* (restored)
‘While I was writing Black Sunlight I was reading books on intellectual anarchism to reinforce my own sense of protest against everything; I was reading Bakunin and Kropotkin. Intellectual anarchism is full of contradictions in the sense that it can never achieve its goals. If it achieves any goal at all, then it is no longer anarchism. And so one has to be in a perpetual state of change, without holding on to any certainties. And that element I put across very seriously as well as in a very frivolous vein.
‘At the same time a very heavy element in Black Sunlight is this idea about sexuality. Everything political becomes personal, everything personal becomes political, but the four are in a state of continuous tension, and therefore almost everything one says or does reeks actually of sex. A bullet can be a heavy sexual image. A bomb can be like the eruption of sperm in the womb. Most of the people I was living with were people who rejected traditional sexual roles and accepted sexuality as a liberating force in itself. As you know, I provide no answers, except only a rigorous re-evaluation, especially of western intellectual thought.’ — Dambudzo Marechera
‘Today we remember the extraordinary and explosive life of Dambudzo Marechera, the Zimbabwean ‘enfant terrible of African literature’ who on this day in 1987 died homeless, penniless and sick from AIDS on the streets of Harare at the age of thirty-five. Tragically for Marechera, even the greatest genius cannot flourish if through the misfortune of their awful circumstances they have become sociopathically programmed to deride contemporaries, to show absolute nihilistic contempt for academic and literary institutions and, at all opportunities, to bite the hands that attempt to feed them. Unfortunately, as the culture of Marechera’s war-torn birthplace had for the previous century been systematically used, abused and ultimately destroyed by White rule, such a brutal finale appears to have been the destiny of this perplexing figure – this simultaneously sensitive and insensitive Poet Brute whose task was always to question, provoke and even endanger all kinds of authority figures whom he would encounter in his too brief life.
‘Deadly aware of his ‘problem child’ reputation, Dambudzo blamed his mother for ‘cursing’ him with a first name that had traditionally been given to girls, and which means in his own Shona language ‘the one who brings trouble’. Little wonder then that this brilliant outsider would grow up seething with resentment. Born into extreme poverty, in 1952, Marechera as a young boy found his escape from his violent surroundings through reading, after obtaining his first book – a Victorian children’s encyclopaedia – from a rubbish dump. His homeland was at that time still named Rhodesia after the dreadful Victorian adventurer, Cecil Rhodes, whose gold and diamond mines had turned most of the population of former Matabeleland into his private slaves. Now still governed by the racist white minority under Prime Minister Ian Smith, Rhodesia was by 1965 boiling over with bile and antipathy, and Marechera was forced to enter his teenage years in a country mired in civil war – one that would not conclude until the creation of the Republic of Zimbabwe in 1979. His country’s instability, its permanent turmoil – these were the factors that most informed his art and his future lifestyle. And though Marechera’s singular if vexatious brilliance emerged soon afterwards, so too would the signs of an unstable personality that would persistently and ultimately sabotage his life.
‘Marechera won a scholarship to the University of Rhodesia but was expelled after his participation in campus riots in the summer of 1973. Shortly thereafter, he won a scholarship to Oxford University: a life-changing opportunity! Marechera, however, did not adapt well to British culture and in particular the rigid Oxford educational tradition. Alcoholism now fuelled his inherently rebellious nature; after numerous disruptions, his final act at Oxford was an attempt to set fire to the university’s New College. Given a choice between psychiatric treatment and expulsion, Marechera made his decision: “I got my things and left.”
‘Three years later, these six words would form the opening sentence of his extraordinary book, The House of Hunger – a collection of eight stories and two poems. After quitting Oxford, Marechera had chosen to live a shadowy existence in a tent by the River Isis in London where he wrote and drank. The House of Hunger was a semi-autobiographical account of violence, squalor, political upheaval, cultural and racial divides, and personal torment as viewed through the eyes of a Rimbaud-like boy-brat visionary – it found immediate acclaim, in 1979, going on to win the Guardian Prize for First Fiction. Marechera however rejected the plaudits in favour of self-sabotage: he arrived at the award ceremony wearing a flamboyant red poncho and proceeded to throw china, chairs and accusations of hypocrisy at his fellow participants. Marechera returned to the newly liberated Zimbabwe shortly after the publication of Black Sunlight, his surreal novel about revolution set in his nation’s violent landscape. But the author’s itinerant and recklessly provocative lifestyle continued in Harare, where his reputation, talent and future prospects were just not enough to prevent him from self-destructing. In the words of his biographer and champion, Flora Veit-Wild, Marechera’s “major quest in life and work was to fight any form of pretence, to unmask all forms of oppression of the individual’s freedom and rights.”
