Copi, The Queen’s Ball, translated by Kit Schluter. New York: Inpatient Press, 2025. First edition 1977. 200 pages.




I got drunk on The Queen’s Ball, i’m still drunk, everything feels deeeep and ohhpen and CONNECTED, i’m waist-deep in semiological science—or Vouvray! Either way, it’s been more than a year in this stupor, like there i am one october morning, my neighbor is railing about the other neighbors and i can see a crucifix half hidden by her collar, and i’m thinking holy trinity and then i’m thinking Copi!—why didn’t i see this before?!—the number 3 is everywhere in The QB, there are actual triplets, and yes love triangles, but also so many characters have not just a döppelganger but a trippelganger, and then there’s the way Copi uses pronouns to talk about the queens, he and she sharing the same referent inside the same sentence,  pronouns switching so fluidly that what would be a grammatical contradiction is now the creation of this uberous third space of both/and—and my neighbor is turning away and i’m whipping out my phone, because i remember the novel comes to a head at 33 rue des TROIS portes…and then i’m seeing rue des trois portes was also the address of Charlie Hebdo when Copi was publishing his cartoons with them, and then i’m on google earth traipsing up and down that Paris street and i don’t think #33 exists, maybe it was a copi easter egg, more credence to my half-boiled three idea, but the satellite is showing me that someone has spray painted “jolie visage” on the side of a building on rue des trois portes—jolie visage! Could there be more perfect graffiti for The QB??? After all, the whole novel may be said to have been launched by the face of Pierre, the Helen of this story, oh Pierre, “Sure, he was stupid, it’s true, but he was very handsome. An Italian from the South with almond eyes, his real name was Pietro Gentiluomo…”—Pretty Face Rock Gentleman!—Or else it’s march, i’m listening to a birding show out of Canada, it’s cedar waxwings day, apparently these birds get inebriated off ripe berries, and voila! i’m thinkingCopi—zero birds or berries in this novel of his—but if cedar waxwings get drunk then maybe it’s evolutionarily beneficial to have a Literature whose main effect is to whip us into bibulousness?

and so on—and i do mean so on—i got up to 49 pages of this essay this way, and then thought, What if I keep heaping failure upon failure until I write an essay that reaches the sparkling page peak of 69?? and i won’t apologize, because it will be fortunate for any readers that i’m more into sex than numbers, that my self-imposed page goal is inspired by the mouth-to-genitals curve when, if we’re thinking strobogrammatically, i could have written a 96-page essay!—oh lord let me not forget about threesomes, or a 996-page one, well though how would that even work??—but no, someone might expect me to EXPLAIN something in a piece of that length, and The Queen’s Ball is too swollen to flatten out—i’ve just been kind of living in it—or on it, on its supremely slick, joyous, cruel surface, and i do want to write something, because it’s everything i want a novel to be, but like all the best books, it can’t be summarized, should not be interpreted, and GODSPEED theorizing it! The plot? the plot is whatever, it’s great, who cares, plot is nothing, style is everything—or it is when you have it, and Copi has it, that “succession of catatonias and accelerations”—I don’t remember whose words those are, but suffice to say, of this book, nothing much can be said and i’ve a lot of nothing to say, and in one of his lectures on Copi, an excerpt of which I google-translated, Cesar Aira says he’s fighting to get away from “the reign of explanation”—omg REIGN!—and i’m with you Cesar, we’re here together though I wish we were together-together, as i love your glasses, i don’t care that you’re 76, you’re super hot and Cesar, is The Queen’s Ball one of our greatest books or not, it is it is, I need to say why for myself, why this book is my baby, I wish it came out of me, I wish Copi’s hairy-browed head on its cover had pushed apart my pelvic bones and yet how could I have produced this book? nothing in my heterolady DNA could have mutated into The Queen’s Ball, nor could the book have been produced by my environment, which does not resemble a 1970s Parisian queer pre-AIDS creative campy fecundity, nor the wildness of Theatre Panique, seeing as how I’m in the suburbs of Rhode Island and co-own a vacuum cleaner with my mother, and yet! this book is so personal to me that if I can’t have birthed it then at least I am going stick it up me and keep it trapped there in the reproductive organs forever, thus making me the very model of a Copi villain, the straight woman who tries to shoehorn her way into faghagdom and then keep all the best gay men for herself, much like Marilyn, the cis-woman villain of The QB, does—more on her in a sec—but yeah, the queen’s balls are stuck up in my ovaries, no more periods for me (the most unbelievable kind of punctuation anyway), it’s a Queen’s Ball Menopause! James Merrill once used his ouija board to ask a dead Jean Genet what he thought of the biography that Edmund Wilson had written of him and apparently genet mostly wanted to talk about a cute sailor but he acknowledged that the Wilson bio was okay— if i decided to seek similar approval from copi I do not think he’d give it and in fact would probably throw garlic, holy water, & sunlight at me for vampiring his work but if there’s one thing i have learned from Copi it’s permission so haha, let’s go, we’ll go right to a list, i love lists, and if i had to catalogue one thing from this novel, it would be all the fucking—it’s copious, the copialating (that’s right, i’m not sorry), and here lies a list of people who get fucked in this book, starting with Copi, who is the narrator, the main character, and the author:

