---“Have you seen DC's?”
---“No,” Matt replies, letting me know he hasn't seen Dennis Cooper's blog today. DC's is a place I've been frequenting pretty much daily since Dennis started it around five years ago. Matt, my younger brother, has been following it and a part of that world for at least two years.
---“It's this cool day on this theater guy Castelucci's works,” I float back.
---A day is whatever Dennis posts, it always has a subject or organizing theme, today being on Robert Castellucci. I go on, “The photos are sort of amazing.”
---I'm staring at the top one, it's a young blond woman who looks to be about to box, her poised to punch arms in front of her chest. Her fists are covered in what looks like shiny metal. All the images from his theater works look like paintings. Every day except Sunday Dennis posts, that is, publishes, what we call a day. I type 'panda?' into the Find box and hit enter to search.
---“Hey,” I start. “You haven't posted on here recently.” I can tell because I don't get any returns for 'panda?', which is Matt's name on DC's. Posting is publishing a comment in the comment section, when not refering to Dennis (at which event it means publishing a day). I start reading the p.s., lots of interesting things happening there.
---“Yeah,” Matt replies.
---“Me neither. I need to,” I add. “I just was reading the p.s., Dennis is looking for someone, lots of someones, to do a day. You should do one on your EP when it's done.” To do a day is to suggest an idea to Dennis and if he approves, which he always will, then it entails putting together whatever you want to for your day. In the past tense it refers to having had a piece posted on DC's. In this case it is sometimes referred to as something you curated. But you wouldn't use that to describe the event yourself.
---The p.s. is a place at the end of the day where Dennis replies to everyone who has posted comments the day before. Dennis also uses this space to alert us to anything he deems important or chat worthy. Right now he's looking for someone to do a day, that is put together a blog post around something or someone, and send it to him. At the end of the day's p.s. is a comment link, this is where the new comments for the day are posted. People have all sorts of conversations there. Also, above the p.s. is the little comments, a place under the last segment of the day preceding the p.s. - people post secret comments here, sort of. This comment section is often neglected by all readers, and posters, except Dennis and those that choose to quietly say something there.
---“Yeah. Whatever happened to doing one on your poetry book 'Secret Single',” he asks.
---“I know, I know. I want to. I still never did the music blog one. The last one I did was on Trevor Brown, and then before that was my giant Japanese Pornography Exploratory thing. Actually yesterday was a back from the dead, it was Jose's Kobo Abe day. The guy who wrote 'Woman in the Dunes'.”
---A back from the dead is a day featuring something from one of DC's earlier blogs that were sadly lost by Blogger. Blogger is the blogging service Dennis uses, it's now owned by Google. The phrase back from the dead was chosen by Dennis.
---“You're hoping he'll do one of yours, huh?”
---“Every single day!” I say and laugh. It's true, I do hope he'll do one of mine.
---“Alan's been doing a lot recently, and Dennis is hoping he'll do more. Maybe it will be guest post central for a while, that could be cool.” A guest post is one done by anyone but Dennis.
---“What are you going to post about?” Matt asks me, wondering what my comment on DC's today will be. A comment on DC's isn't necessarily a commentary on the day itself. It can be but just as often it can be a poem, or dialoge with other posters, or correspondence with Dennis or anyone who frequents there, or basically anything else. And often a comment takes the form of all these things.
---“I don't know. I want to go back and read that SPD, and read the comments. But it was like a three parter, right? I don't even think I'd be able to get through it. I don't want to skim though, maybe I'll just search for 'you-x',” which is my name there though like most people here I'm also known by my real name. “I don't really remember who liked my poems and drawings, well No More Teenage Kicks, and Alan. I remember that. I liked Alan's too,” I pause. “Oh, and I still wanted to tell Dennis how much I enjoyed his last varioso.”
---An SPD is a self-portrait day. These have been going on for years now, they are usually suggested by someone who posts to DC's, that is someone who posts in the comments section, and then if the idea is liked Dennis puts out a call for entries. The entries are open to all, regular commenters, lurkers, and anyone who feels like sending something in. Each SPD has specific criteria, the last one was a response to images from the Thematic Apperception Test. There was a page set up with a number of images from the TAT and then if you wanted to be a part of the day you just had to respond to them, either in a piece of writing, visual art, song, video, anything. A varioso is a type of day Dennis does, titled varioso with a number indicating its sequence in the series, with an assortment of things without any specific theme. These can be items picked by Dennis as well as things submitted by anyone.
---“That was a long time ago,” Matt says.
---“I know, like a week or two,” I say, but it's probably longer. “Also, I wanted to get in on all the recent Cycle talk.” The Cycle is a series of five novels Dennis Cooper wrote, known in full as the George Miles Cycle. It was through these books that many, but not all, of us on his blog came to know Dennis and his work.
