Announcing and illustrating the imminent arrival of Gone: Scrapbook 1980-1982 (Infinity Land Press)

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from the introduction by Martin Bladh

Put together in secrecy during late 1980 until early 1982, the Gone scrapbook is a tour de force into Dennis Cooper’s most private obsessions and macabre fantasies. We’ve never seen him exposed like this before, without leaning on (or hiding behind) his remarkable craft. Cooper mingles picture and text collages, prose and poetry, with news reports and pornographic renderings. The tabloid killings of William Bonin, Dean Corll and John Wayne Gacy – their victims catalogued repeatedly – bleeds into late 70s/early 80s teen stars and anonymous, forgotten porn actors in a crude, yet rigorously composed collage of Sadeian proportions.

Official Detective, 1977: The killer apparently offered the boy a ride home. Instead the child was taken to an as yet, undetermined location. He seems to have been tied up for several days. What ensued during this period can only be pieced together and speculated upon. The boy appears to have been well fed and kept clean, but there are signs of brutal and wide-raging sexual misuse. Multiple bruises and deep cuts across the back and legs would seem to indicate numerous beatings with what may have been a coat hanger or electric appliance cord. The neck is deeply bruised, as well as broken, presumably from the force of his strangulation. Teeth marks up to 1/4” deep cover the face, neck, upper arms, thighs and the buttocks. He had been savagely sodomized with a large instrument, possibly a man’s hand and arm.

The scrapbook must be looked upon as much as a document for research as a work of art. an example of cooper’s unorthodox investigation can be found on pages 122-123. Next to the first page which shows the faces of the freeway killer William Bonin’s twenty victims - all minimized down to postal stamp size - he has written: “The faces of dead boys are usually average to look at, with an occasional mystery or allure that only the madman or the aficionado would find and desire.”
Who is the madman and who is the aficionado?
does it come down to indicators and signifiers?
Which ones do you look for?
Which trigger your imagination and desire?
What do you read into these monochrome faces?
you, the investigator, would need to confront your own sexual desire and use it as your guiding tool to understand the urge of the killer.

Mark Shelton looks energetic, cocky and cute, and his reportedly “particularly brutal” molestation and death would seem to indicate something about him astonished his killer.

Donald Hyden has a rough cuteness and sullen arrogance about him which could have infuriated/excited the killer and caused the man to want to “tame” him.

Thomas Lundgren is a sweet faced boy with a sane air about him. His calm and sensible air surely appealed to his killer’s sense of aesthetics i.e the destruction or elimination of composure.

What does it mean to you, the investigator; if you find that you and the killer share the same taste in men? What does it say about your nature?

James McCabe is the kind of boy I fell and still fall for, with his sureness about himself so there in his face. He is a type of boy who is, at his age, inevitably liked by his fellow students and girls, whose body is pale by its nature... (his) somewhat expressionless face registers its pleasure and ... [illegible] ... casually that one is drawn into speculation over his thoughts. In a killer’s mind this moves one step further and plans were un- doubtedly made to quash this boy’s serenity and utilize this temporal beauty.

Cooper seeks to connect to a certain madness or monstrosity deep within himself. As readers we must remember that this document was not created as a provocation intended to shock an audience, but was put together by the author for the author’s private use, and wasn’t displayed in public until early 2013.
Is this clandestine multimedia collection of death and desire a way for cooper to test his limits to the full, to find an iconoclastic, subversive voice, or does it reveal something more unnerving?
Is this the first time we see the author’s true face and pathological template laid bare? Troubled writers like Henry Darger and Yukio Mishima spring to mind.

1. at 3 months with toy
2. at eleven months old
3. With sister at four
4. Guest starring on “family affair” at the age of eight 5. With sister at eleven
6. With football at thirteen 7. Sunshined and battered 15
8. teen sex god at sixteen
9. World’s number one teen idol, 17
10. former # 1 teen idol, seventeen
11. dismembered body found in a trash bag, eighteen

In a two-page-spread collage called The Story of Leif Garett, Cooper collects ten black and white photographs of the celebrity spanning from his earliest childhood year until his peak as a teen idol. The eleventh picture shows two middle aged men carrying a big plastic bag.

Under a small picture of teen stars the Williams twins cooper has written:

Hi, we’re twins and we’re fourteen and a half years old. We’ve been trying to be pop singers but it’s not work- ing out because our act is a little perverse – two boys who coo romantic songs to one another. Oh, well. So, you can kill us, just so long as you do it up right. Fuck us totally over, strangle us and bury us together in a deep hole, that’s all we ask. Otherwise we’re yours. Really. Where’s your sense of danger. Prove you’re a man. We’ll put out our hands there. Don’t be shy. Take them.



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Samples



























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from the interview in Gone


DC in 1981


Martin Bladh How important is scrapbooking for your creative process?

Dennis Cooper It’s extremely important, and I’ve almost always made scrapbooks to help me develop a novel. The only times I haven’t, it was a decision to see what would happen to my writing if I didn’t fall back on that habit. I still make them, although now I create them online, usually on my blog, rather than in blank books with scissors and glue and so on.

