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DENNIS COOPER - PART 1

ON ZINE DAYS (THEY WERE GOOD) AND TRANSGRESSIVE BLOGS (THERE IS SUCH A THING) - The Vice Interview

INTERVIEWED BY STEVE LAFRENIERE

If you rated magazines on a scale of 100 for megasellers to 0 for practically shunned, poetry journals would barely register in the high minuses. Who exactly is the itsy audience for milquetoast rags like Figdust, Narrativity, and Tarpaulin Sky? Whatever the answer, from the late 70s to mid-80s their ranks suddenly swelled to include porn auteurs, junkie punks, hustler artists, zen careerists, Joe Brainard, Shaun Cassidy, and Andy Warhol. They were all reading or starring in Little Caesar, a dark-carnival literary zine edited by Dennis Cooper and laid out in a back room of the former Venice, California, city hall building. Back then, before his fiction was published in novels and collections like Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period, and before he became an Abject-Lit god, Cooper was a recovering Hollywood glitter kid cum pop-obsessed poet. Today from his current home in Paris he tells us it was a great time for publishing radical words and pissing on obsolete writers—and that something called New Narrative was in the air.


Vice: You started Little Caesar in Los Angeles in 1976. What was the idea?

Dennis Cooper: I’d been writing a lot of poems and investigating the LA poetry scene with Amy Gerstler, who was my poet friend in college. It didn’t feel very interesting to me, what was going on. I was very, very into the New York School, the whole Saint Mark’s Poetry Project]thing and the presses they were doing. I was madly collecting their books and pamphlets and chapbooks and magazines. And, I don’t know, I had this dream of doing something on a punier scale in LA. Then I went to England in ’76 because I’d heard the punk thing was happening and I went to look at it. It was so energizing to see that stuff, and also the zines they were doing, like Sniffin’ Glue. So when I got back to LA it seemed like the right time to give it a shot myself—have a small group of friends and people that I liked do a magazine without a center. Also try to pull some of the New York stuff in, the music and all.

Were there any worthwhile lit journals around then?

A few. Particularly inspiring to me was a New York one called A Muzzled Ox. It had pictures, that’s what interested me. It had the usual New York crowd publishing in it, but it was just a little bit more multimedia-looking and I liked that. And then Kenward Elmslie had his magazine Z, and I was really into that and some of the others like The World, and Angel Hair. There was also this press in Boston called Telegraph that was really big to me. They did these small books. They did Patti Smith’s first book. They did Brigid Polk’s Scars.

At the same time you were into the rock ’n’ roll rags...

Oh yeah. Creem of course was big because of Lester Bangs, and then before that Crawdaddy had been OK. But there were a lot of magazines that came out of the early punk scene, too. Both the English ones and the New York ones like Punk and Trouser Press. In LA Slash was just about to start, and this guy Phast Phreddie had one. I can’t remember what it was called. Those were all happening around the time I started Little Caesar.

You saw the connection between certain music and certain literature.

Well, I tend to see everything as art, so I was interested in the art in punk. Also there was the connection already going on with Patti Smith and Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine, people doing stuff in the music scene who were already writers. Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries also. There was something about it that connected with my aesthetic as a writer. There was a kind of literariness to it.

I first saw Little Caesar at the Wax Trax store in Chicago. They had a publications rack with stuff like Morrissey’s zine about the New York Dolls and Throbbing Gristle tracts. But Little Caesar stood out by virtue of being weirdly teenage and grown-up at the same time. Like you’d have a naked picture of Iggy Pop on the cover and then a long archive-worthy interview with Joe Brainard inside.

Yep.

I recently read that interview again. I’d forgotten that in the early 80s Brainard was one of the biggest artists around.

Isn’t that weird? I would solicit all those New York guys for the magazine. Then I’d go there and befriend them. Joe was the sweetest guy.

That was around the time that he dropped out of the art world?

Yeah. Everybody was always saying, “Joe, when are you gonna fuckin’ do it, make some art again?” But he would just never do it.



In the same issue that would have writing by Robert Creeley, Kate Braverman, or Rene Ricard you’d have a Top 5 Fave Records list.

That was actually really fun. I was able to get all these crazy people to do it like Debbie Harry, Andy Warhol, Shaun Cassidy, Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick.

You made Rimbaud the theme of one issue. I remember this bizarre photo spread of David Wojnarowicz wandering around sleazy New York locales with a Rimbaud mask on, jacking off, etc. How did you get people to do stuff like that?

In the beginning I had to write these people, try to be charming, and get them to throw me their worst poem or whatever. But then the magazine got a buzz around it and it became easy. I began publishing people like David Wojnarowicz before anybody else did. The only reason that one happened, actually, is because my friend Tim Dlugos fucked him, and in the process asked him what he did. He said photography and writing, so Tim told him to send something to Little Caesar.

He was a newcomer.

He was a hustler! Tim bought him. [laughs]



Little Caesar was nice-looking for a zine, and it was actually printed. The first issues were stapled, but the rest looked like paperbacks. How did you pay for it?

I basically coerced my mother into paying for it. I guilt-tripped her. But my whole thing with Little Caesar was to sell it for incredibly cheap, so it never ever earned back what it cost. And of course the stores never paid me for selling it, so I lost tons of money. Then I got all ambitious. I went offset and started putting photos and art in. I did a crazy Gerard Malanga 800-page or whatever issue. Then with Little Caesar Press I published 26 books, with color covers, and would sell them for two bucks. There got to be a point where my mother said, “I cannot do this anymore!” [laughs]

Nowadays you’d get a grant.

There were no grants! I’ve never gotten a grant in my life.

Was it distributed widely?

To some degree, yeah, considering the limitations I had. It was in a bunch of stores in England, Amsterdam, and Germany so I started getting things from over there as well. Like some guy in England would write and say, “I did an interview with Johnny Rotten, do you want it?” Stuff like that.

The final issue was “Overlooked and Underrated.” You got poets to do appreciations of their favorite obscure writers.

That one was easy. I let Ian Young edit it. I thought it was a little staid, and was disappointed I had to go out on that one.

Really? That one issue turned me on to Ronald Firbank, Denton Welch, Jonathan Williams, and Abe Merritt, for fuck’s sake.

There was going to be an issue after that, a really amazing one. It had a lot of pictures and was going to cost a lot to print. I got it all together but my mother said she wasn’t going to give me any more money. So that was the end. I’ve thought about doing a Best of Little Caesar, and putting some of that issue in there, but the layout accidentally got thrown away. It would be all yellow now anyway, because I did it on old typesetting machines. Plus getting all the rights would be a complete nightmare now. But my blog seems like such a free space, and I’ve never had any trouble with copyright. So I figure eventually I’ll put as much of Little Caesar as I can on the blog.


TO BE CONTINUED
DENNIS COOPER ON ZINE DAYS | 1 | 2 |

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