Dennis Cooper lives in Paris, France. When I was 18 I visited Paris alone. I flew from JFK to CDG and stayed at an AirBnb that I think was in the 13th but I won’t check because I’d have to read old emails and I never read old emails out of principle. The old woman who owned it slept on the floor in the next room and was watching the news when I arrived with a backpack. The phrase “Air BnBDSM” kept running through my head.

That night there was an animal rights demonstration going on outside the apartment and the street was illuminated with red signal flares—”Stop Gavage”; “Boucherie Abolition”; “Fermons les abattoirs.” It is said that behind each piece of meat is a sensitive being. A young man handed me a flare, patted me on the back, and said something incomprehensible. I used his flame to ignite mine and walked down an abandoned street since I didn’t seem to fit their demonstration, nor was I particularly in the mood for organized marching. I walked to the Seine and threw the flare in like a curveball. With a nearly inaudible fizz, the sky was dark again.

The next day I asked two elderly female tourists to take my picture on The Pont Neuf next to the Henri IV horse statue while wearing my cousin’s Tennessee Volunteers Football hoodie. I imagine Henry used his riding crop sparingly, as he was “the good king Henry.” I was certain he was the subject of Steely Dan’s song “Kings” though recently I’ve learned it’s in fact “the good King Richard” and “the good King John” of whom they sing. A good war horse brings out the best in a man.

I did other French things as well. I visited the Louvre ten minutes before closing time and panicked when I thought the floor was going to collapse from the tourists. I felt neither Paris Syndrome nor Stendhal Syndrome upon seeing the Mona Lisa. I wondered what a .357 would do to the Japanese-made bullet proof glass, and who this “Mona Lisa” person really was anyway.

That night I went to a club recommended by an American friend. It was on a boat docked in the Seine and because I was alone I was approached by a number of people asking for MDMA. I soon joined up with one of these groups and got way too high. Coming down the next day, I writhed in abject misery while a couple at the new AirBnb I was staying at insisted we all watch Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Taking the subway the next day, my eyes filled with tears as I paid the fine for not having a ticket with the only money I had left. The police officer was very unsympathetic, and probably a manic depressive. Paris, it seemed to me, was just like any other place, only maybe prettier.

That was 2014. The next time I would visit Paris would be over Skype in a conversation with Cooper. In my mind, Cooper and his fiction were always intimately bound up with Los Angeles, as a place and an idea and a lifestyle. But Paris seemed to fit him just as good. Since my first visit there, a lot had happened—Charlie Hebdo, the November 2015 Attacks, the burning of Notre Dame, the Gilets Jaunes protests. In some ways it was no longer the Paris I’d come to know and love in my three-day visit, but mostly, it was the same. Nothing anywhere really ever changes. Everywhere you go, there you are.

DENNIS COOPER: Are you wearing a Mayhem sweatshirt?

MARCUS MAMOURIAN: Yeah. It’s really well-made by some guy in Mexico that I found online. It has all the members’ pictures on the back.

[Shows Dennis black and white photo on the back of the shirt]

MAMOURIAN: Does Paris feel apocalyptic right now?

COOPER: There was a huge uptick in that sentiment after the Bataclan bombing and it stayed like that for a while, but it was so traumatizing that people here don’t want to talk about it. The French aren’t like Americans, they don’t like to talk about whatever. When I first got here I saw this documentary about when the US rescued France at the end of the War, the French just went down the street and beat people to death who collaborated and it was completely shocking that the French would do that because I think the French are like the coolest people. So my impression is that it was tough for them and they don’t really like to go back there. Although they’ll write about it. So my impression of that is like, long story short, that type of thinking was tough for them and they don’t really like to go back there.

MAMOURIAN: You’ve talked about heroin as being the worst thing in the world.

COOPER: It is, to me.

MAMOURIAN: There’s this scene in your book, Try, that’s always resonated with me, where Calhoun is sitting in a room, strung out on heroin. It’s the first scene I remember when I think of the novel. He’s watching TV and his girlfriend is trying to get him but he’s completely lost interest in people. Was he based on someone you knew?

COOPER: He was based on a friend of mine—well, two people. But the person you’re talking about was a writer and really strung out on heroin when he was 19 years old. I was spending a lot of time with him trying to help him get off it. So I was observing him, which was also a kind of escape. I wanted to live in his fantasies and his thoughts.

MAMOURIAN: Do you connect that drugged-out desire to escape from the world with other kinds of fleeing? Like in your movie, Permanent Green Light, or like the case of that Australian kid Jake Bilardi who joined ISIS. Or with the mole people underneath New York City living in the abandoned tunnels. Are those all just different ways of escaping the world?

COOPER: No doubt. I mean, that’s pretty much in everything I do.

MAMOURIAN: There’s something about drugs and the desire to disappear that is more interesting than that word “escapism” though.

COOPER: In my books, sexual obsession is a form of escapism too. Because for people in my books, their sexual obsession isn’t a realistic one. It’s this wanting to possess the body, wanting it to be something as simple as a toy. All of those things are connected.