‘Dambudzo Marechera’s untimely vagabond death in no way reflects fairly the vivacious life of this extreme, almost heroically contrary figure. But it does aid Marechera’s legacy as his role as an African literary hero continues to gain momentum. In 2009, even stuffy Oxford University celebrated the life of their would-be arsonist!’ — On This Deity
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Further
Dambudzo Marechera @ Wikipedia
The 40-year-old “prophetic” novel that predicted the troubles of modern-day Zimbabwe
WHERE THE BASTARD IS GOD?
Dambudzo – A native of nowhere
Tribute to the extraordinary Dambudzo Marechera
DM @ goodreads
Dambudzo Marechera Archive at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
THE SLOW SOUND OF HIS FEET
The Grotesque Body of the Postcolony
B-SIDES: DAMBUDZO MARECHERA’S “THE HOUSE OF HUNGER”
Four poems by Dambudzo Marechera
Dambudzo Marechera – Beyond the Single Story
The life of Marechera
Unpacking Dambudzo Marechera: Part One
Soul-Food for the Starving
Abjection in Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger
The Fourth Dimension: Dambudzo Marechera as a Dramatist
FORMS OF HYPOCRISY IN THE WRITINGS OF DAMBUDZO MARECHERA
Vindicating Dambudzo Marechera
Dambudzo Marechera: a man beyond his time?
Buy ‘Black Sunlight’
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Extras
DAMBUDZO MARECHERA’S VIEW ON AFRICAN LITERATURE
Alle Lansu interviews Dambudzo Marechera about Oxford
Dambudzo Marechera (late) on his visit to Zim after 8 Year in UK
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Constructed Interview
Tinashe Mushakavanhu: Where does the problem lie in Zimbabwe? Who is to blame for the crisis in Zimbabwe today?
Dambudzo Marechera: We in Zimbabwe know who the enemy is. The enemy is just not white, he is also black. The police force, the army in Zimbabwe are three-quarters black. They have always been. And for me…I believe that to see the Zimbabwe struggle as merely a black versus white struggle is stupid and naïve. And hence, in most of my work, there’s always a mistrust of politicians, no matter who they are.
TM: Zimbabwe has been constantly in the news as a kind of hell on earth. What is the actual state of affairs in Zimbabwe?
DM: The rich are getting more powerful and richer and the poor are getting poorer. Any writer worth his name cannot write about that, the publishers are afraid of Government attitude towards anything they publish which may not be considered patriotic.
TM: What is your opinion on the present leadership?
DM: This is a weird world of mechanical speeches; lullabying the povo with mobile horizon promises (what is Zimasset?). They are quick to mend legislation; so the world is what they make it for us who are passive, we who they shamelessly claim to have liberated from the white man. With that as their pretext, they weigh their grievous lot on us day in day out. All we hear are empty slogans.
TM: In the past three decades, the ballot has failed to effect political change. Is it better for Zimbabweans to resort to violence?
DM: I am against everything, against war and those against war, against whatever diminishes the individual’s blind impulse.
TM: What is your comment on the historical domination of Zanu (PF) in post-independence Zimbabwe?
DM: I am afraid of one-party states, especially where you have more slogans than content in terms of policy and its implementation. I have never lived under a one-party state, except under pre-independence Zimbabwe, Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, which was virtually a one-party state. And what I read about one-party states makes me, frankly, terrified.
TM: After 36 years of misrule and dazzling corruption, do you think independence is a reality for the majority, or just an illusion?
DM: I think some things have been improved. But basically our revolution has only changed life for the new black middle class, those who got university degrees overseas during the struggle. For them, independence is a reality; it has changed their income, their housing conditions and so on and so on. But for the working classes and the peasants, it’s still the same hard work, low pay, rough conditions of living. In other words, I don’t think independence so far has really made any significant change as far as the working class are concerned; especially for those who committed themselves to become fighters. They joined ZANLA or ZIPRA before they’d finished their education. Most of them are now unemployed and live in the streets. This is what I wrote about in Mindblast.
TM: Indeed, Mindblast gives a blistering account of the early years of independence. Why do you think Zimbabwe downplayed your significance as a writer?
DM: In some ways there is a certain disconnection between my profession as a writer and the needs of Zimbabwe as a developing country. A developing country doesn’t really need a writer like me. It needs teachers, it needs development officers, it needs people who will help to build a better future for the working class and the peasants. I had come back armed with a profession which is irrelevant to development.
TM: It seems contemporary Zimbabwean writers are uncertain about their stand today. Was it easier for your lot before 1980?
