fantine's Updates en-US Mon, 28 Apr 2025 23:03:11 -0700 60 fantine's Updates 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Friend1421264931 Mon, 28 Apr 2025 23:03:11 -0700 <![CDATA[<Friend user_id=52444769 friend_user_id=131016402 top_friend=false>]]> Review7525535530 Mon, 28 Apr 2025 22:16:35 -0700 <![CDATA[fantine added 'Closer']]> /review/show/7525535530 Closer by Dennis Cooper fantine gave 5 stars to Closer (Paperback) by Dennis Cooper
Do I love George Miles?

This question arises every chapter and is asked by different characters. By every man that admires, uses, fantasises, tortures, fucks, caresses, kisses, hits, draws, watches and brutalises the beautiful high school student. This question underpins the writing, and I get the feeling the work, the life, of author Dennis Cooper. George Miles was, after all, his childhood friend and lover.

Is this love? This obsession?

Cooper reminds me of Hadrian, founding a modern-day cult of Antinous. Words as a temple, rewriting reality, deifying a boy. Miles committed suicide a decade before Cooper knew. He found out whilst on tour for the fourth book in the George Miles cycle.

'"How would you kill Georges?� Very slowly, so I could see everything in him and know what he has meant to me. “Would you expect to see yourself in him?� I would expect to see someone who could answer my questions looking at me through him. He would resemble me.'

There is a haunted house in the neighbourhood of Closer, explored and referenced throughout. Its potential is debated and reputation chilling. Although dilapidated, the house endures. There are even remnants of lives lived: a mattress on the floor. The purpose of a house, to provide space for life, for refuge or secrecy or escape, remains, as long as it stands.

George Miles is a haunted house. We meet him when he shakes, quivers at intimacy. Throughout the novel, via shifting perspectives, we witness the repeated degradation of his body. It is brutal and horrifying. He provides space for others to live out their fantasies. He is a muse and an actor, an avatar and a corpse. He finds hope in fellow students who then discard him. He gets caught up with a circle of predatory older men who fantasise about death and merge sex and scat and scars.

We catch his perspective a quarter of the way through. He’s abusing substances, his mother is almost dead, and he’s being passed around like a toy.

It is odd to me to call him empty. He keeps a diary, he has feelings and an obsession with Disney. In fact, I find George the most real, the most knowable character of all. When I try to pinpoint why, I can’t quite tell you. Maybe I see myself in his helplessness. But is this value I am ascribing not dependent on his use to me? Dennis Cooper has done something brilliant. He has trapped the reader into the role of perpetrator.

“Dan thought of love as defined by books, cobwebbed and hidden from view by the past. Too bad a love like that didn't actually exist. In the twentieth century one had to fake it.�

I had an interesting conversation with a friend about lesbian/gay/queer literature. After a particularly nourishing binge of lesbian works (thank you Eva Baltasar), I expressed my recent weariness with certain gay literature in which explorations of the bodily feel contained to the sexual and ignorant of gender in a way that feels misogynistic. Dennis Cooper (and my recent obsession, Bret Easton Ellis) do not fall into this category. Sexuality almost feels secondary to masculinity in these constructed worlds, where every alluring, shining youth has sex with men, homophobia is vague, and coming out is a ridiculous notion.

I remember once, at a drag show, my gay (former) friend grabbed my breasts, squeezed them in front of everyone. It was an unusual experience precisely because it was so familiar. Being groped by a man in a club. I laughed along in a way I wouldn’t usually. Perhaps it was my belief in the safety of the environment that delayed the shame and humiliation that soon heated my face. When I think of all the times I’ve been harassed, this memory is potent. But I struggle to call it what it was, despite the identical feeling of powerlessness.

Groomers on grindr, hazing rituals, deepfake pornography. The world of young men deals in dominance and submission. What are the rules of attraction? It is in works like this, in so-called extreme horror, that I recognise mundanity and tradition. It’s almost an inverse of the way I read Shirley Jackson’s work, where normality implies horror.

A quote from Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys: “The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it's in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth.�

I LOVE META-FICTION!!!!!! ]]> ReadStatus9364487473 Mon, 28 Apr 2025 18:33:17 -0700 <![CDATA[fantine wants to read 'Frisk']]> /review/show/7527216808 Frisk by Dennis Cooper fantine wants to read Frisk by Dennis Cooper
]]> Review7525535530 Mon, 28 Apr 2025 18:31:28 -0700 <![CDATA[fantine added 'Closer']]> /review/show/7525535530 Closer by Dennis Cooper fantine gave 5 stars to Closer (Paperback) by Dennis Cooper
Do I love George Miles?

