Human Bodies Are Such Garbage Bags: Dennis Cooper’s Frisk – Manuel Marrero
December 30, 2024
A writer reached out to me recently to express their disappointment at being snubbed by Dennis Cooper for his year-end list. My response has been utter bemusement at why anyone would care. Another artist running in overlapping circles once told me they thought Dennis Cooper’s blog was as good or better than any arts and culture magazine of the last half-century. You have to be brain damaged to hold this list in high esteem. It’s literally just a predictable assortment of jpegs year after year. He’s put books from Expat on the list that I have no idea how he possibly could have read because I personally ship every book. Maybe the author reached out on their own. Maybe he got a PDF. I know I sent him a box of books once and he sent them back months later, clearly either read or otherwise molested. I was thinking recently about how being a gatekeeper has affected my relationships. I’ve met a lot of writers this way, people who reach out to see what I can do for them. Some writers have stopped talking to me altogether, crashing out in rearview. I’m everything Gian pretended to be. There’s no last tastemaker. Not while I breathe. I want friends now.
I care too much, so when someone doesn’t care enough and purports to wield authority in this world I fully inhabit, call that a spade. It’s base to flatter your audience. So, the book. It’s a masterpiece. Unafraid to stare down pure evil, but if you can endure it and not break eye contact, it’ll never leave you and you’ll be better for it. I learned how to tastefully write the unprintable by reading Dennis Cooper. Some of you did it by reading Peter Sotos or Bret Easton Ellis, but I would argue neither are as sick as Cooper is here and more than ten years later in The Sluts. And before and in between and after. Only the Marquis de Sade shares this stature. It’s a book that earns its brutality and dances with real Book of Job type shit. For a world so desensitized by inferior stimulation, you can read this and your imagination will do the work of a thousand vore videos, combat footage, and cognitohazards. The way X dot com is crack, the way 5G causes cancer, if you’re a sensate human you will come to the end of this book undeluded and disabused of any preciousness about gratification through literature. More disgusting than the content is the fact it’s fiction and relishes the bait and switch. The heart must beat deep to be heard through the subhuman execration, and Cooper’s emotional substance comes from dissociation. It puts use and effect before existence and essence. Everyone is a damp, fertile void facing the sun, at the mercy of their malleability. Its images obliterate you like you were never here, and it’s 100% words. If you’re interested in agonizing over the extremes of dehumanization and objectification for vanity, hedonism, and other emptinesses, this is a primary text.