DM: Oh yes, it was. Because the objective was to fight racism and obtain independence. After UDI in 1965 Ian Smith deliberately created the Rhodesia Literature Bureau to promote a certain kind of Shona and Ndebele literature which would be used in the schools and perpetuate the idea that racism is for the good of the blacks. And we had writers who were writing the very books Ian Smith wanted the blacks to read. In primary school I was taught Shona literature which caricatures black people and which was in line with the specific political policies before independence. One of the main themes in Shona literature of that period was the story about a person coming from the rural areas thinking that he’d have a good life in the city. Then he or she comes to the city and goes through hardship and decides to go back to the rural areas because that’s where heaven is. Now this was in direct line with the urban influx control policy. Blacks were being discouraged by the city council and by the government to come to the cities.
In other words, even before I left the country, the literature which was being written here had no relevance to me or even to our people, to those who knew. Before independence you had two schools of thought among writers: those who participated in Ian Smith’s propaganda programme, and those who had to run into exile and write protest literature. You will find that after independence the ones who were in the first school are now the ones in high positions, and those who were part of the Zimbabwean protest literature are the ones who are having problems or who have been forced to compromise themselves. Literature is now seen merely as another instrument of official policy and therefore the writer should not practise art for art’s sake or write like Franz Kafka or like James Joyce or explore the subconscious of our new society. All that is for European bourgeois literature. And that’s why for instance my work is condemned. One of the reasons given by the censorship board when they banned Black Sunlight on August 7th, 1981, before I had come back, was that Dambudzo Marechera is trying to be European, that this book has got no relevance to the development of the Zimbabwean nation.
TM: The economic downturn has driven many people out of the country, though in your own case what drove you out of the country was the political madness of the time. Tell me, when you came back after years of exile in Britain, what kind of country did you expect?
DM: The only idea I had of what to expect was what I had been reading in the British press about the struggle here and about what was going on in Uganda, about the military coups in Nigeria and so on and so on. In other words, the idea that our own independence would be another disaster had been instilled in me very much. The first time I heard the Prime Minister’s motorcade, and there were suddenly all these sirens going, “whee, whee, whee”, I thought, “shit, another civil war has started.” And I rushed to my hotel room and just locked the door, listening hard, waiting for the gunfire. Some people here call the motorcade ‘Bob and his Wailers,’ after Bob Marley.
TM: The Third Chimurenga came up with a wholly new cultural programme meant to celebrate Mugabe the supreme leader, first secretary of ZANU PF, commander of defence forces, chancellor of all universities through musical galas, political jingles, etc. What in your view is the relationship between culture and politics?
DM: Here we have a deliberate campaign to promote Zimbabwean culture: everyone is talking about it, building it, developing it. When politicians talk about culture, one had better pack one’s rucksack and run, because it means the beginning of unofficial censorship…. When culture is emphasised in such a nationalistic way that can lead to fascism. When in Nazi Germany culture started to be defined in a nationalistic way, it meant that all other people, all other nations were stupid; it meant intellectuals, painters, writers, lecturers, being persecuted or being assassinated. In this sense, all nationalism always frightens me, because it means the products of your own mind are now being segregated into official and unofficial categories, and that only the officially admired works must be seen. All the other work we must hide or tear up.
*All the responses are actual quotes from Dambudzo Marechera.
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Book
Dambudzo Marechera Black Sunlight
Penguin Classics
‘“I really tried to put terrorism into a historical perspective, neither applauding their acts nor condemning them. The photographer does not take sides; he just takes the press photographs.” In an unspecified setting the stream-of-consciousness narrative of this cult novel traces the fortunes of a group of anarchists in revolt against a military-fascist-capitalist opposition. The protagonist is photojournalist Chris, whose camera lens becomes the device through which the plot is cleverly unraveled. In Dambudzo Marechera’s second experimental novel, he parodies African nationalist and racial identifications as part of an argument that notions of an ‘essential African identity’ were often invoked to authorize a number of totalitarian regimes across Africa. Such irreverent, avant-garde literature was criticized upon publication in Zimbabwe in 1980, and Black Sunlight was banned on charges of ‘Euromodernism’ and as a challenge to the concept of nation-building in the newly independent country.’ — Penguin
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Excerpt