This question arises every chapter and is asked by different characters. By every man that admires, uses, fantasises, tortures, fucks, caresses, kisses, hits, draws, watches and brutalises the beautiful high school student. This question underpins the writing, and I get the feeling the work, the life, of author Dennis Cooper. George Miles was, after all, his childhood friend and lover.

Is this love? This obsession?

Cooper reminds me of Hadrian, founding a modern-day cult of Antinous. Words as a temple, rewriting reality, deifying a boy. Miles committed suicide a decade before Cooper knew. He found out whilst on tour for the fourth book in the George Miles cycle.

'"How would you kill Georges?� Very slowly, so I could see everything in him and know what he has meant to me. “Would you expect to see yourself in him?� I would expect to see someone who could answer my questions looking at me through him. He would resemble me.'

There is a haunted house in the neighbourhood of Closer, explored and referenced throughout. Its potential is debated and reputation chilling. Although dilapidated, the house endures. There are even remnants of lives lived: a mattress on the floor. The purpose of a house, to provide space for life, for refuge or secrecy or escape, remains, as long as it stands.

George Miles is a haunted house. We meet him when he shakes, quivers at intimacy. Throughout the novel, via shifting perspectives, we witness the repeated degradation of his body. It is brutal and horrifying. He provides space for others to live out their fantasies. He is a muse and an actor, an avatar and a corpse. He finds hope in fellow students who then discard him. He gets caught up with a circle of predatory older men who fantasise about death and merge sex and scat and scars.

We catch his perspective a quarter of the way through. He’s abusing substances, his mother is almost dead, and he’s being passed around like a toy.

It is odd to me to call him empty. He keeps a diary, he has feelings and an obsession with Disney. In fact, I find George the most real, the most knowable character of all. When I try to pinpoint why, I can’t quite tell you. Maybe I see myself in his helplessness. But is this value I am ascribing not dependent on his use to me? Dennis Cooper has done something brilliant. He has trapped the reader into the role of perpetrator.

“Dan thought of love as defined by books, cobwebbed and hidden from view by the past. Too bad a love like that didn't actually exist. In the twentieth century one had to fake it.�

I had an interesting conversation with a friend about lesbian/gay/queer literature. After a particularly nourishing binge of lesbian works (thank you Eva Baltasar), I expressed my recent weariness with certain gay literature in which explorations of the bodily feel contained to the sexual and ignorant of gender in a way that feels misogynistic. Dennis Cooper (and my recent obsession, Bret Easton Ellis) do not fall into this category. Sexuality almost feels secondary to masculinity in these constructed worlds, where every alluring, shining youth has sex with men, homophobia is vague, and coming out is a ridiculous notion.

I remember once, at a drag show, my gay (former) friend grabbed my breasts, squeezed them in front of everyone. It was an unusual experience precisely because it was so familiar. Being groped by a man in a club. I laughed along in a way I wouldn’t usually. Perhaps it was my belief in the safety of the environment that delayed the shame and humiliation that soon heated my face. When I think of all the times I’ve been harassed, this memory is potent. But I struggle to call it what it was, despite the identical feeling of powerlessness.

Groomers on grindr, hazing rituals, deepfake pornography. The world of young men deals in dominance and submission. What are the rules of attraction? It is in works like this, in so-called extreme horror, that I recognise mundanity and tradition. It’s almost an inverse of the way I read Shirley Jackson’s work, where normality implies horror.

A quote from Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys: “The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it's in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth.�

I LOVE META-FICTION!!!!!! ]]> ReadStatus9340899846 Tue, 22 Apr 2025 17:40:16 -0700 <![CDATA[fantine started reading 'Axiomatic']]> /review/show/2762171560 Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin fantine started reading Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin
]]> Review7481711686 Tue, 22 Apr 2025 06:31:05 -0700 <![CDATA[fantine added 'A Meeting by the River']]> /review/show/7481711686 A Meeting by the River by Christopher Isherwood fantine gave 4 stars to A Meeting by the River (Paperback) by Christopher Isherwood
this was so white lotus season 3 ]]> ReadStatus9337671934 Mon, 21 Apr 2025 22:17:51 -0700 <![CDATA[fantine wants to read 'The River Has Roots']]> /review/show/7508512935 The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar fantine wants to read The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
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Permafrost by Eva Baltasar
]]> ReadStatus9298902811 Fri, 11 Apr 2025 20:29:15 -0700 <![CDATA[fantine is currently reading 'A Meeting by the River']]> /review/show/7481711686 A Meeting by the River by Christopher Isherwood fantine is currently reading A Meeting by the River by Christopher Isherwood
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