MB 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?

DC 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.

MB How much time did you spend in the early 80s going through printed matters to find the specific material that you were looking for?

DC Quite a bit, I guess. Once I’d started the scrapbook, it became an important project to me, as important as actually writing a novel, which is pretty consuming state for me to be in. So, I spent a lot of time looking mainly for either detective magazines, teen idol-oriented magazines like Tiger Beat and so on, or pornography that I could use in my studies and ultimately in the scrapbook itself.

MB The scrapbook contains a fragment from an early manuscript called Diary of a Mass Murderer, with a handwritten note where you claim it to be your first real attempt to explore mass murder, and that it was supposed to be accompanied by photos of fictional victims. Would you like to put some more light upon this piece? Was it the forerunner to A Herd?

DC I don’t remember much about that piece. I guess if I noted that it was my first attempt, it must have been, so it would have preceded ‘A Herd’, probably by a fair amount of time. My original idea was that I would try to write from the viewpoint of the murderers rather than from the p.o.v. of the victims, and I’m not sure why that was. That ‘Diary ... ‘ piece is just dreadful, and I think that, in addition to the fact that I just didn’t know how to write interestingly at that time, the failure is due to the fact that I can’t write from that position, or not purely and wholly and primarily. The entire scrapbook, for me, shows the struggle I was having locating my imagination and writing within that material. I think that, at least over the course of making most of that scrapbook, I was still trying to find some kind of amorality and sadism in myself, and I never was able to find that. So, the scrapbook feels very naïve to me except when, in some of the texts and collages, I work more with the emotions of the targeted boys. In the scrapbook, I can see myself struggling not to identify with the victims and trying to play the ‘evil’ God or something. But I just couldn’t do that. When I tried, what I was doing lost its complexity and just became silly and horny and too wannabe, I think.

MB There are several references to teen stars such as Scott Baio, Ricky Shroeder, Jimmy McNichol, Matthew Labourteaux, the Williams brothers and most notably Leif Garrett. Pictures of these boys have often been remodelled and put into a pornographic or sadistic context - some scenarios even end with them dying. Did you have a problem finding pornography that satisfied your taste and urges, so that you had to invent it yourself, get it down on paper and put the subject of your desire into a fictional, erotic context?

DC Mm, my fantasies and imaginative desires and so on were pretty complicated, and the representations of them that were around in pornography didn’t interest me very much other than as a dumb, failed, one-sided picture. I made the collages and juxtapositions to try to represent my fantasies in a way that was true to them as they were in my head, which meant trying to make things that were simultaneously disturbing, sexy, tragic, absurd, and mostly unrealizable because I’m interested in how the sex/violence axis can only be illustrated in the imagination, or perhaps in the safe, hallucinogenic context of fiction, where people don’t really suffer or die or care if they die or care if they’re doing something completely unfair and unacceptable to someone else. I think the kinds of things I was interested in couldn’t be represented in photographs or movies or videos. For me, if they were going to be represented visually, they had to appear in the collage form where my hand and intentions were as important or more important than the acts that the collages were trying to represent.

MB There’s a ten page gap in the book destroyed by Fales Library due to its ‘potentially illegal’ subject matter. This section starts out with a handwritten introduction where you describe a series of pictures from the first “real porno magazine” you ever bought that had a particular erotic importance to you. although you give a thorough explanation of this piece, I’m still curious why Fales thought this section was so disturbing that they tore out ten pages of the book. Do you have any recollection of this series today?

DC There are actually quite a number of pages that were defaced and censored by Fales Library. I don’t have an intricate memory of that porn sequence itself. I assume the pages were removed because, in the porn narrative that was tacked on to the pictures, one of the models was said to be 14 years old. As far as I can remember, the model in question was clearly not that young, and that magazine was widely available and sold openly in porn shops for years, so it doesn’t seem likely that he was underage, but I guess Fales decided that the narrative’s designation of the model’s age was reason enough to remove the pages. I think that in the photo sequence the two models just had the usual kind of sex, and I think the images were softcore with no actual penetration shown, which was pretty typical of porn magazines of that era. I’m not sure why 10 whole pages were removed because the sequence wouldn’t have taken up that much space, so there must have been other things removed as well, but I don’t remember what they would have been.



