Jack Skelley and Dennis Cooper: In Conversation on the Biology of Language, Adaptations, and Literary Scenes

Dennis Cooper and I have an artistic/personal camaraderie four decades long. I worked at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center in Venice, California when Dennis began programming events there in the early 1980s. That’s when Dennis formed the “Gang” of writers and artists who, from there, launched long and significant careers. Our writerly lives re-entwined in July, 2024 with the publication of two new books of fiction: Flunker, stories by Dennis (Amphetamine Sulphate, 2024) and Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love by me (Far West, 2024). Here we discuss craft, artistic “scenes,” writing projects and beyond.

Jack Skelley: Let’s start with your new book. Flunker is a collection of six stories from various parts of your career. It’s a rich range of prose styles and subjects. Yet I detected (I think) a through-line in your distinct approach toward “voice” and vocabulary. Some are classic Cooper in almost dead-pan cold depictions of extreme mental or physical violence. Others are modulated with warmth, emotion and tenderness. How did you choose these pieces and did you conceive an overarching narrative or theme?

Dennis Cooper: They’re actually all from the past ten-twelve years. I had a bunch of unfinished things, and I was restless to work on fiction while being too busy finishing Zac Farley’s and my new film Room Temperature to concentrate on something new, so I decided to see if there were enough workable strays to finesse and polish up to constitute a little book, and it turned out there were six, barely enough.”From Here On” was originally a piece of my novel I Wished that got excised and that I reinvented a bit. “Gold” was a side experiment I did while writing I Wished. “Trous Francais” is constructed from left-over bits of The Marbled Swarm. I did research on Emo while I was writing The Marbled Swarm, in which Emo factors, and I found some Emo message boards. I got very excited by the intense, cathartic, barely articulate ways the participants ranted at each other, so I did some experiments inspired by their language use, and the two that seemed interesting enough (“Face Eraser” and “Start”) ended up in Flunker. “Corpse and Hand Puppet” is a reworked text that was originally used in a robotic installation piece I made with the theater director Gisele Vienne for the Whitney Biennial. So, I guess the thematic unity of the collection is just luck? Myth Lab is so beautifully cohesive, but were the seven sections originally written to be parts of the whole work as it currently exists, or did you assemble them after the fact, or…?

Jack: Myth Lab and Flunker share some origin stories, including knitting past texts and found sources into “voice-inspired” concepts. (Although 90% of Myth Lab is new writing.) I had fun slathering mock-academic language over fractured narratives on the theme of human and sexual evolution. I resort to terming these seven pieces “theories” because they seem to resist normal genres: they are personal but not autobiographical, they employ “poetic” language but aren’t “prose poems,” and they are preposterously speculative (inventing human histories and futures, e.g.) but don’t qualify as sci-fi. The more I wrote, the more I interwove them. Among the sexual motifs is this: Technology, an extension of imagination, is exponentially speeding human evolution. This creates new menus of sexual mutations, choices, experiences. Transexualism, with its brave new world of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), implants and more, is in several stories elevated to cosmic realms. It’s interesting that parts of Flunker evolve syntactically from Emo message boards, as Myth Lab delves into TikTok and QAnon comments. Reminds me of your recent QA in Poetry Project Newsletter. You explain that you are “obsessed with the rhythm of the sentence, the structure of the paragraph.” It seems these choices granulate to the level of individual and unexpected words, which gives your fiction precision and humor. Do you agree? And is this level of prose—where language is not “transparent” but often fizzing on the surface—related to poetry?

Dennis: Your description of Myth Lab is ideal. It’s rare that a writer can talk about their work in a way that mentors the reader’s viewpoint rather than instructing the reader re: what that viewpoint should be, but that’s how it felt to me. But then I guess I’ve been deeply keyed into your work and taking tokes of its machinations for a long time. I feel like your obsession with sentence architecture is similarly nitpicky to mine, but maybe the effect is manifested more ecstatically and explosively in your work. In mine, the close attention to language’s biology is a bit more secretive maybe.The machinery’s more in the basement. But yeah, no question that I come to fiction heavily through poetry, or from what I figured out when I was writing poetry. But a lot comes from experimental fiction too. One of the reasons I stopped writing poetry seriously is that my writing has too much weight or density or something for poetry. You can write fiction where the sentences are like birds that seem like they could fly away if their feet weren’t caught in the paragraphs’ traps. Mine are more like birds buried up to their necks in mud. I admire your gift for writing prose that’s fleeting and bonkers and yet as stable as a bomb shelter. You probably can’t say how you do that any more than I can say how my prose ends up where it ends, but I’d sure like to hear you try.