---“I think it was longer,” Matt says and I laugh. “So which DL did today?” A DL is a distinguised local, I'm not sure who started using the term, but Dennis uses it whenever refering to work by somebody who is known on the blog.
---“Oh, I think it was Dennis',” I say.
---“The orignal DL,” Matt cracks.
---“Ha,” I laugh. “Yeah, Distinguised Local number one. I think because of his work with Giselle or something,” my words seem to have no direction as I read the p.s., which is usually a few pages long and always delightful. “Did you see someone wants to make 'Jerk' into a movie? She's going to the performance tonight. I can't believe I missed it when it was in Seattle.” Giselle, or Giselle Vienne, is a French theather director Dennis has been collaborating with for the past four years. 'Jerk' is the name of their currently most well known playing piece.
---“I wonder what separates something from being part of Galerie Dennis Cooper, and just being a day like today's,” Matt poses.
---Dennis often does these Galerie Dennis Cooper days, featuring the work of an artist he is interested in. Dennis has been a contributing editor to Artforum for twenty some years and also is incredibly active in the art world.
---“I think maybe the Galerie posts are like curated by Dennis, as an exhibit, whereas the others are more like explorations, like a catalogue essay at an exhibit rather than the exhibit itself.”
---“When was the last slave day?”
---“I don't know. It seems like those escort posts come all the time and then never, but really I think DC does them on a schedule, but I'm so bad at paying attention to those things.” The escort, or slave days, are monthly posts of texts and images curated by Dennis of male escorts which are found on assorted open escort sites.
---“Me too. Did you ever hear back about your book from DC?”
---“No, I should do a phoner. I also want to talk to him about the Other.” I'm talking about a phone call, or a phoner as it's referred to on DC's. The Other refers to love, and the experience of that in relation to someone outside you, but not actually someone. I believe the term orignally comes from Lacanian psychoanalysis, but it's used in a much freer sense here.
---I fade into today's comments. JW Veldhoen writes about his pending divorce, being in debt and possibly taking to the streets, his wordver is 'rents'. That guy always destroys with poignancy. I can't remember my last wordver, except that it was strangely fitting, of course, and sort of funny. A wordver is the captcha generated by Blogger, which sometimes turns up as a really interesting word or phrase fitting to the situation. The word comes from “word” and “verification”.
---“Rents. That was Veldhoen's wordver. And he's losing his place and broke or something.”
---“One time I got closer,” Matt says. It's significant because that's also the title of the first book in the Cycle. “What was on htmlgiant?” Htmlgiant is an online literary magazine, that is basically a blog run by a lot of MFA students.
---“I haven't checked, did you see Alan's 'Haut or not' on there?”
---“No, what was it?”
---“Oh I'll show you after I post,” I say.
---“Okay,” Matt says as I begin to finish up notes for a linguistics paper.
---Looking over the jargon used on DC's I'm fascinated by how much it has entered into my daily conversations outside the blog, not just with Matt but with other people I know who frequent the blog or at least have at one point. There are a number of word-formation processes at work, though for the most part they seem to be informal and practical. The name of the space came simply from it being Dennis Cooper's blog, so it became known as DC's, an acronym. I think this also qualifies it as something of an eponym. This acronym is used to refer to not only the blog as a space as well as what's in that space but also to signify if something is from Dennis. Another acronym is “p.s.” which was borrowed from the world of letter writing. This, like all the other acronyms used on DC's, is spoken with each letter pronounced (see also: SPD, DL). There are examples of blending, wordver, derivation, phoner, borrowing, varioso, conversion, post, and surely mutliple processes which are evading me at the moment. The jargon is a mix of things specific to originator of the space (who was the reason we all started congregating there), such as Cycle, as well as words that have formed for functional purposes of this active and unique space of writers, artists, intellectuals, and genuinely friendly individuals of all ages. A lot of the words have a literary connection and seem to at least carry some tropes of the literary and art worlds. But others, such as phoner, seem straight out of lost American slang from the 60s – which they well may be though I've never encountered or used that word outside of DC's. Each word is useful and functional and makes up part of the fabric of one of my favorite places, a place both old and new, avant-garde and somewhat popular, formal and informal.