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p.s. Hey. ** Misanthrope, Back to the real then. It seems to me that the post-inauguration hell is already raining down quite heavily. ** jay, Hi. Yeah, strange thing to say, but a lot of hetero guys’ thinking about and approach to women’s bodies is a foreign and very interesting thing to me too. Mm, I’m glad I didn’t sit through that play but it does sound very curious. I’m not a fan of that book, I guess I should say. You’re making that ‘Castlevania’ game sound very tasty indeed. I’ll at least go watch part of a YouTube play-through vid. We’re supposed to get a couple of added degrees today, but that certainly isn’t apparent this morning. How did you spend your more temperate hours du jour? ** _Black_Acrylic, I entirely agree with you, mister. ** Jack Skelley, I just hope the breakage is permanent. Yeah, I’m going to dig into your reading assignment today, I believe. The air still sucks? Wow. So sorry. Ours just has the mixed blessing of turning our breaths into little clouds and making our toes into things that could be dropped into a glass and drowned in whisky. ** PL, I know people who have the kind of relationship with their parents where they could ask them something like that, isn’t that bizarre? How was the double birthday? What did you get? Well, the work of yours I saw was terrific, so awesome if you think you’re even better now? Of course I’ll be curious to see. I drive but my drivers licence expired years ago, and I never renewed it, so I drive illegally when I do, only in LA. I love driving, been doing so since about age 13 like a lot of people who grow up in LA. I never worry. I’ve only been in two hardcore accidents in my whole life, and nobody ever got hurt even in them. My guess is that once you start driving it’ll get demystified, and you’ll do a duck-to-water taking to it. A guess. ** Steeqhen, Oops, mushed brain with a tight deadline, although I’m sure you foraged through. I like coke because it’s so nothing-ish. Or I did when I was drugging. It was like a chemical acquaintance as opposed to a friend. Hallucinogens rule, but you do need to make the time for them and be sure you’re not repressing all kind of fears and things that the hallucinogens will inevitably wrench to your surface. I’ve never had socials on my phone. I only use my phone for calls, texts, and photos/videos. That’s it. It makes life outdoors remarkably peaceful. ** James, And always in CAPS. EXPORT. Thanks as ever for being so attentive and meticulous. You’re the dream blog recipient. I put on socks and they were still cold. The US equivalent would probably be taco trucks or those mobile trucks serving made-on-truck food. At least in LA, that’s where people gather and hang and drink and carouse to the degree that LA people carouse. I guess the closest Paris equivalent would be crepe stands or shawarma stands. Russia paper in what sense? Not written in Russian, I’m assuming. Hoping your brain is still percolating. ** Lucas, Oh, pal, I’m so sorry you’re going through the double ringer. But at least your body’s cooperating. Well, Kathy reconciled herself with all the confessional stuff partly because she framed it as cooptation of found texts, and often it is found/re-contextualised, but it’s just kind of twisted into vehicles that she can exorcise through or something. Well, first thank you so much about my work helping you, and, obviously, I use fiction as my personal protector. Not that people don’t read my autobiography into my fiction, and I can say you’re being reductive, and it’s true, but the scary, weird stuff gets out. I think you know you can do that too and have been doing that already with power and impeccableness. I hope you slept well and rose feeling stronger. xoxo. ** Dan Carroll, Thanks, Dan. We would love to show the film Chicago, and hopefully we’ll find a way. Zac went to university in Chicago, so he’s very attached to the film having a presence there. Observing the fear and need to escape of the other people was part of the incentive of wanting to stick around at the TG show. It was quite an interesting spectacle. No, I never met EXPORT. That would have been a boon. I found that ‘Pussy King of the Pirates’ starts really well and excitingly then kind of runs out of gas at a certain point and just continues on expectedly. I think that’s a bit of a general issue with Kathy’s later novels, but they have their champions. ** HaRpEr, I guess that’s true about current performance art now that you mention it. I just put together an upcoming post about Downtown NYC performance art in the 80s, and I was re-excited by how wild the work was back then. I used to practically live at performance spaces in those times. I wonder if there is really challenging work still going on but that the venues that purport to present exciting new performance work are afraid to contextualise it. That’s certainly the case with a lot of other art forms. I’ve never understood the high rating and revering of Oasis. I don’t see or hear anything in them that warrants that. I’m sure I’ve mentioned that Alex James was supposed to interview me about ‘Guide’ when it came out for a big magazine, but then he freaked out about 30 minutes before the interview and cancelled. And then the Melody Maker and NME ran little news squibs about him being a chickenshit about the book, and I’m sure that only made him freak out about the book even more. ‘What would happen if you gave William Blake LSD’ sounds pretty enticing to me. Good luck getting the work done in time today. Maintain heavy self-belief, no doubt extraordinary warranted. ** Steve, Hi. No, your first volley didn’t register. I hope you worked things out with your