This interview was submitted by Craig Laurance Gidney. 

For the past thirty years, Dennis Cooper’s dark, transgressive fiction has explored the further reaches of the erotic imagination.  The themes of obsession, desire, anomie and death are refracted through the lens of marginalized gay and other subcultures (punk, stoner, skater).  However, his work has more in common with Georges Bataille or Sade than it does with your standard coming out novel.  With pared down, almost clinical prose punctuated with random bursts of poetry, his examination of the erotic self are unflinching and often horrifying.  His singular vision has led to prolific collaborations into other media—from poetry, to theater, dance and film.  At least two films have been made of his work, and he has also worked with musicians.

His new book, Ugly Man, collects many of his short pieces, previously available online or in out-of-print zines and journals.  A humorous tone arises from some of these miniatures that experiment with form and structure.  Five poems are also included in the collection.

Cooper kindly agreed to an email interview with The New Gay, which follows below.

The New Gay:  Many critics and fans have opinions about the thematic subtext of your work.  (My own two cents:  existentialism as demonstrated through lens of gay sexual desire.)  What would you say your themes/messages are?

Dennis Cooper:  That’s a difficult question for me to answer.  I’m not a calculating writer when it comes to thematics and messages.  I’m as calculating as I can be on the level of the writing, style, structure, and things like that.  But what my work is about is very intuitive and propulsive, or it feels that way.  My interest is in being true to what I want to write about in terms of nailing the complexities of the material and of my feelings and ideas about it as possible while at the same time aiming for complete clarity on the level of communication.  I think if my work is about anything, it’s about crystallizing a tremendous confusion that I both feel myself and respond to in the world around me.  It’s about trying to find a language for things whose representation would seem to defy language.  That’s how I think about it.

TNG:  While Ugly Man explores many of the same themes and situations that have appeared in your work, there are pieces here that are quite funny—like “The Fifteen Worst Russian Gay Porn Websites.”  Did you set out to write “lighter fare” consciously? 

DC:  In the case of most of the pieces in Ugly Man, yes, I did set out to write comedies.  That was something I’ve always wanted to try to do in an overt way.  My work has employed humor before, but, for the most part, I’ve used comedy in my earlier work as a device to distract or relax or limber up the reader so I could slip them something very difficult or disturbing.  With many of the stories in Ugly Man, creating comedy was a chief goal, or rather creating comedy that didn’t in any way slight or soften the content was my goal.  I was interested in finding that balance and experimenting with what would happen with difficult subject matter if it was forced to operate in the kind of thinned out, more immediate prose that comedy requires.  When I was a kid, and before I discovered the writers like Da Sade and Rimbaud and Baudelaire whose influence kind of constructed me as a writer, I used to write comedies and parodies exclusively, mostly to entertain my friends, and when I was 11, I edited a zine called Flunker that was heavily influenced by Mad Magazine.  So writing comedy was actually a case of me going back to my roots, as it were, even though I wasn’t consciously trying to get back in touch with the innocent, goofball kid I used to be.

TNG:  Like Sade, your work deals with a form of erotic autobiography.  Many of the characters are ciphers on which you project sadistic desires, and the avatar-incarnation of yourself appears (sometimes named ‘Dennis’) in the texts.  Is it hard to access that part of the id?  Have your books been censored?  Can you share any anecdotes about readers who can’t distinguish between literary conceit and reality?

DC:  No, it’s not hard for me to access those areas, but I worked for years and years, starting when I was fifteen, to figure out a way to be comfortable enough with myself and with my fantasies and with my interest in things that disturb and frighten/compel me to be able write about that area of myself accurately and without any self-censorship.  I’m pretty clear on the difference between fiction and nonfiction, fantasy and the real, and so on, and I’m not afraid that exploring those aspects of myself will unleash something terrible that’s hidden inside me.  I suppose I was probably scared of that when I was younger, but not anymore.

One of my books, Frisk, was banned in Canada for a while, but otherwise, I don’t think my work has been censored unless the number of publishers and magazines that won’t stuff my work counts.

Well, the most obvious example of that inability to distinguish you’re talking about was the death threat I received by a queer activist group when Frisk came out.  If you don’t know the story, I was told I was going to be killed in retribution for the crime of killing gay boys in my book, and a pamphlet was distributed calling for my death, and that was intense until a phone call with the perpetrator revealed the group had only read negative reviews of the novel but not the book itself, and the fatwa was then called off.  Otherwise, I used to get guys who would send me weird stuff and ask me where they could get snuff movies and offer themselves up as ‘victims’ and things, but that was quite a while ago.

TNG:  You moved to London for the punk scene, and underground/ indie music plays a big part in the milieu you write about.  What was that like?  TNG loves music—particularly leftfield things.  What have you been listening to?

DC:  I didn’t actually move to London, I just wanted to explore the early punk scene in London in 1976 and spent a summer there checking it out.  It was interesting, of course, but it was still pretty fetal at that point, so I mostly just saw a lot of gigs and bought a lot of records and zines.  I was lucky enough to be at the legendary Ramones show at the Roundhouse, which is now considered the event that basically started the British punk scene in earnest.