----
p.s. Hey. So it's the unimpeachable writer, recording artist, and distinguished local You-x who welcomes the blog back to full duty with this intricate and wistful exploration of what this place is all about. I'm, of course, feeling honored as hell, and I hope you out there find a place in your heads and hearts for it as well. Thank you kindly, You-x, and thanks to all of you in advance for the amount of your weekend time you'll be spending with it. So, just quickly, everything has gone very well over here in London, I think. It could have a lot less hot and humid, and I could have used much more sleep than I've gotten, but the very good definitely outweighs that bad. I'll tell and show you more about it when I'm 'home' again and have more time on my hands. So, while I was here, I managed to very, very occasionally score a little internet action, and the following p.s. proper constitutes the amount that I was able to read of the comments left while I was gone. The last time I'm able to check -- which is Friday morning as I type -- is as far as I got, and when I finish the interactions, I'll program this post to launch tomorrow (today, Saturday) at the normal time because I won't get any more internet between now and when I'm back in my Paris pad. Thus, addressing you from the near-future of launch time, I'll add that any comments left here within the last 24 hours will be responded to on Monday, okay? Also, I'm kind of quite sleep deprived and dripping sweat at the same time, so please excuse my lack of sharpness and just general zonked out energy here. ** Tomkendall, Pure treat to have been able to see you even that little amount the other night. Thanks a lot, man. ** NB, Well, you're down south or rather southwest now, I guess, and if you check in here, then here's a twangy howdy to you, and if you're sticking to Facebook while you're kicking up Texan dust, I'll try to follow your antics in that realm. Have all the fun you need. ** SYpHA_69, Hey. Well, I don't know those publishing houses except for Soft Skull, of course. I mean, there are a growing gazillion of new indie literary presses of high note too, although maybe you're angling for a particular kind of context? I just mean ideally you could keep sending it out for quite a while if necessary, and make that kind of your hobby or something while you move on to what you want to write next. I wouldn't give up after a handful or rejections. There are just so many possibilities out there, and why not keep fishing with your left hand while your right hand inscribes the new work? ** Jesse Hudson, Hey, pal. ** Colin, Yeah, Pina Bausch is a very big and sad loss. Her work is very important to Gisele, and she's pretty gutted, and the work of Bausch's I saw back in the 80s was definitely among the most startling and powerful theater I've ever seen. Ugh. Well, as I think you came to see 'Jerk' on Wednesday, which technically is tonight as I type this, I will have met you by the time I read this, and since it's given how great that experience is going to be, I'll just say for now how great it was, with details to emerge once I'm post- the momentous occasion. ** JW Veldhoen, Hey. Yeah, I can't go objective on the Phelps gang, like I said. Their shit is too unforgivable to me. If you become their new fearless leader, I'll try to find out if there's any part of my heart that hasn't been scoured yet. Who's DM? I'm spacing out. Oh, Derek, duh. That took me far too many seconds to parse out. So how do you see the distinctions between Bowie and Bolan as your own musical ideas construct themselves? ** David Ehrenstein, Hey, David. Ah, it's good you alerted me to that vegetarian = weak bones thing because I just read the other day how being a vegetarian can help significantly lower your chances of getting quite a number of kinds of cancer, and I was a little in danger of getting too cocky, ha ha. ** David Saa V. Estornell, I've been thinking about you these last days, and hoping you were doing okay. I'm very, very sorry for your loss. Be strong, my friend. ** JoeM, Yeah, Rigby got it backwards. My will leaves everything hereabouts to you. But I seem to still be alive, as far as I can tell. Need I say, if sides needed to be taken, I'm on yours re: the pro-Daily Show vs. meta-anti-FOX. I do have to say FOX's news is about as balanced as a Charles Manson monologue. I'm missing Wimbledon, so I'll take everyone else's word for all of that. ** David, Hey. Richard Stark ... of course I haven't read him. I should really try to go to a bookstore while I'm here. Where I'm staying, at the Institut Francais, which seems to be in a French neighborhood of London, all the bookstores (and restaurants and even souvenier shops) are French! It's like I'm not even here. ** Misanthrope, The heat here is more than a bit much, and the lodgings they've put us in are kind of monastery level lodgings, and the combo is not sleep friendly, but ... I always seem to save my whining for you. Why is that, I wonder? I think it's a good sign, but I apologize anyway. Uh, I think it's too hot here in London to go all JoeM Jr. on you about FOX News and the notion of their straight reporting, but I think you know my schpiel. Yeah, like I said, Wimbledon is escaping me this year. I don't mind Federer so much. I used to not be able to stand him. The French love Federer. When he plays in the French Open, people over there lose sleep worrying he won't win. It's kind of weird. He might as well be French to them. I guess because he speaks fluent French. Soccer the most boring sport?! Dude, I dare you to watch a single cricket match and then come to that same