dad. Freezing-ish here too, but supposedly on the rise today, we’ll see. I have the Louise Weard film cued up, and I just haven’t had the time to watch it yet. Your mention is incentive. Very curious about it. ** Tyler Ookami, No, your comment was a singularity. That is/was a visually lively looking mall. RIP. I haven’t personally been to The Spectacle, but of course I know it, and it showed Zac’s and my last film ‘Permanent Green Light’, so I’m obviously a fan. ‘We Don’t Care About Music Anyway’ sounds worth hunting out, but Japanese noise is interesting enough to me in general that I’ll take what I can get. Thanks for the reference. Yeah, when ‘Guide’ was published, it caused kind of a biggish kerfuffle in the UK because of the Blur stuff. To the point where, as I just said to HaRpEr, Alex James was assigned to interview me about my novel’s ‘sexual abuse’ of ‘him’, but, as I said, he bailed. Thanks a lot for the Conner O’Malley links. I’ll check those out. Great, thank you! ** Justin D, Hi. There seems to be at least the beginnings of a fight back starting up over there. It’s hard not to feel fatalistic about it all though. Sex Week, interesting. Thanks a lot, my friend. I’ll push Play once I’m in the post-p.s. clear. How is/was your day today? ** Callan, Hey, Callan! Export being an antithesis of Paglia is a really interesting way to think about them. Cool, thank you. I agree about Leigh. I started with ‘Naked’ too. I sometimes think about how strange and presumably disappointing it must be to David Thewlis to be given such an astonishing, god given role and opportunity as an actor at the start of his career and then to never be given a role that even remotely allows him to explore and max out his talent ever again. Let’s compare notes on ‘Hard Truths’ once it’s under our respective belts. I’ll look for an opportunity on my end. ** Okay. Today I’m re-instituting my blog’s spotlight on this amazing novel by Dambudzo Marechera, a novel bewilderingly under-known considering how exciting and great and ever relevant it is. It’s one of my favorite novels, so an examination of its spotlit being is highly recommended by me. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
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Hi!!
Most of the above interview/quote compilation remains deeply relevant even today, which is really sad. Not surprising, but sad. I’ve never read anything by Dambudzo Marechera, but I’m definitely going to try to get my hands on some of his books – starting with “The House of Hunger,” I think. Thank you so much for this post!
Sorry for the extremely cliché choice, but we can’t possibly leave this one out: Love will tear us apart, Od.
Marechera is new to me of course, but I see House of Hunger is printed as a Penguin Modern Classic so think I will maybe start with that that one? That publisher does tend to do good introductions.
Re fish and chips, there’s a really good place around the corner from me here in Crossgates called The Skyliner that even has a veggie option if you’re interested. Yorkshire is known to have a particularly good range of chippy, with Whitby said to be a highlight.
Dennis, Yes, he signed an EO requiring everyone to come back into the office full time. The agency I work with is already making plans. I have no cubicle to return to, so I don’t know where I’ll end up. But I will have that 3-to-4-hour round-trip commute, which means I’ll be spending most of my workdays dealing with work, getting up, going in, getting home. I’ll have very little time to spend with Alex or even to work out. I’ll have to rearrange my schedule to an unrecognizable point. I’m not happy about it.
Hi Dennis… the unblockage continues! Great to see everyone here!!! Good comments, all! Alas, Garth Hudson, last remaining, and perhaps weirdest, member of The Band. HIs big organ showpiece being “Chest Fever,” — a song which I could swear I once heard Butthole Surfers cover at a weirdo Butthole concert (I even remember the venue: John Anson Ford theater in the Hollywood Hills.) Other shit: I published abig multi-sourced article about the fires in Urban Land magazine. Quality wonkage. I’m doing a reading this Friday at Leroy’s Place, a seemingly hot new Chinatown gallery. This YouTube book vlogger got into Fear of Kathy Acker AND Dennis Wilson and CHarlie Manson. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAW8O3IAEtI&t=194s …. etc. Have you ever been to AWP? DOesn’t seem likely but perhaps you have been invited at some point. It’s coming here soon. People telling me the parties are better than the official events, so that’s my plan. Hope the cold isn’t too cold… could be worse… xo Jack
Hi hi Dennis! Wow, that book looks incredible, I may follow your regimen, and read a section of it – the section you shared was amazingly evocative, really vivid. Thank you for sharing.
Yeah, I also really dislike “A Little Life” – I first read it when I was 14 or 15 or something, and I hated it because it felt far too pessimistic. I re-read it recently, and I ended up hating it for being too sentimental, so, that’s interesting. The play is the best thing that’s come out of that text, in my opinion. Although I often find truncating anything that’s around 800 pages long improves it, so I may be biased.
Yeah, the game’s really fun. Sadly I’ve got a ton of school atm, so I’ve been playing for a few minutes after getting back from work, so a relatively old, simple game fills that niche very nicely. Yeah, the weather here’s been miserable too, my boyfriend always gets depressive in cold/rainy weather, so I have mild seasonal depression-by-proxy. Wafting warm air your way.
