Fiction / Dennis Cooper

:: Zac’s Haunted House, Chapter 1 ::

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the writer

:: Account ::

I think the ani­mat­ed GIF is a super rich thing, most­ly unin­ten­tion­al­ly? For the nov­el, I thought of them as these crazy visu­al sen­tences. But unlike text sen­tences, they do all the imag­i­na­tive work for you. They ren­der you real­ly pas­sive. They just jug­gle with your eye­sight, and you’re basi­cal­ly left bat­tling their aggres­sive, looped, fire­works-lev­el dumb, hyp­no­tiz­ing effects to see the images and the mini-sto­ries/ac­tions they con­tex­tu­al­ize. I think, ulti­mate­ly, they’re most­ly rhythms, or they reduce their imagery and activ­i­ty, etc. to illus­tra­tive com­po­nents of these real­ly strict rhyth­mic pat­terns that turn the eye into an ear in a way.

My idea is that if you make a nov­el out of them, the visu­als in the indi­vid­ual GIFs can serve dou­ble duty in the same way that the instru­men­ta­tion and vocals in music sam­ples do. They become just the tex­ture of the loop’s rhythm, and that some­how seems to iso­late the GIFs’ con­tent from their source mate­r­i­al. When you com­bine and jux­ta­pose the stacks, if you do it care­ful­ly, you can break or dis­rupt their indi­vid­ual rhythms in a way that makes their imagery either rise to the sur­face or become abstrac­tion. Basi­cal­ly, you can then use their con­tent and appear­ance as sets and actors and cin­e­matog­ra­phy in a fic­tion. They can hold their ref­er­ences, if you orga­nize them to do so, and you can use those asso­ci­a­tions to cre­ate short­cuts to some idea or emo­tion you want to get across, or they can become quite mal­leable and day­dream-like, or you can emp­ty them until they’re just motions that are as neu­tral as a text.

The real­ly excit­ing thing for me is that the nar­ra­tives can be as unre­al­is­tic or abstract or sense­less or triv­ial or abject or unread­able as you want, and they will always remain inher­ent­ly pleasurable.

 

Den­nis Coop­er is a nov­el­ist, poet, and crit­ic. His ten pub­lished nov­els include The George Miles Cycle (Grove Press, 1989 – 2000), an inter­con­nect­ed sequence (Clos­er, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Peri­od), and The Sluts (Da Capo Press, 2005), win­ner of France’s lit­er­ary prize the Prix Sade. Addi­tion­al­ly, he col­lab­o­rates reg­u­lar­ly with the French direc­tor Gise­le Vienne. Like Cat­tle Towards Glow, a film made in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Zac Far­ley, will be released inter­na­tion­al­ly lat­er this year.