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Some of the censored/defaced pages










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Backgrounds



William Bonin


Leif Garrett


Robert Piest


Dean Corll


The Williams Twins


Steven Stayner


John Wayne Gacy


Scott Baio


David Brooks


Larry Eyler



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Further

GONE's page @ Facebook
DC's scrapbooks @ Dennis Cooper Website
A Scrapbook on THE MARBLED SWARM @ the purest of treats
Guide to the Dennis Cooper Papers @ Fales Library
Slideshow: 'Closer: The Dennis Cooper Papers' @ Kunstverein Amsterdam
'Closer: The Dennis Cooper Papers'
'The Tenderness of the Wolves' @ goodreads





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p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Hiatus, yeah. I get these little hour or two-long hiatuses these days, and they're nice, but I guess I'd go stir-crazy if they stretched out much longer. 'The Orange Eats Creeps': That's a terrific book. 'Lolita' annotated as in external annotations or Nabokov's? ** Armando, Hi, man. Oh, shit, that sucks. Families really don't know best. Really, it's weird, but, in my experience, families are the most clueless, agenda-heavy people you can know, and guilt-tripping is evil. Guilt is the lowest, cheapest, most selfish manipulation there is. Don't fall for it. It's totally self-indicting and issued from their problems, not yours. You're awesome. Word. You are. ** David Ehrenstein, Ah, it's a Carol Burnett thing most importantly housed inside the great Madeleine Kahn. Cool. I forgot that Kramer did that 'Lost Horizon' writing. Huh. I'll hit that link in a bit. Thank you. ** Kier, Hi, K! Do share those photos, please? Thank you. Ouch. Maybe the work itself is clumsy, and you're like one of those bunking bronco riders. No, I stopped doing the Self-Portrait Days a while back because of an unpleasant kerfuffle here around a group participation thing the blog was doing, but it's funny you mention that because I had an idea for a SPD the other day, and I think I'm going to run the idea by you guys in the next few days and see if there's enough interest to do it. So, yeah, maybe they'll restart. Take care and watch your arms, hands, and fingers today, my pal. ** Keaton, Oh, okay. I keep forgetting about upbeat music. I should try some of that stuff. Those periods where you feel like you've forgotten how to write can be amazing ports. I'm often trying to forget how to write, so that sounds kind of nice. Much love back. ** Gary gray, a NPC, ha ha, that's cool, a cool way to think about it, you, anyone. I like that. Oh, sorry to have jumped to the conclusion that you were between LA and SF. I don't know why I found that conclusion jumpable. Weird. Emotions are good. Oh, my pleasure, my honor, my stating of obvious re: your lovely prose. That K'nex ferris wheel was a great. It's back to being a colorful pile in a bag at the moment, sadly. ** Toniok, Hi, T! I do remember the video game project, and I remember how exciting it sounded, so that sucks that it didn't pan out. Onwards to the next extremely promising project. Abdellah Taia's movie just opened here. I'm going to see it asap. Have a sweet weekend, man. ** les mots dans le nom, Hi. Ha ha, I have a long way to go before I master the p.s. if I ever do, but thank you kindly. The internet can be intense for sure. Other than the p.s., I try to stay relatively mum or like a man of few words out there. You're an excellent commenter, don't think twice about it. We've been being rained on here almost non-stop for days and apparently for days to come. It's not bad. ** Rewritedept, Big thanks again for the great show and tell yesterday. I saw 'I Heart Huckabees' when it came out in the theater. I remember having a problem with it, that it was maybe too self-consciously cutesy or something, I don't remember, and it's been ages, so who knows? Cool that the post stoked your friends. Rightly so. My Friday was productive. Zac and I had a great meeting with Christophe Honore, who's the associate producer of our film, and we auditioned a guy for the film who was really cool, so that was good. I got some bad news last night that I don't want to think/talk about, but you can't have everything, obviously. I hope your weekend is awesome too. I look forward to the backwash. ** Schoolboyerrors, Oh, yes, Leve's 'Suicide' is incredible. Oh, wow, you translated Leve! Crazy. I'm going to fine-toothed-comb that as soon as I click 'Publish'. Everyone, the incredible mind and talent with fingers named Schoolboyerrors has translated a short work by the great French writer Edouard Leve called 'A Night at the Strip Club', and this is a great thing for so many reasons, such as the paucity of Leve's work in English and the chance to parse Schoolboyerror's fiercesome mind happenings, so, yeah, read it, click this. Yeah, that book was tough on me. Re: George, and also because I knew Edouard, so there's that. I'm excited because Dalkey is publishing another Leve book soon. Right, about the Webdriver Torso thing? Cool, cool that they caught your fancy too. All right, have a weekend of your dreams, D. ** Steevee, Hi. Oh, man, I hope your auditions go really, really well today. Let me know. Zac and I did one for our film last evening, and we have another one this evening, and a bunch more next week. ** Misanthrope, Yeah, Shane lives in Lyon. It's not that far from Paris, but it's just far enough that you can't just hop back and forth. I've only been to Lyon maybe 5 tines in the years I've been over here. I have no tattoos. No, never had any. Never have given serious thought to getting one, no. I think they're fine and sometimes more on other people, but the idea of being tattooed has never appealed to me. I guess I want my body to be ambiguous and unmarked and not locked down or definable by some reference or period of my life or whatever. Ha ha, I think you totally need Rose Kennedy's face imprinted over yours. For so many, many reasons. ** Okay. There's an introduction of sorts to my 'Gone' book, and I hope it's of interest, and thanks for whatever time you put into it in advance. See you on Monday.