Post is off to a depressing start, godawful that anyone at all can die homeless from AIDS, with no money. New College going up in flames sounds like a pretty sight. It is a shame that substance abuse fucks up people. Fabulous suit in that black and white pic. The excerpt beats my record for earliest use of profanity, hitherto that spot was held by Trainspotting, I think. ‘You could bind a man with long ropes of words he did not understand’ – good. I like the riffing on Jesus’ word. It’s pretty intense writing. ‘sudden and barbaric impulses, crude and insatiable appetites’ are my *favourite.* Thankful that Marechera could get his stuff out there while he could.
Hi Dennis, I’ve got explosives on my mind at the moment. I’ve spent my afternoon so far eating and feeling like I should be more worried about these exams than I am, which is often how I feel, even if they’re mocks.
Oopsies, I’ll amend my lack of caps. EXPORT, roger. It does have some more OOMPH that way, and I can appreciate OOMPH. Lord knows I’m in need of it.
Cheers. I do what I can to pick these little veins of information apart. I know there’re better blog observers than me out there, I ought to rope them in somehow. Do an enticing dance or something, I don’t know what blogreaders like. Wait. They probably like blogs. Duh. The blog is a thing of which I am fond of in an almost pet-y way.
I’ve had socks off, on, off, on today, it’s riveting stuff, really. I do find that they don’t always do their job. My gloves are useless too, my hands are better warmed up by just putting them in my trouser pockets. It was really nippy on the walk back today.
Mobile food places(? vehicles?) are charming little things. Bless those churros I had in Leicester, they were delightful and made me a little woozy but they were so worth it. When it comes to crepes, I prefer thicker pancakes than the thin kind. Rather too dainty, even for *my* tastes.
Russia paper as in writing about 13.5 sides of A4 about the domestic effects of the Crimean War, Russia’s rulers c1855-1964 limiting personal, political, and religious freedoms, and about the impacts of war and revolution on Russian government for 2hrs and 30 minutes. In English, thankfully. Yes I am pretty exhausted. But I’ve got TWO papers tomorrow! And TWO ON FRIDAY! OH, JOY. My brain is holding together. Going to read and study some. Probably will eat more biscuits than good judgement would dictate. But 2 papers down out of 6, so I’m 1/3 of the way through. Must. Not. Crack.
Hi James! Yeah, I get what you meant yesterday about being blunt, but I unfortunately am surrounded by quite normal people, so going into detail about what Sade entails would probably make me go down in their estimations a little. Don’t worry, you don’t sound like an egomaniac. Cataille was bouncing around my head all last night, very funny image. I was sort of imagining him as an yaoi-ish catboy, but with the face/body of the actual Bataille – only with a tail and ears. Awesome you got anything out through your Substack story – I thought it was great, just finished it. See ya!
Hey D… crazy your Dern day came on the day Lynch passed. I’ve been busy as fuck lately.
My improv collective played a live show on Friday and by Saturday night I had turned it into an EP on band camp. (I substacked about the process, thanks for subscribing!)
Just before I left for the show I add some Lynch material to my sampler and I’m so glad I did. It made for a great intro. Gonna write a lot more about that genius in substacks to come. It was nice when my social media went all Lynch for a week.
Here’s the EP if anyone is interested… https://kallohumina.bandcamp.com/album/metaphysical-dehumidifier-live
Anyway, good vibes from the PNW headed your way as always…
Gold ! Yes !
I was born two days before the year 2000, and grew up watching so much American tv that I didn’t believe my parents when they said I was living in Scotland. For me, your books always fit neatly, setting wise, on a kind of nostalgic non descript America imaginary; an empty suburban sprawl. And culturally, they fit just as neatly onto a Gen X imaginary; the kind of jaded MTV generation I grew up with the cultural dregs of. There’s a kind of Francis Fukuyama end of history American hegemony vibe to them. (I’m probably not the first person to, on a whim, look up what year “Closer” was first published then also look up what year the Berlin wall fell- and seeing it was the same year think: oh, aye, that probably makes sense.) – I can’t help but read your books through that lens- being distinctly now a not American Gen Z.
Which is what made it so weird to read “Gold” – a story almost perfect to read as a double feature with the short film “The Fall of Communism as Seen In Gay Pornography”. – which uses the genre conversions of a Dennis Cooper story but without those markers of American Hegemony I associate so closely.
It felt like reading that superman comic book where the rocket ship baby lands in Russia instead – where the novelty was seeing the thoroughly American iconography Superman, twisted into soviet iconography. But here, in “Gold”, it’s post soviet. The American iconography of the jaded MTV boy is the same, what feels different is, I guess, it feels cheaper. Or at least – money is more present. I guess reading “Gold” was less like that superman comic and more like the Gorbachev pizza hut advert.
