Dennis Cooper’s tenth novel bears all of the earmarks of his legendary and controversial work — intricate formal and stylistic play, disturbing content, an exploration of the borderline between fantasy and reality, concern for the emotions and dilemmas of youth, etc. — but it is both something unique in his body of writing and possibly something of a world’s first in the novel genre itself.
Instead of gathering materials from language, sentences, and the developmental character and narrative possibilities allowed and restricted by written fiction, Cooper has turned his characteristic inventiveness on the animated gif, employing gifs’ tightly wound, looping visual possibilities, nervous rhythms, tiny storylines, and their status as dismembered, twitching eye candy to compose a short novel of unexpected complexity, strangeness, poetry, and comedy.
Zac’s Haunted House is as fun and eerie to explore as its namesake attraction, and, the more closely one searches and decodes its carefully detailed sequences and construction, a deep and fraught fiction puzzle.
Zac's Haunted House will be available as a free download or to view online beginning today.
Kiddiepunk Press
5 chapters + preface & afterword
Book & page design by Michael Salerno
Get yours here.
FREE
_______________
DC interviewed by Mystery Guest
Mystery guest:
Dennis Cooper:
MG:
DC:
MG:
DC:
MG:
DC:
MG:
DC:
MG:
DC:
MG:
DC:
MG:
DC:
MG:
DC:
MG:
DC:
MG:
DC:
_________
'This is the sort of one-note joke that—like rickrolling or ermahgerd pics—normally fades after a few revolutions of the international meme cycle. But animated GIFs aren’t dying. They’re metastasizing: People festoon their Tumblrs with them, pass them around in email, and use them as Twitter avatars or signatures on discussion boards. Oxford Dictionaries even chose GIF as its USA Word of the Year for 2012. This is all the weirder considering that GIFs date back to the prebroadband late ’80s. As a medium, they’re quite old.
'It’s this ancient vintage that helps explain their true appeal. To really understand the value of animated GIFs, you have to go back even farther—to 1879 and Eadweard Muybridge’s “zoopraxiscope.” The zoopraxiscope captured evanescence, replaying tiny moments of everyday life so we could see them in a new way.
'Ann Friedman, a columnist who has tracked GIF culture closely, thinks Tumblr users are evolving a rhetorical style for their usage. “I’ll go, Meryl Streep’s eye roll is the emotion I’m trying to convey here, and I’ll search for a GIF of that,” she says.
'In a sense, the animated GIF illustrates what sharp viewers we’re becoming. Video used to be, as media critic Neil Postman worried, too slippery for analysis. But now that we have a simple tool—and grammar—for looping a half second of video, we’ve started watching with scholarly scrutiny. We’re looking for half seconds to excerpt.'-- Wired
______________
Zac's Haunted House: deleted paragraphs
*
p.s. Hey. So, 'Zac's Haunted House' is officially out. Use the link up there to get it. Hope you, you know, like it. ** Hyemin kim, Hi. Oh, sorry I missed your comment. I hate when that happens. Thank you for the belated b'day wishes. It was cool. I'm not sure when I'll move yet, but my current address should be okay of the next couple of months, I think. Thank you greatly for wanting to send me a gift! ** Dan Shea, Well, hello, Dan Shea! What a superb response to the dudes. If they only knew, unless they do. Occasionally one of them does know and let's me know about it. Usually they're just confused when they do let me know about it. Anyway, that was awesome, and I'm honored on their behalves, and thank you! ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Ah, a twins thing. I really briefly dated an identical twin when I was in high school, and his heterosexual-identifying brother was a friend of mine. It was very confusing, but very interesting. The Malet twins don't ring a bell, but I'll try to remember to ask my more hooked-in local friends, and I'll let you know if I find out anything. ** Etc etc etc, Hi. The future's cool. It's a great plaything if nothing else. I've always been kind of interested in Scientology. I mean, I grew up in LA, so it was everywhere, and my current pad in LA is in the thick of the area where Scientology owns a lot of the real estate and have planted their giant headquarters and The Celebrity Center and all of that. And a friend and I accidentally took their 'IQ test' indoctrination thing when I was a teen, and it freaked me the fuck out, and we literally broke the door of the place running to get away from them. Excited about your book on American-made religions. Great subject. Where are you in the project? ** Keaton, Wow, you would use your gift of a time machine to swipe my horrible thousand page teenage snuff porn blathering? I'm honored. It would be weird because it would become a distant memory, and I would imagine that by now I would rationalized the inexplicable occurrence into something logical. Either that or I would have spent my life as a paranormal investigator or something. Shit, you got attacked, no wonder. Trocadero is pretty, yeah. I never go there, or I mean rarely. It's so tourist-packed. But sometimes I get in the mood to be amidst tourists and see how I do and don't fit in with them. Fishing was kind of really boring. It was in a river. Maybe it would be less boring in the ocean or something. Yeah, it would almost be worth hiring that escort just to find out why he chose that tattoo. Maybe if I see him around somewhere, I'll freak him out and ask