As for what I’ve been listening to lately … well, I like a number of the new and newish bands like Times New Viking, Wavves, No Age, the various Animal Collective-related bands, Dirty Projectors, Wolves in the Throne Room, and so on.  There are these two kind of whiz kid genius 15-year-old one-man band guys I really like:  Pacific Blush and Natural Numbers.  I really like Deerhunter and Xiu Xiu.  I guess my favorite albums at the very moment are Sunn O)))’s ‘Monoliths and Dimensions‘, Hecker’s ‘Acid in the Style of David Tudor‘, and Pacific Blush’s ‘Skeletal Gardens’.

TNG: You started an imprint, called Little House on the Bowery, in conjunction with Akashic Books.  What is the goal/mission statement of the press?  Who are you reading now that you recommend?

DC:  Little House on the Bowery is an imprint that focuses on publishing books by what I guess you’d call emerging North American fiction writers whose work strikes me as daring and original.  As someone whose work is known and who has a little bit of power because of that, I think it’s really important for me to do what I can to help newer writers of experimental or at least very unconventional fiction get their work out into the world.  I had support from above when I was first starting out, and I needed that because my work is quite uncommercial, and I’d like to do the same thing for young writers, especially now when it’s more difficult than it ever has been to get published when your work is unique and unfamiliar and doesn’t immediately put dollar signs in editors’ and agents’ eyes.

As for what I recommend, well, I have to recommend the brand new LHotB book, a novel by Derek McCormack called The Show That Smells, which is really something.  Other writers I’ve been reading and really admiring lately are Blake Butler, Shane Jones, Mark Doten, Ken Baumann, Jesse Hudson, Michael Kimball…I could go on, but those are a handful off the top of my head.

TNG:  The objects of your protagonists’ desire are often young, wasted, nihilist ‘twinks’, so I was pleasantly surprised to read in your excellent poem “the .jpegs,” that you addressed race and eroticism.  Is this something you are looking to explore further?  Have you read the “transgressive” works of Samuel Delany (e.g., Hogg, The Mad Man), which explore themes similar to yours?  Do you have any plans to write more poetry?

DC: I don’t think my characters are ‘twinks’, but I guess that term is used in a very general way these days. I’ve addressed the issue of race and eroticism here and there.  ’The Ash Gray Proclamation’ in Ugly Man does, for instance.  I’ve had a longstanding fascination with the particular way Asian guys tend to be heavily and superficially objectified, and that’s been at play in a number of my pieces.  I guess the most directly I’ve dealt with that issue was in the theater/performance works I made in collaboration with the director Ishmael Houston-Jones in the 80s.  It’s something I might well explore further.  It wouldn’t surprise me.

Sure, I know Delany’s Hogg and The Mad Man, and I think they’re both pretty amazing, especially Hogg, which is about as daring a novel as you’ll ever come across.

I’m writing some poetry right now because my limited edition poetry book The Weaklings that came out last year is going to be published in a regular and expanded edition next year, so I’m working on some new poems to include in that.

TNG:  Your work has been adapted to theater, and film, and you’ve done collaborative work with many different artists, including graphic novels.  How is the process of collaborating as opposed to working alone?  Which of your collaborations are the most successful/your favorite?  Whatever happened to the musical collaboration between you and Michael Quercio (of The Three O’Clock)?

DC:  I love collaborating, and I do it as often as I can.  I’ve been mostly living in Paris for about four years, and during that time I’ve collaborated on four theater works with this French director Gisele Vienne that have gone really well and are currently touring all over the world, and we just started work on a fifth theater piece.  Our most recent work, which is based on a story of mine called ‘Jerk’, is going to tour North America in early 2010.  The most obvious pleasure of collaborating is just sharing the buzz and excitement and ups and downs of making work in others’ company, which is hugely refreshing if you’re used to writing a novel in what amounts to solitary confinement for years at a time.

The most successful of my collaborations so far has been ‘Jerk’, the theater piece I just mentioned, which has just been kind of unstoppable.  I can’t pick just one favorite collab.  I’m really fond of Horror Hospital Unplugged, the graphic novel I made with the artist Keith Mayerson.  One of the performance works I did with Ishmael Houston-Jones in 1985, ‘Knife/Tape/Rope’, is a big favorite.  And I really love another of the theater works I did with Giselle Vienne, ‘Kindertotenlieder’, which hasn’t been performed in the US yet.

Oh, it’s a real shame that the rock opera I was going to make with Michael Quercio and the artist Jim Isermann never happened.  We were going to do that in the very early 90s.  I wrote the script, and Michael was going to write the songs obviously, with Jim designing the stage sets and costumes.  The problem was that Michael got very busy with his band of the time, Permanent Green Light, and we just could never get the scheduling together to be able to do it.  I really wish we had.  I think it would have been really special.

Be sure to visit Cooper’s frequently updated and extensive website to get a sense of this ever-evolving writer.