I’ve typed out and deleted different question strands, touching on the kind of background knowledge of your dad working with Nixon and how it felt being that close to the cold war and then writing a story about the (not a bang but a) whimper of that cold war. Or about Nixon getting rid of the Gold standard. Or something or other. But I guess I’m less confident those questions are interesting?
I guess what I was wondering when I read “Gold” was like – how did it feel/ what was it like writing in this setting? How was writing about this setting different from the Californian suburb? How did that, if at all, consciously impact the way you engaged with the characters? Reading it, I felt distinctly outside the kind of hazy dream logic of the other books – it felt uncomfortably real, uncomfortably mired in the economic relations being played out. I guess my question is: how different is your relationship to this cold sociopolitical landscape of Russia compared to your literary relationship with America? Why did you want to write about Russia?
What does a Dennis Cooper book look like set in Paris May 1968? Or in Thatcher’s Britain? What does it look like in Cuba or China? What does it look like in the future?
Fukuyama’s already retracted his statement however many times – history is renewed for a reboot franchise. What does a Dennis Cooper book look like in an increasingly likely world outside of American Hegemony?
(Perfectly fine for the answer to be -“I don’t think about it much Diesel lol” – but “Gold” got me spinning around in my head so I wanted to ask)
P.s. fabulous spotlight ! Just ordered a copy of House of Hunger !
P.s.s. James and Jay- skimming through the comments and drew Catielle – https://ibb.co/3mmNffy
Oh my god, thank you, that’s unbelievably good. Would you mind if I used that as a profile photo, it’s incredibly good.
Ah- thank you! And yes ofc
Hey Dennis,
About to present a quiz in 5 mins. Did some ‘on the street’ interviews on campus for the magazine im creative director of, which just won an award for Best Digital Magazine throughout the entirety of Ireland for Student Publications! Exciting stuff
Chemical acquaintance is a great way to describe coke; i must admit if someone offers it to me i will always take it, like how i’ll always hang out with an acquaintance i run into at a night out.
I’m excited to get home and sleep to be honest, I’ve been nonstop the past few days.
Gotta go now and present. See you!
Okay, back from the quiz and was able to properly give this post a read. What a tragic end to his life, it’s heartbreaking. The excerpt seemed interesting, the repetition in that first paragraph alone had me getting into a bit of a trance. I remember reading a book set in Rhodesia, Nervous Conditions, for one of my college modules last year. It was pretty interesting, and made me interested in the history of Zimbabwe. I’m gonna add Black Sunlight to my reading list (though I doubt I’ll get around to it til after college with the workload and backlog of books I have)
Hey, Dennis. Yeah, I suppose driving isn’t that awful once you get into it. I just have a lot to do right now and I don’t want to make it easy for Death. Our birthday hasn’t happened yet, it’s the 5th, but I’m expecting some nice presents as it is the first time I’m celebrating with friends for a real long time. I don’t have many friends, and I don’t make friends easily. It’s not that people dislike me (even though they think I’m a bit odd), I just never like them enough. The friends I have are mostly people I met online, and some are coming to the party so I’m happy. At the end of the day, it’s just because I really hate the State I live in and it’s people… and it’s culture. I feel like the place I live is the Brazilian equivalent for Michigan? I don’t know if it makes sense. Where are you from by the way? Do you like the place you were born or you felt it was too “provincial”. I feel like this. Nobody’s ready for anything! And they suck so bad… But it’s beyond me so I just have to deal with it. Recently I started to watch corny TV shows, Law&Order: SVU, and Sex and the City. I suppose Law&Order is supposed to be cop propaganda, but they make such bad decisions that it’s going the other way, and Sex and the City is… New York propaganda maybe? To be honest, it’s working for me. The show is fun, nothing else, but ever since I started to watch it I started to pay more attention to NYC. Then I watched the musical ‘New York, New York’ and some old Wendy Williams compilations, and she’s always talking about the city. It’s kind of the goal for me right now, have an exhibition of my work in NY. I’m sure it’s not clean, and people are mean, and there’s rats everywhere but I need to go there. What do you think about New York?
