“He was the kind of boy I used to close my eyes, reach into my underwear and build from scratch.” —Dennis Cooper, from “Brian AKA ‘Bear'” in Ugly Man.”
I’ve tried three or four different approaches to talking about what this sentence does to me (juxtaposition of beauty and obscenity…or beauty as obscenity…or obscenely beautiful…or masturbation as generative…or the beauty of, but also threat posed by an ideal, an abstraction, which so often enables violence in Dennis’s work, so tension between the generative and the destructive…), but all of them feel like obnoxious intellectualizations of something ineffable, so I’ma say, “shit’s hot,” and leave it at that, even though actually, that’s totally not what I just did.
what a creepy, yet fantastic sentence. i’ve been wanting to read this book for a while.