Jack: Ha! Love your ornithological metaphors! I guess I prefer some word-birds to be caged, the better to display their identifying plumage and trills (meaning and wordplay), while others I release to fly off in song… heedless, senseless. Myth Lab’s idea/word experiments interbreed these species. Also, I’m easily inspired by other texts and want to frolic with them. I’m an intertextual slut! At play in the Myth Lab are: theorists/thinkers (Julia Kristeva and Marshall McLuhan), psychedelia (psilocybin shaman Terence McKenna), music, movies, celebs (Kim K, Madonna, some porn stars, all lovingly mocked), and, crucially, the sexual/emotional lives of me and people I love. I tend to build on my previous books. The opener Myth Lab theory, “Cuties of the Universe,” extends from a passage in my Fear of Kathy Acker novel-thing. Don’t you do the same? In the sense of your George Miles cycle of novels, with I Wished as a kind of extra-orbital sequel. At this point in your career you must be conscious of your legacy. Your life’s work already has a monumental impact on many people. As you reflect on it, do you want certain parts to be best remembered? Or am I projecting my own mortality anxiety?

Dennis: Oh, gosh, I never think about my past work unless people talk or write about it. With I Wished, I wanted to write a book about my friend/muse George, and he happened to be the namesake of the Cycle, and I felt I had to reference that. I’m really grateful that people have liked my work enough that I can keep getting my books published. But, no, I’ve spent the years thinking about trying to get better and experimenting and hopefully writing my ultimate novel. You, however, have a much more interesting story. You were a fireball in the eighties with your poetry and Barney Magazine and your music, and then, whoosh, you basically disappeared from the literary world for almost forty years. I know I was out of touch with you for about that long. And then you came back and have become a splashy literary sensation. Now that’s a fascinating trajectory. That could make a great biopic if biopics weren’t fundamentally an awful genre. Eddie Redmayne could play you, maybe. Do you want to talk about your lengthy absence and why and your return and stuff? I don’t think I’ve seen you really talk about that in print.

Jack: There’s a goof answer and a true answer. The goof: I aim to execute the greatest comeback in the (short) history of alt-lit!! (whatever tiny world that is). The truth: I had withdrawn from the publishing and performance scene to focus on family responsibilities. Of course, I never stopped writing, reading and making music, but events in 2020 re-jolted me into hyper-creativity. E.g.: For its “Made in L.A.” biennial, Hammer Museum/Huntington Library produced Sabrina Tarasoff’s stunning archival installation “Beyond Baroque.” This is the walk-through “haunted house” that turned an “archival” spotlight on work by you, me, Mike Kelley, Bob Flanagan, Amy Gerstler, Kim Rosenfield, Ed Smith, Benjamin Weissman, David Trinidad and other writers and artists in the eighties at Beyond Baroque literary/arts center in Venice, California. This project plunged me into memories. I renewed precious friendships. I wrote like crazy and haven’t stopped! Perhaps you will agree: Evolving and sharing one’s core themes, obsessions, and values has a snowball effect. It generates new inspiration for oneself and those around you. This will sound geeky, but fuck it: now more than ever I am gratefully enriched by Love and Imagination. Indeed, Dennis, you gathered this eighties art “Gang.” So I thank you and ask you (before we return to current projects): What are your feelings about having instilled such a volatile yet somehow enduring scene? And is scene-making on this level even possible in today’s atomized and algorhymed world?

Dennis: You know, it just felt like a super lucky accident, didn’t it? We were all on the same track already, and we met and glommed on to each other. My being the curator of Beyond Baroque’s reading series just kind of automatically made that place our clubhouse. Other young writers like us would come to events, and we’d cajole them into the Gang. Looking back, it seems like a movement or something, but I feel like we were just young and excited and ambitious and trying to move our work and the L.A. poetry scene forward. I felt like I was too much in motion to self-reflect back then. Sure, I’m positive there are similar young writer scenes, certainly online—the scene around Shabby Doll House, which is mostly an online thing, is very vibrant, just to pull one easy example—but IRL too. I just don’t know that we would know about the scenes. A true, alive scene like ours was, for instance, isn’t newsworthy or maybe even buzzworthy. I mean, you seem to be involved in quite an exciting scene of younger writers and artists in L.A. right now, aren’t you? Isn’t that how the recent theatricalized Fear of Kathy Acker performances happened? From over here, that seems like it’s as happening a scene as our Beyond Baroque scene was, no? Speaking of, how was the FOKA theater experience for you? I tend to think most book to theater adaptations are kind of ugh, but everyone I know in L.A. loved the FOKA performances.