See ya
Cherry Creek Mall is still around, it just doesn’t have the 90s neon cartoon slime aesthetic. It rebranded as a luxury mall. No Hot Topic, no Spencer Gifts, no FYE, just golf and watch stores. It used to have the absolute tackiest gimmicks of that era, though: Rainforest Cafe, Build a Bear, the Disney and Warner Brothers stores with the giant cartoon statues, other bizarre stuff that I’m definitely forgetting about because I haven’t been there in well over 20 years. It still has a giant playground at the center but it has been rethemed twice according to my research: once as Looney Tunes and now as dinosaurs. Both seem to have more stuff like slides and treehouses that a regular playground would have and are probably more actually fun rather than just strange. There seems to have been a trend of these weird mall playgrounds that seem designed to seed microphilia in underdeveloped minds. The mall near me had one that had big soccer and basketballs and sneakers you could climb in. I swear there was one at Colorado Mills that was bugs and flowers. I found images of an identical breakfast playground at about a half dozen malls searching for that one so some of them must have been mass produced. I was trying to think about why so many of these would have been built around the 90s to the very beginnings of the 2000s and it must have been inspired by that playground at MGM Studios with the big ant and cookie and the Play Doh can.
Hi. I didn’t mean to suggest that performance art is all bad yesterday. I just meant that a lot of what the major galleries present is purely gimmick based, extremely obvious in terms of statement, lacking motivation. But no, there’s obviously a lot of great performance art out there. Also, it’s interesting that the definition of what it is is changing. There are people in film and people who border on being comedians, and drag artists who would count as performance art. A lot of social media stars are basically just doing performance art, even if it’s poor quality. It’s interesting. I was having a conversation recently about how a lot of really creative people who probably would have been writers, artists, filmmakers etc. in another era are now turning to the impermanence of streaming and ‘content’ (ugh, I hate that word). It’s interesting to think about what the future holds and what art will look like and if it’s even conceivable to us now. Sorry, this was a bit of a ‘smokes weed for the first time’ thought.
Oh, I recognise this book from your list of favourite books, so of course I’m going to have to write this down. I know that you don’t like compliments but I’d be living in a place called nowhere if I never saw that list.
I got the poem thing done on time! Phew. Ah Christ, I haven’t stopped working except to eat or smoke for hours. But I’m pretty happy with it. And if I’m happy with it sleep-deprived, in the morning where everything doesn’t seem as bad as you thought it did last night, I’m sure it’ll be presentable. Is it like that for you? Sometimes I go to bad and am like ‘that is the worst thing any human being has ever shit out’ and in the morning I’m like ‘oh, that’s quite good actually’. Maybe it’s because strong feelings are liable to fall to either extreme. Or just sleep deprivation.
I did read Black Light after the original blog post. What a tragic life.
I’m enjoying Nate Lippen’s Ripcord from your best-of list. Obviously I can relate to all the queer punk aging stuff! I have jury duty tomorrow, and will bring it along, ha.
The Leonora Carrington show here had some interesting pieces, including a nice sculpture, and paintings with translucent ghost-like figures. Wendi Norris has shown a lot of surrealist women over the years, including an excellent Remedios Varo show a couple years ago. I think Varo is a more distinctive painter. I’m also hoping to get to London to see the Ithell Colquhoun show this summer.
Bill
I first encountered Marechera in anthology as I was leaving school, using a line from his poem to bid goodbye to one of my friends “No broom can sweep away the dust / Of your departure”. And then I read Black Sunlight off your favourite books of all time list and I didn’t connect the two until late last year. Got back to college last week and the long flight took me out. Still super tired and in the thick of things. Working on some translations and big papers, but that’s not new. Also some of my friends are back and that’s been great, especially ***** and ***** who I spend most of my time with. And the guy I like may be beginning to like me back, but that’s just wishful thinking. So yeah besides the cold and the tiredness (not entirely unlinked) it’s a good time. It would be really cool if you could screen the film here but I don’t know if that’s super able to happen. I know very little about the film world, or really about most things.
hi dennis!!!
i desperately need to get into marachera. i was introduced to him through this rapper named billy woods who references him quite frequently throughout his body of work. he was formerly a resident of zimbabwe and his father, i believe, was an prominent intellectual within the country as well. his music is littered with a lot of similarly obscure references and overarching metaphors so each of his many albums ends up becoming an endlessly rich rabbit hole of information.
looking forward to the hard truths noteswap btw ! and yeah it is truly a shame that Thewlis never got another role of the same magnitude as Johnny, although i’m sure those Harry Potter checks also provide him with a sense of fulfillment as well (those films feature a lot of Leigh alums now that I think about it).
Wow, that excerpt just knocked me over. I’m definitely picking up Black Sunlight tomorrow. And I’m barely halfway through Pussy king of the pirates but I’m slogging through all the dreamy stuff. It’s been hard to do anything lately, and I keep thinking I need to be working harder because I’m no closer to finding a job. Agh. I feel like I’m always having to drag myself out of whatever stupors I’m in to do anything. Painting still feels good though. Even when I’m not happy with what I have I still just wanna keep working on something. Maybe I should just stop smoking weed during the day