him. ** Cal Graves, Hi. Well, it's mostly the chemicals they use to treat fabrics when making clothes that's the problem. And the synthetics involved too. And dyes really kill me. Even with organic clothes, I can't deal even with black and really dark organic dyes. When I shop for clothes, I just have to rest my hand against something for about 15 seconds, and I'll start to get an allergic reaction, and I'll know if I can wear it or not. I basically have to wear organic cotton everything. The only non-organic clothes I wear against my skin are my jeans because organic jeans are very hard to find, and they're weird looking when you can get them. So I have to wash new jeans a ton before I wear them, and I still get a mild allergy to them until my body gradually gets accustomed. It started in the early '90s, and it sucks. Ah, gotcha on the who-maintaining thing. Makes sense. Another interesting question. You mean that I would commission something particular from the artist? That would eliminate a lot of them because most of the artists I love are loved because what they make seems so unthinkable to me. I think I would probably just ask them to make something that excites them. But that's not answering your question. Okay, hm. I always wanted to own a Vermeer painting. It would be really interesting to bring him back from the dead and plop him down in contemporary Paris or LA and ask him to do his thing using what's around him. Or maybe I would ask Bas Jan Ader to complete 'In Search of the Miraculous', the sea voyage work where he was lost at sea before finishing it, which would be cool because that would also save his life. Yeah, maybe that. Ooh, a blog thing. Awesome! Very exciting!!! Sincerely, me. ** Kier, Denology, nice. I keep forgetting to ask Zac what his Kier-derivation word was. Shit, I will today. Good, good, I'm glad you're just about healthy enough to go back to your thing. Well, I guess you're beyond 'just about' if you went to work today. I've never quite gotten Charlie Chaplin. I always feel like there's this genius thing happening that I don't understand. Wednesday wasn't too exciting. Zac decided he needed yesterday and today to finish the sound work, or a bulky part of it, so we'll start editing again tomorrow. So I did stuff here mostly, still catching up and more like trying to. Kiddiepunk and I coordinated about the tech and logistics stuff re: the 'ZHH' launch today. Zac and I had made a reservation to do a tour of the Large Hadron Collider last year, but then they shut the thing down for a long time, and our tour got canceled, but they're accepting reservations finally again, so I looked into us rebooking that for fairly soon. Oh, that's weird: the Recollets sent out an email yesterday saying they were going to test the fire alarms this morning, and they all just went off a second ago, and, boy, they're very loud and ominous sounding. Uh, yeah, I fear that my day was a forgettable blah for the most part. I'll do my best to do something describable. How was your return to work and everything around it? ** Sypha, Hi. Ha ha, you and Keaton suddenly materializing before my early teenaged eyes as I struck the match above my pile of hardcore juvenilia telling me not to do it is a most curious image. I was taking acid a lot back then so maybe it wouldn't have even phased me. Hugs about the funeral. So weird, funerals just in and of themselves, much less when they have personal meaning. Feel better. ** Steevee, Hi. Something like 90+% of the escorts I come across refuse to do bareback, and there's a high demand for bareback sex from escort seekers, and the ones that will do that tend to be very competitive and try to out slut-ify themselves in their profile texts, but, as with the slaves, the escorts' texts can be no more true to the actual offered experience than, I don't know, National Enquirer headlines are to their news items. Very good news about your unproblematic blood test. ** _Black_Acrylic, Thanks. Oh, wow, yeah, I guess people will read my gif novel on their phones. Weird. I didn't think about that. I wonder if it'll be like watching 'The Hobbit' on an airplane's little seatback screen. That (((echo))) event looks cool. Have fun! ** Jeffrey Coleman, Hi, Jeff! Wow, that is wild and very cool about the Hans Henny Jahnn book in paperback. I should grab one. Strange! How is 'Colony of Whores'? I'm very curious about it, obviously. That was kind of a really, really beautiful description of your training and of the location and the atmosphere and the aftermath. Nice stuff, man. Thank you! ** Misanthrope, Dude, it really, really sounds like you need antibiotics. Can't you, like, get a doctor's appointment very early in the morning and just miss half a day of work or something? And now you've got a sick household. Dude, doctor! ** Kyler, Hi. Uh, hm, you know, I don't think Denizen has come up yet. Strange. It's a very goodie. Congrats on the nothing wrong thing. What a relief. You've got good genes, man. Me too, I think? ** Aaron, Hi. I know of 'Heaven Knows What?' I've seen it written about, and I was super intrigued to see it. God knows if it's been here or will be. I'll check. Cool, thank you for the alert and reminder. I need to see a really good film. I haven't gone to the movies in ages. ** Jonathan, Hi. Oh, it's already getting downloaded. Cool, scary. Let's talk. When you are free of your visiting friends-related fun and duties? ** Okay. Yeah, go get yourself a 'Zac's Haunted House', why don't you? It's free. No skin off your anything. Etc. See you tomorrow.