IN THE MAGAZINE

DENNIS COOPER ON ZINE DAYS (THEY WERE GOOD) AND TRANSGRESSIVE BLOGS (THERE IS SUCH A THING) - PART 2

The Vice Interview

INTERVIEWED BY STEVE LAFRENIERE

In the end do you think it was unique?

I really don’t know. To me there was never another magazine that seemed like that, and it might have gotten a lot of people thinking. Having the combination of music, art, and writing together was maybe inspiring. People have told me that connecting those made writing seem kind of cool, opening up the whole idea that poetry could be connected to these other things that are more popular. But you’d have to ask other people that one.

Tell me about Beyond Baroque, the LA literary center you did events for during the time you were making Little Caesar.

The place had been started in the 60s by this old leather guy named George Drury Smith. I started hanging out there in the mid-70s to see readings, but it was very provincial. They never brought in writers from outside their crowd unless they happened to be in town and something fell into place. But they had a typesetting facility, and I started doing Little Caesar there. Bob Flanagan was running the readings, and he hated doing it, so they asked me if I’d be interested in taking over. I totally jumped at it, but I told them I wanted to remake it. I had a whole other idea about how to run the series. They said yeah, fine, because they thought it needed a boost. But there ended up being tremendous hostility toward me.

How come?

For one thing I abolished open readings. Everyone was furious at me, literally punching me and throwing things in my face. Because that’s all they had. They would go there every week and read their poems at the open reading and that was their thing. And to all the people who had always automatically gotten readings there I said no, you’re not good enough, you can’t read here.



As only a 25-year-old can dictate.

Right. At the time I thought, “This is just a provincial waste of time and we need to make it more national.” I didn’t see them as being serious about what they were doing. I wanted there to be a lot of energy and I wanted people to be really serious about their writing. So I was picky. There were only about three or four people from the old crowd that I even allowed to be in the new scene.

Did you present things beyond the poetry readings?

Oh yeah. I brought in performance artists like Tim Miller, Eric Bogosian, Mike Kelley. I had bands play—Wall of Voodoo and local bands. And special theme events. Like we did Rimbaud’s birthday party, and I hired this boy to be Rimbaud and piss on people and spit on them.

Were John Doe and Exene Cervenka hanging around Beyond Baroque?

They came to readings and played there a few times. Actually, they had been in the workshop there, too. John Doe, Exene Cervenka, and Tom Waits were all going to the poetry workshop at the same time.

Wow. And as time went on that new scene started to coalesce under some critic’s umbrella term, “New Narrative.” I remember in the early 80s there were suddenly all these weird new writers everywhere—Jack Skelley, Brad Gooch, Benjamin Weissman, Robert Glück, you, Lynne Tillman, Sam D’Allesandro, Elaine Equi, Gary Indiana, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian—all doing perverse, amazing things with traditional narrative structure and content. Mostly in short stories and poetry, but then later on novels too. Just this explosion of writing. But by the 90s it seemed like publishing had gotten really dull again.

Right, there was that period where it felt like that stuff wasn’t happening anymore. The major presses stopped publishing anything adventurous. But there definitely has been a continuation. The whole indie-press thing started up, and now they’re really kicking ass. You’re starting to see that kind of work again.

All right, let’s talk for a minute about your own press, Little House on the Bowery. The idea was to put out two books a year, and you’re up to... what now? Ten?

Eight or nine.



How do you describe the writers?

See, there’s no one to name these people. With my peers, we all happened at this certain moment where we got named. Transgressive Fiction. Gay Fiction. New Narrative. There was always some name to give us a little bit of a punch. But these people don’t have anything like that. It’s much more underground. I mean, in a couple more years it’ll be a different story, but right now I think we’re at the beginning of something just starting to happen.

Who buys them?

The audience for the Little House on the Bowery books is hard to nail down too. Richard Hell’s got the Richard Hell crowd. The gay books get the gay thing. Some of the books have sold really well, some of them haven’t sold at all. It depends.

My favorite is Userlands. You pulled together writing by people that comment regularly on your blog and published it as a book. I have to say, that idea sounds bound for lame. But in fact it’s a really good collection.

A number of people who are in Userlands are now getting agents and finishing books of their own.

Great. What about young people supposedly not reading books anymore?

It’s actually a lot better than it has been for a while. I have to credit McSweeney’s. I don’t like everything McSweeney’s does. They publish that clever, clever stuff. But then they’ll also publish Vollmann and Lydia Davis and interesting people. McSweeney’s has made a huge difference, more power to them. Also, there’s this whole new group of bands who are more literary again. I know that in my case it’s been incredibly helpful that Deerhunter and Xiu Xiu like my work. There are so many kids buying my books because Jamie Stewart and Brad Cox talk about them. Battles, Liars, Devendra Banhart, Animal Collective—these people actually read and talk about books. So yeah, I think this new wave of bands is helping out.

You get a sense of something exciting happening?

I get a sense these days of a higher intelligence and a feeling for aesthetics and an interest in language. There are so many interesting young writers that post on my blog all the fucking time. And the independent presses seem to be welcoming them, so if that’s true I think things are going to happen.



OK, I want to connect this back to Little Caesar. Your blog, The Weaklings, is also like a “magazine without a center.”

Very much so. It evolved over a couple of years into what it is now, to the point where I think of it as my Project. I feel the same kind of excitement about it that I used to feel about fiction. It’s an incredible form—you can contextualize anything in a blog. As an artist it’s really interesting to play around with that. And then there’s an encyclopedic quality that I like, passing on information and alerting people to things.

What stands out to me is that a few times a week you give over your daily post to one of the readers to do with as they please, whatever interests or obsessions they may have. Like recently there have been mostly excellent things on Félix Fénéon, Merzbau, Chic, the last place on earth to survive when the sun explodes, Mauve Zone Recordings, how to build a fog machine, the Florida Hog Trail Murders, and Thomas Bernhard. People might also put up their own writing or artwork. That’s usually a recipe for disaster...

I know, but there really aren’t any klinkers. There are some weirdos and some this and that. But I’m shocked that we never get bad eggs on there. The politics are great, and there’s no commerce around it at all. The people that come on there are artists or writers, and it matters to them that I can support them and that there’s a whole community of people that can support them. It seems to be helping them as artists. Plus it has an incredible readership now, something like 80,000 to 100,000 hits a day. I try not to think about it. [laughs]

It’s one of the only anarchist deals I’ve seen that actually kind of works. Would you consider it that way?

Well, the inherent organization of a blog space is not anarchist. It’s more like I own the front page and you can own the journal. But the fact is, that organization of it keeps it going. I do everything I can to not be a power monger on there. At the same time I’m the lure, people come there because of Dennis Cooper, blah blah blah. But I try to disperse the power as much as I can. So there’s a structure in place that holds the anarchism together.

You do a lot of posts where you manipulate gay porn, with full nudity, hard-ons, butthole shots. There’s also extremely violent and sexual manga stuff on there. How do you get away with that?

I don’t know. I mean, yeah, there’s porn and guro all over the place on there. Maybe they consider me too small fry? During that whole JT LeRoy thing, my first blog got hacked and I thought I’d get in a lot of trouble if I started up again, but it didn’t happen. But, I mean, I have copyright problems on the blog every day. I’ll steal stuff from anybody and put it on there! You’d think they’d get me for that.


DENNIS COOPER ON ZINE DAYS | 1 | 2 |

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