Books to Make Space For On The Bookshelf: Closer
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 18 March 2021
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Drugs, sex, violence and thinking about death are at the core of the George Miles cycle of five novels. New Generation Thinker Diarmuid Hester draws the links between the author Dennis Cooper and the radicalism of the Marquis de Sade. Now 68, Cooper's books have been praised for his non naturalistic writing and the texture of teenage thought that he captures in the series, which begins with Closer, and condemned for depravity. George Miles was his childhood friend and then lover, who ended up committing suicide.
Diarmuid Hester teaches at the University of Cambridge and is a 2020 New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council which selects ten academics each year to turn their research into radio. He has published WRONG: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper, and is now working on Nothing Ever Just Disappears: A New History of Queer Culture Through its Spaces You can hear him talking about Derek Jarman's garden in this Free Thinking https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jgm5
Producer: Luke Mulhall
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music |
| 0:27.0 | when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.3 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:37.3 | I'm Deermott Hester, and in this essay episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast, I'm going to talk to you about one of the writers I think you should make space for on your bookshows. |
| 0:49.1 | Stay tuned. |
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| 1:26.7 | The date is the 4th of July, 1976. |
| 1:31.4 | In the United States, it's Independence Day. |
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| 1:38.8 | the thousands of excited young people |
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