sure. Great about your novel’s preliminaries! That’s the best news. Hope the brews and the brawls were combustible. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, B. Oh, my god, that photo of you as a Whitehouse-r is great. Everyone, Click this to see a photo of Mr. Ben ‘_Black_Acrylic’ Robinson back in 2010 doing a visually uncannily Whitehouse-like performance of their ‘Just Like A Cunt’. I have that Lil Peep doc cued up on my laptop for today, actually, coincidentally enough. And I’ll go find out why Marcelo Bielsa is a god. Thanks for the gifts, man. ** Ian, Hi. I didn’t see the ‘Shaft’ remake, but the original is a pretty cool blast. I’ll put spit and art together in the blender of my weird imagination and see what shoots into view. Life’s pretty good here, yeah, and I’m happy it’s the same Montreal. You and I can definitely count our lucky stars. Thanks about the podcast. ‘God Jr.’ almost got adapted into a family friendly animated film by the great animation studio Laika, amazingly enough. They had it under option for about ten years, but it never happened. Bon day! ** Nick Toti, Hi, Nick! Sypha did a helluva job, yeah. I don’t know Blackhouse, which seems weird. But you can bet I’ll investigate them post haste. You good, man? Hope so. ** Steve Erickson, Hi, Steve. Happy day to ya. ** Right. I’ve got a whole bunch of fountains for you to look at and sometimes read about today. See you tomorrow.

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