okay so Copi is fucked in the ass by largely inconsequential characters—an ugly old guy in the toilet, the red-haired taxi driver, the bald queen at the baths, the traveling salesman at the baths—and once by the love of his life, Pierre/Pietro (he’s Pierre when they’re in France or Ibiza, Pietro in Italy); Pierre is fucked in the ass four times a day by Copi and in the bellybutton by him on several occasions—oh wait, i’ll give you a little taste, this is Copi talking about Pierre—

“His bellybutton was deep and smelled faintly of ass. It wasn’t long before I was able to stick two fingers in it, then my entire cock. His spasms were constant, insane, as were mine, I felt like I was penetrating Pierre more deeply than any other asshole in the world could have been penetrated. He referred to the orgasms I gave him as “Gioia Divina,” a phrase he’d cry out every time I stuck my cock into his bellybutton while suckling and nibbling his huge testicle breasts…Was it the hormones? I doubt it, although he had been taking them for a year when I discovered this new erogenous zone, which for that matter quickly turned into our central, almost unique focus in sex…His bellybutton had always been deeper than normal, and when he was very young he kept the coins he fished out of the Fontana de Trevi in it, while the other kids kept them in their mouths.”

—and now back to our list, there’s Michael, the old hippie they meet in Ibiza, whose full name is Michelangelo Buonarroti, who has sex of an unspecified variety with Copi, Pierre, and also Marilyn; ahem, Marilyn is very important, pay attention! Full name Marilyn Monroe, born Delphine Ardieu, the “fruit fly” drug dealer who impersonates the movie star at the Alcazar (described by a 2024 Paris travel guide as a “notorious transvestite bar”  hmmm)—is she the Marilyn who, in 1963, in Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, rises from a coffin and becomes a vampire? maybe! because she certainly is feeding on the vital essences of all the gay men in this story!—anyway Marilyn is fucked once by Pierre in the ass, and at least once by Michael (offstage) in the vagina, but in between, for most of the book, she is described as a virgin; then there are the queens who live for a while in Copi’s apartment and fuck old men in order to steal from them, and these queens also give each other blow jobs to help maintain their erections for the photographs for the porno mag they’re producing; then there is Pierina, the two-year-old daughter of Marilyn Monroe and Michelangelo Buonarroti, named after, who else?, Pierre, and she is fucked in the ass, at Copi’s invitation, by a dwarf with a cock so large that Copi himself wonders if being penetrated by it wouldn’t send him to the Hotel de Dieu—

it’s at this point that some of my friends go, hmm, toddler rape, hmm, or if you go to Goodreads you see people are like “I loved it until the toddler murder/rape and then no thanks” but in fact, no, those people are wrong, when they read the book they started from a different baseline, maybe they started with linear thinking, maybe they live by the code of Hammurabi or the code of Mariska SVU Hargitay (all love to you, Mariska!— but SVU is anathema to The QB, may we meet again on other pages), maybe these people are wrong simply bc they eat french fries with a fork, but their baseline is not the baseline of Copi, who says right at the start that there will be “no cops… and so, no punishments” and so this book is, thank you, god!, not a moral one, for instance Copi, the cum of a taxi driver freshly deposited in his asshole, reunites in an early scene with Pierre and as Pierre fucks him in the ass, the taxi driver cum isn’t material proof of infidelity, it’s just lubricant—there are no words in this universe like “adultery” or “rape”—there are only… actions… strangling a fortuneteller is on par with nicking a pain au chocolate—there are things that happen, and there is no good & bad—only bad luck and one elaborately evil Marilyn Monroe—and in this way The QB is like a lot of Copi’s plays, possibly superficially shocking for what it contains and then more deeply unsettling for what it does not: i found his final play, An Untimely Visit, in a big dusty library anthology called Gay Plays, Copi wrote it while dying of AIDS, its main character, Cecil, is also dying of AIDS,  and what’s missing is any sadness or sense of tragedy—the play treats AIDS— death itself—the same as boxed wine, or an ugly nightgown—(much worse than AIDS in the Copi world is the straight woman, this time she’s called Regina Morte!) & while the play is no masterpiece, I regard with wonder and idolatry the fact that Copi did not find 1988 too soon to joke about AIDS, he died while the play was still in rehearsals, he farced his way right out of this world—

