Dennis Cooper Gone: Scrapbook 1980-1982 (Infinity Land Press 2021)

Martin Bladh:  The scrapbook originates from the time just after The Tenderness of Wolves came out. Did you ever have it in mind as prima materia for a specific work? I’m thinking about how it has been stitched together, the continuity with different leitmotivs that overlap each other, and it looks like you’ve gone back on some occasions and reworked the composition? 

 Dennis Cooper: As I said, it was to help me figure how I could write the novel cycle that I had been dreaming of making since I was a teenager. I started making it because I had just had a small paying job that involved helping the man who, at that time, owned the William Burroughs archive, organize the papers. In the process, I was able to really study the scrapbooks that Burroughs had made while writing his early novels, and I was very inspired and influenced by the way Burroughs had combined texts, both original and found, with magazine images and photographs in a collage-like way, and I thought that trying to work out my ideas and sense of style and structure through that kind of multi-media approach without the pressure of having to start writing the novels might help me, and it really did...

Dennis was one of the early champions of EOMS and his giving a shout out and link to this blog a month or two after I started it certainly helped get the word out initially. Anyway it turned out that there was an overlap of us both living in Amsterdam in the early to mid eighties. I probably would have come across some of his early work (or at least reference to) but one place where we DID intersect was at William Burroughs' One World Poetry reading in the city's Melkweg on 12 November 1985. My first job in Amsterdam was actually working in the bookshop in the Milkyway for Alistair, who you had to say knew the market he was catering for. It was just selling (lots of) copies of another way of deciphering the Kabbalah with me trying not to puke at the smell of patchouli. Interestingly as I googled how to spell the p-word then, this came up:

I KNOW the answer to that one but you won't like it...see also this:

Unfortunately I can't say a word about that what with me at this moment wearing my Grateful Dead jacket and not having had a haircut for over the year that we have been in and out of lockdown.

But back to that night in Amsterdam. JLP of the Gun Club at one of his first spoken word appearances had to be escorted off stage by Simon Vinkenoog after what five minutes (?) as he was as nissed as a pewt. Was he as pissed as 12-18 months before this night, when playing A Love Supreme as the last song of a Gun Club performance at The (London) Lyceum he crawled under the stage and managed to get himself stuck under the drum riser, having to be helped out by roadies as the audience stared and clapped in disbelief.  They were the last two times I saw him. Very sad actually. 

But back to Burroughs and this was the sixth time I'd seen him read and boy did he make me laugh but as he left the room where he had been reading the glass door that he had just gone through exploded with glass flying everywhere. Turns out that Dennis was right in the middle of it as he was only a couple of paces behind WSB and I was probably another 4 or 5 people back from him trying to make my way out. Turned out that Burroughs still had the power to give some people the shits and take offence even then. Such a small poetic world we live in really isn't it?

Dennis Cooper's Blog