conclusion. ** Flit, Hey, Flister. ** Mark, Ha ha, hey! Oh, the proof sheet looks very interesting. The multiplicity of the opaque/transparent sheet as you used it is most impressive, the range of layered imagery from the Psycho offshoot to the block of ice and everything in between ... kudos, man. Do you have more lined up? ** The Dreadful Flying Glove, Lovely thoughts, my friend. I went to Nudie's shop once on Sunset Blvd. when I was younger than that now. Never bought a thing, though. Stupid kid. ** Kiddiepunk, Sunday! ** Bernard Welt, Buddy, pal of mine, hello. Where's my key to that blousey dream guy's visage? I assume you checked Ubuweb already re: the Akerman doc? I can check to see if it's on DVD in France, if you like? I can only imagine the freshness of the difference when hanging with the Obama appointees. But I'll keep my thoughts backpedaled to that loosey goose sentence because Obama is just a topic I think I'm going to avoid opinionating about around here for fear of triggering land mines for the time being. ** Pisycaca, Hey, you guys. Oh, I think the radio play recording is going to be delayed, so I'll be even freer. ** Clovenskull, I'll see your thanks and quadruple them. ** Rigby, Leave my jism on your coat, if you haven't washed it out yet. Assuming it's not too late, three days from now, something miraculous will happen to your coat, and if you've been a good boy, it might just do something miraculous for you. If not, it'll do something miraculous for ... oh, let's say Oscar B. ** October, Hey, man. Oh, that doesn't sound so good, obviously. A real convergence of difficult stuff. With the girl, yeah, I hear you. Your feelings about her will settle into something that's more coherent, which doesn't help now, and I feel like I'm always telling you to hang in there, but there is this whole thing about time and patience that's a drag when you're on this side of the eventual resolution, and life is too often much more slowly paced than emotion can tolerate, but it's a fucked up no immediate win situation always. Man, I'm just sorry you're having to go through all of that. Steeping in sadness is part of the deal, and I guess that's sometimes the only way to renounce it honestly. Oh, thanks about 'God Jr.' That's really nice of you. I appreciate it a lot. My back is getting back to nearly normal, I think. I won't be picking up any anvils for a while, but it's all right. Lots of respect and support and affection to you, man. ** Erik, Hey, Erik! It's so nice to see you. Is your new doubled up life going well? I have this feeling it is? But tell me. ** Oscar B, So great to meet you. Way, way too brief, but what's started can't be stopped. It was just nothing but a joy. **Alan, Hey, man. I haven't been following the reviews on 'Ugly Man' all that closely, but I think HP is gathering them up for me. The handful I've seen have been pretty good, a couple that seemed to get the work fairly well. A couple of snarky ones, but nothing too vicious. Blake Butler's thing about it via writing re: one of the stories therein on HTMLGIANT has been my favorite. The NYT just gave it what I suppose is a little thumbs up given how 'not their thing' my work is. I guess it's going okay on that front, but I haven't scoured to see what's out there, although I'm sure curiosity will best me soon, and I'll embark on an actual hunt. Hope you had a good week. ** Saint-Amant, Hey! It's very nice to see you, of course. I'm always wondering how you are and what you're doing, working on, etc., etc. Obviously, I think it would be great if you launch that new blog you're talking about. I'd be all over it. Between a severe case of spaciness due to the above mentioned few days of very poor sleep, and the crushing wet, thick heat I'm staggering around in mentally and physically, and the severely limited time I have online right now, I've only been able to read the writing you've posted once and very quickly so far, but I liked it quite immensely. Very rich, very beautiful, and, for whatever it's worth, the style has a curious kind of distant resemblance to the style I'm working with in my cannibal novel, so that was quite interesting for me, and it gives my admiration a kind of close relative knowingness maybe. I don't know. My brain is not shooting out sufficient sparks right now. I like it very much, and I will spend the quality time with it that it deserves when I get back to Paris whereupon my attentions will regain sufficient respectfulness. For now, I'm hugely pleasured and honored to have it. Thank you, Eric. We'll talk more soon, I hope. ** Okay, that's as far as I got before the internet and my schedule and all that stuff took me elsewhere. The rest will be addressed after the weekend, as previously stated. Please do enjoy the local loveliness perpetrated by You-x and reward him with triggered thoughts of some kind. It being Friday where I type, I'm off to investigate certain holographic possibilities offered by a London based special effects company, and then the show happens tonight, and then I'm back to Paris on the morning that this post will appear, and then ... well, weirdly, I might actually go witness the Paris concert of the Britney Spears 'Circus' European tour if a possible, possibly promised free ticket is offered to me. I mean, why not? The yearly Parisian edition of Japan Expo ends on Sunday, and since the JE makes an appearance in my novel-in-progress, I should really take the opportunity to go have another look at the thing, which I'll do if I can manage to drag Yury or someone else along with me. Anyway, that's my weekend ahead roughed out if not foretold. Dig yours. See you Monday.