MAMOURIAN: Addiction is a part of that connection?

COOPER: Yeah, and that probably carries through to what’s going on now. It’s such bullshit though, the whole “people are addicted to social media,” or “people are addicted to their phones.” There’s this complete closing-off from the world that wasn’t true back then. There was really nothing like that. So now people read it as a kind of meta-version of that or something, like being addicted to your phone is somehow like being on heroin, which isn’t true, but there is an interesting relationship there. The other stuff seems like a purer version of getting involved in opioids or whatever. At least in Permanent Green Light, the guy is engaging with his friends. With a junkie there’s nothing fascinating about it. It’s just like, wake the fuck up.

MAMOURIAN: There’s a feeling of transcendentalism in your writing in a way that suggests that immanence and transcendence can be the same. I’m thinking about Ziggy and Calhoun in Try, the way their physical bodies are used for some greater spiritual goal.

COOPER: I don’t really like that word very much, transcendent. I kind of relate to sublime, you know? Which is of course, sort of a cleaner thing. I was a teenager in the sixties so I got kind of “meh” about all that. When this guy interviewed us for the American release of Permanent Green Light, he asked “Does the film raise metaphysical questions?” I was like yeah, kinda. With transcendence, I just can’t really relate to that. I don’t like the term I guess. I’m not interested in spirituality or anything like that even remotely.

MAMOURIAN: It’s a messy term. But for instance in Try even the corpses have this vibrancy to them. Decomposing flesh becomes a compelling character.

COOPER: I’m certainly very interested in the material transcending itself through form. So in that sense, yes, it transcends for sure. It’s more about trying to construct this thing that becomes more than what it is. My last novel, The Marbled Swarm, was all about trying to transcend what it is. It’s about that in the actual text as well.

MAMOURIAN: That’s the one book of yours I haven’t read. For so long I thought it was called the “The Marbled Swan.” I don’t know whether that made me like it more or less.

COOPER: That makes it sound like an Edmund White novel.

MAMOURIAN: I heard you on a podcast recently talking about the American meta-fictionalists.

COOPER: Yeah, how their experimenting with sentence structure didn’t go far enough.

MAMOURIAN: You mean language doing even more through structure?

COOPER: There’s just this American thing. I really like them, but you always feel that they’re forming a plot and making all these characters and that you’re supposed to somehow buy that stuff when you’re reading it. I don’t think that they see characters and plot and psychological development as a device to get at something else. I think they think: this is how you’re supposed to communicate, you know ‘we share stories, it’s about stories,’ and that’s important.

MAMOURIAN: Right.

COOPER: So even with the ones that really go out there, I feel I don’t relate to them. I never did. I didn’t study writing in school, so I have no loyalty to that stuff. In Europe, whether it’s Genet or Céline or Guyotat, there’s so many writers here who just use narrative to get at something else. That’s very rare with Americans—there’s Acker and Burroughs. But it just feels weighted, like it’s really really heavy somehow. I like Foster-Wallace a lot. I think his sentences are so insanely genius. They become the most important thing in his writing, whether he meant it or not, they do become the most important thing.

MAMOURIAN: I personally read your novels for the narrative, because I like your stories.

COOPER: It’s there and I pay a lot of attention to the narrative but there’s this whole “pay-off” thing, like you’re supposed to build these things and then have a pay off. I don’t do that.

MAMOURIAN: You’ve said that Rimbaud is one of your biggest influences.

COOPER: He’s the ultimate teenage hero.

MAMOURIAN: There’s this line in Houellebecq’s book, Submission, where the protagonist is ranting internally about the fact that there are tens of thousands of students writing dissertations about Rimbaud and how horrible it is, how stale and bourgeois they’ve made Rimbaud.

COOPER: He was 15 years old and a genius. He’s not a scam. He’s the greatest hero of all and no one can ever live up to that. If you’re a certain age, Rimbaud is your escape from the world.

MAMOURIAN: He’s like: drugs, guns, poems, and then slave-trading.

COOPER: He quit because he didn’t want to betray his genius. He quit while he was young. He’s the perfect human being.

MAMOURIAN: He’s gnarly.

COOPER: He is gnarly.

MAMOURIAN: What are you watching and reading right now?

COOPER: Watching, it depends who I’m writing about for the blog. I have to make those blog posts all the time and get involved in the filmmaker I’m making a post about. I just finished reading Mark Doten, Richard Chiem’s King of Joy. People send me stuff all the time to read. Katharine Davis, a book called Rag. Fiction is really happening in the United states.

MAMOURIAN: So you’re not reading like Blanchot or old philosophy stuff anymore?

COOPER: Every once in a while, if there’s a new translation, but I pretty much absorbed all that stuff.

MAMOURIAN: What do you make of Macron?

COOPER: He’s a shady guy. Very personable. You continue to feel like he’s not a bad guy. He wants to be Margaret Thatcher. He wants to take the French socialist model and deconstruct it into a market capitalist system. They like anyone from the past. They like Chirac. Macron is not interested in culture.

MAMOURIAN: Would you rather die in LA or Paris?

COOPER: Paris.