Fragments and Puzzle Pieces- from Sanditon to The Sluts

April 25 to April 30, 1976

Notes to a Science Fiction Writer, Ben Bova
It would take me years to figure out that I am not going to write science fiction.

Epoch, Robert Silverberg and Roger Elwood (Ed.)
My note: didn’t finish. A short story collection, so I guess that means I didn’t read them all.

How to Hide Almost Anything, Daniel Krotz
My note: didn’t finish. When I looked this up, it came back to me--it literally was about hiding things--I think 1976 was a more openly paranoid time. My problem was and is that I naturally forget where I so cleverly hide things, or even if I’m not trying to conceal things...

Sanditon, Jane Austen and Another Lady
I didn’t have any comment, but my memory of this final Austen fragment “completed” by a modern author, is that the non-Jane Austen parts were ho-hum. I haven’t been drawn to re-read it, though I’ve re-read most of Austen (some several times) since.


April 25 to April 30, 2006

The Sluts, Dennis Cooper

I had not heard of Dennis Cooper until I read about his misfortune in being one who was “befriended” and used by the perpetrator of the JT Leroy scandal. Cooper's work, but it was so praised that I went to check out him out at http://denniscooper.net/. After reading a sample online of the riveting first chapter—or segment, the book doesn’t have formal chapters--I had to read The Sluts.

Not everyone will want to read this book, no matter how well written. There are some books I won’t read (Bret Easton Ellis, who has a blurb on the back of The Sluts, is an example of an author who has never tempted me—though Lunar Park looks interesting). Also, other people may be put off by the highly explicit sex and extreme violence. The sex part was so far away from anything that pushes my buttons that it didn’t “get under my skin” so to speak. When the violence went over the top, I skipped some parts (notably the castration scene).

Good news/bad news. Good news: Cooper is a master storyteller and I read the book pretty much in one day. Bad news: That’s about all I did that day. But that is why I read books anyway, to go to different places. And this was a very different place!

Cooper achieves a very interesting distancing effect with both the sex and violence by presenting the story through many people’s online postings to a website. So the intense scenes are filtered through each emailer's fantasy or fetish requirements. The effect is fragmentary in a similar sense to Lawrence Sanders’ The Anderson Tapes (which was told entirely in transcripts from surveillance audio tapes), but the material so over the top that the fragments become jigsaw pieces, as the reader tries to sort of pure fantasy from real events.

The reader is drawn into a mystery where the objective truth is always elusively a few pages further on.

Cooper perfectly portrays the way an online community can develop around hot button issues—in this case, an attractive, intriguingly flawed and possibly dangerous young hustler, whom some pursue and some wish to murder.

As I read, I couldn't help wondering if this is the sort of gay lifestyle that many homophobes believe to be the norm. It’s not. But if it were, do you think my gay friends would tell me?

Um, I think I might be able to manage to guess though--“Would you like some more of this amazing torte? David really outdid himself in the kitchen this time. Oh, ignore the screaming, it’s our slave boy, down in the basement—could you go put some tape on his mouth, dear, we do have guests.”

All the characters in The Sluts are gay men who hire young hustlers and review them on a website set up to consider sex as a product to be rated and recommended. We've got online descriptions of extreme fetishes, courting and spreading HIV as a lifestyle, damaging and even killing sex partners as a fantasy to be shared, acted upon and, in some cases hidden from the authorities. The dehumanizing aspect of this is clear. In a variation on the “not involving humans” viewpoint—it’s only expendable hustlers who die. But Cooper ties up most of the loose ends and brings it back to a human grounding in the last several pages.

I also want to quote The New York Times review on the cover and Cooper’s website: “In another country or another era, Dennis Cooper’s books would be circulated in secret... This is high risk literature.”

I lived in the era described, in the United States in the 1950s and ‘60s, and I value the freedom we have now to be able to read an author like Cooper. It would be tragic if we lost that freedom.