But now i need to get back to The QB and to its fucking, to the sense of fucking over, and it is mostly Marilyn—she has the most balls here!—engaging in this kind of fuckery: Marilyn fucks Pierre by swapping his female hormone pills for testosterone pills (upon the discovery of which Copi laments “As if there weren’t enough normal men in the world already!” (amen!!)); Marilyn fucks Michael by luring him into a heterosexual couple/nuclear family lifestyle with her (“this supremely gay man has fallen into the women’s trap” oh no!); in one small scene Marilyn is sitting on a wicker chair reading a Somerset Maugham novel, or in other words she is consuming art by a gay man that contains no gay characters and that is set in a time when homosexuality is illegal, or in other words, Marilyn, it matters not that she is Copi’s character, is fucking Copi, her own author, by holding in her hands a copy of Copi’s nightmare literature; Marilyn also fucks Copi by stealing Pierre from him, by stealing Pierre from him again, by goading her boa constrictor into biting his leg and thus leaving Copi an amputee (whose stump develops “the sensitivity of a penis tip,” and is itself fucked by a queen’s mouth at the bathhouse), by blackmailing Copi into marrying her; and Copi fucks Marilyn back—by winning Pierre back from her; and definitely the reader also gets fucked because the novel itself is a TRAVESTI—the word that its translator Kit Schluter picks for the queens—bc it refers to “general acts of disguise and more festive gestures… a party-goer preparing for a masked ball”—and although Copi does not disguise the theatricality of the novel, he disguises how tightly it is constructed—he pretends throughout that it’s artless, written on the fly, or written while zonked on vodka and drugs, produced purely for mercenary purposes and I got tricked—almost—into taking the book at face value—and then I got tricked again, into not taking it a face value—it was on that day that I tried to spin the whole thing into an expression of Lacanian jouissance, phallic jouissance specifically, i mean a borrowed and read a whole book on it, and that reading failed and anyway a really smart critic, upon reading an early (better, more coherent!!)  draft of this essay about The QB said, “I found myself thinking, wow this guy sounds very Sadeian, or very Jean Genet, or Artaudian, as he clearly thinks of sex/extremity/taboo as some kind of ethical (in the loosest sense) practice, weaponized to arrive at something or at least to shock/refutate the current…” and I thought, YES, absolutely, she’s right, but—the Copi effect here is very different than Artaud, who gives me a headache, or Sade, who gives me a stomachache, or Genet, who makes me look in the toilet and see poetry, who inspired me to send my colonoscopy images to sasha, bc genet doesn’t give me an acute physical sensation but more a starry-eyed amplitude, while copi, copi makes me feel—and i have to keep saying this so you know—guys i’m totally plastered, the person driving this keyboard is BLITZED, goddamn manchild you fucked me so good that I almost said I love you—i’m gushing lana del ray lyrics all over my kitchen, i have no filter: i love you copi, i barely know you, i’m not even reading you in french, and still, i love you, and i guess now i love kit schluter, he’s like a, a, a, pimp is not the right word, he’s like a glory hole? yes that’s it, his translation is the glory hole Copi sticks his pen through? This is making sense to me, so let’s keep going! and actually, actually, Copi says on the first page, “I always write with a Bic pen…” and book’s afterword says that Bic is a slang for penis, and Copi has so much fun using his pen as a penis, when he gets writer’s block he says, “Pierre refuses to come out of my Bic”—although in the original it’s “Pierre se refuse à ma Bic,” so obviously the translator, by including “come” is totally in the right spirit—or take another scene, when Jean-Marie, the lisping sadomasochist & fellow writer, begs Copi for a C-section and Copi assents and then after opening Jean-Marie’s abdomen, he keeps going, “I split his skull with an ax blow,” until, post-hyperbolic violence, realism takes over for a little bit, sort of—“The phone rings, I let it ring, it stops, it rings again, it stops and starts again. I cross back through the Moroccan tapestry, I go into the bathroom and take a shower, I have some trouble with the water heater, you have to light it first and I can’t find the gas lever, the phone stops ringings, I soap myself up good, I’m in covered in dry blood. I like this apartment, it’s relaxing”—here Schluter helps keeps the scene buoyant with his choice of words, bc in the original french it doesn't say relaxant or some form of se detendre, nope the French is “il est tranquille,” but in a scene with an ax murder, Schluter turns tranquille into relAXing, haha—