Jack: Those eighties days were magical. Precious. Today’s L.A. lit scene is as big or bigger. There are readings/performances nearly nightly. At the moment, some of the most vibrant come from: Car Crash Collective, Casual Encountersz, Agape Lodge Poetry Society, Currant Jam, and the many throwdowns centered around Stories Books and Cafe and Poetic Research Bureau/2220 Arts. Lots of new publications too. Many with high standards (The Big One). Beyond Baroque remains as active as ever. A parallel explosion is happening in NYC, with its own vibes (Dirty Magazine and The Whitney Review stand out to me). The adaptation of FOKA into a theatrical production relates directly yet freakishly. Playwright Siena Foster-Soltis mirrored our eighties scene (very present in the novel) satirically in today’s “alt-lit” happenings. Personally, I can’t begin to express how profoundly disturbing it was to experience FOKA’s narrator “Jack” rendered on stage… by a female actor, no less! I agree that “experimental” theater from an experimental book too-easily fails. But Foster-Soltis’s craft and crew soared and scored. (Late Iranian-American dramatist Reza Abdoh was a sensory-assaultive influence). Which brings us to your ongoing leap from novel-writing to filmmaking. Recently you wrapped your latest collab with Zac Farley, Room Temperature, shot in Southern California with an international team. What is it like to shift media? I assume, in general, you are responsible for the script and Zac for the direction? And, creatively, what itch does film scratch that fiction can’t?

Dennis: Sounds amazing. I hope I’ll get to check that out next time I’m in L.A. No, Zac and I are both responsible for the directing and writing. I’m just more dominant on the wordage front, and he’s more dominant with the visualizations. But we do everything together, from the inception to casting and shooting and editing. It’s very, very exciting to make films. And working with so many collaborators on the technical and performing end is… well, maybe it feels like being part of an exploding artistic scene, like we were talking about. Except with a single purpose and start and end date, It’s a total frontier for me, as opposed to fiction where I kind of know what I can and can’t do. And we’re making big leaps with every film. I think writing Gisele Vienne’s theater works kind of helped the transition for me. That got me used to writing for real, specific people and actual locations. Obviously, in fiction all of that is amorphous and malleable. But, yeah, film is where my ideas are gravitating most these days. Maybe the form will become familiar and less like a semi-foreign planet at some point, but not yet. I can’t wait for people to see Room Temperature. I’m super proud of it. So, maybe as a last question, what’s next for you?

Jack: Fantastic! Yes, the two Cooper/Farley films I have seen (Permanent Green Light and a sneak peak at Room Temperature) have a distinct, diffused “coolness” that is very moving and feels very Dennis… but I guess it’s a true collaboration among you, Zac and your teams. I also had the opportunity to see your Gisele Vienne dance performance co-composition Crowd when it appeared in L.A. Totally mesmerizing. In fact, I think I’ll jump over to Spotify right now to hear some Underground Resistance, who did the music! I’m doing Myth Lab launch events in NYC and L.A. in July and August. They might be wild affairs. And I’m writing a memoir… of sorts. The first finished chapter, “Gig,” is about being in bands, touring, hanging with amazing peeps like Sonic Youth, etc. It appears this fall in Washington Square Review. It’s not a “normal” memoir. More of a time-travel/mind-meld… I think. You’ll figure into it somehow! And what’s your next move?

Dennis: Thank you about the films. Your “memoir” is massively anticipated. On my end, once Room Temperature is released, there’ll be stuff to do around that, attending screening and press and stuff. I’m working on the script for Zac’s and my new film. At the moment, we think we’ll do a short film next while working towards the next feature because making Room Temperature, or raising the funds at least, was such a long, difficult process, and we’re restless to make something more quickly before we head into that mess again. I’m churning my brain in search of  a new novel idea, but I haven’t found anything exciting enough yet. Otherwise, just counting the days until Halloween and hoping to survive the Olympics, much of which is happening two blocks from my apartment. Should be crazed. Great talking with you, Jack!

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Dennis Cooper’s most recent novel is I Wished (Soho Press, 2022). His third feature film with Zac Farley, Room Temperature, is forthcoming later this year.