ohhh all this back and forth between the original and the translation has sobered me up a bit, i’m afraid i’m on the verge of making a point, but the point is not that Copi’s weaponizing the taboo in order to wrench himself free from the perversity of the heternormative world and its nuclear family crap, I mean that’s true, but that’s not new, what’s new—to me—is how fast he goes while doing it!—A good novel should go like a good hand job—quick, lubed, and less tight than you think it should be—that’s my position, which I have taken only by virtue of reading a George Saunders interview and then a reddit/sex thread and falling asleep to dream this literary wisdom, because it’s Copi’s lightness i’m in awe of, his prose is so freaking fast that nothing really has any weight whatsoever—it’s novel as salad spinner—there’s a ton of lightness, so much so that reading it, I felt, despite not being in active pursuit of the feeling, happy—and now, since reading The QB, i see how so many other novels are littered with so much contemplation, oh my god, even some really good ones—they all have some kind of depth, they take time, they let introspection leak out of their narrators’ pores, and i keep coming back to The QB, which goes too fast for Copi to be self-conscious—is this a new way to be modern?—only once in the book does his consciousness surface—or dive down?—it’s when he says that he wants to stay on “this revolting merry-go-round” because if not he runs the risk “of going astray toward a different sensibility, myself”—oh yes! the self—why am I always going towards it & not away? This is why Copi gives me not only permission but a drenching sense of freedom, he was totally free, he did anything he wanted, it was like he’d never read a novel before, he was so free—the only comparable reading experience I’ve had is a twitter feed in the days between the United HealthCare CEO being shot and the shooter being caught—the celerity at which facts were being discovered and appraised in that span made the whole thing feel frothy—e.g., Starbucks? the shooter stops for two protein bars at a Starbucks? people on the feed are disappointed—“Girl, the boycott!”—and there’s a whiff of charming extravagance coming off the shooter, especially when, at each new image of his enormous, theatrical eyebrows, we get a fresh tide of come-hither-and-hide-out-at-my-apartment posts, and then, we get a pic of his face and, who could make this up, Joyce Carol Oates tweets that the shooter is so beautiful he should dress in drag, what a beautiful woman he would make, they would never find him, and at this point the story of the shooting is decidedly not Doestoyevskian—no it’s demented!—it’s a glorious space with no martyrs and no victims—no cops, no punishments—just sexiness and beauty and frothiness and speed—i declare—while i’m standing on my roof in a final surge of nonrational life energy, while i’m doing a besotted little dance—i’m yelling this to all my neighbors: Alfred Jarry’s ass-faced baboon is my lodestar—HAHA—the fool is fathomless, blah blah, and facile surfaces hollow me out, i fall, I am falling into a hole as deep as the bellybutton of Pietro…Copi and Pietro have this beautiful scene together where Pietro says that their life together was only a dream, only a copy of the real, and then Copi describes how he pushes his hand one last time into Pietro’s bellybutton and then upward until he touches his heart, “stroking it with my fingerprints, encircling it with my fingers, Pietro murmurs amore, amore, we fall asleep” and in the morning Copi’s arm is still up there and Pietro is dead, yes, Copi literally squeezed his lover’s heart till it stopped, or no, this is just an illustration of how communion with a lover can kill us, and to top it off, the day Pietro dies in Rome is Resurrection day, bells are ringing, if we stay too long in all the metaphorical possibilities we will drown! but we can’t, it’s too shallow, it’s not a deep book, the depths are in us—