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Hi, self promo time! "Cold Glitter" is my new book from Feral House. It has lots of wild stories and fabulousness on a dime so no, you definitely do not have to be Canadian or a Glam head to enjoy it. Over 400 pages of PIZZAZZAMATAZZ and ten years in the making. Get it from Feral House or ask for it at your favourite shop or library.
"Dayton's deep plunge into the crystalline depths of Canadian Glam is a strange swim indeed, something only an author this obsessive could provide -- a mirror ball's worth of wild reflections on an ice-cracked world long gone. No need to know anything beforehand about Canada or its music to be thoroughly dazzled by this scintillant dip! C'mon, shoot the boots!"
Guy Maddin, director of Rumours (2024), My Winnipeg (2007), and The Saddest Music in the World (2003) among many.
“The always-entertaining Robert Dayton details a mysterious, undocumented scene that was hiding in plain sight up North. Written with the enthusiasm of a renegade entomologist who just uncovered a rare, precious, and peculiar bee, the book is loaded with colorful characters and alternate-universe tales.”
Gregg Turkington, actor, writer, and comedian best known for his character, Neil Hamburger.
"Cold Glitter is a province-by-province walking tour of the soft sequined underbelly I never knew I had, as a so-called Canadian. It is enlightening and hilarious and in the end inspiring. Cold Glitter creates a home for the perverse and the ecstatic, in a nation vehemently down on both.” Dan Bejar, musician (DestroyerCold Glitter is a province-by-province walking tour of the soft sequined underbelly I never knew I had, as a so-called Canadian. It is enlightening and hilarious and in the end inspiring. Cold Glitter creates a home for the perverse and the ecstatic, in a nation vehemently down on both.” Dan Bejar, musician (Destroyer
4d ago
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The name dropping will leave you breathless!! the best niche ref is fern mallis. has anyone else read this?? bc I need to know what you think about the mountain of Snapple and mentos consumed and what it felt like for you to be in zoolander’s vacant head for 500 pages and what you think the ice and confetti were all about
Jan 28, 2024
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I picked up this book from a used bookstore in midtown after seeing the cover, which read “dead glamorous: the autobiography of seduction and self-destruction” - enough to convince me! The book, aptly named, is about death and glamour, which are just about all I think about nowadays. Carole is shallow and cynical and twisted and perfect and relatable (ex. “I wanted to live in a black-and-white world with champagne for breakfast and millions of men committing suicide over me”) - j’adore!
Jan 18, 2022
‘They’re faggots. They’re writers—quelle surprise!’
I had to ask Gay’s the Word to order Castle Faggot in for me. I used a £7.99 discount token from their pay-it-forward scheme to buy it when it arrived, povo that I am. I spent that £7.99 on one pint at some Bloomsbury pub and read it all in one sitting, twisting the book upside down, inside out, trying to make sure every toff in a gilet could see what I was reading. This is one of the reasons the book is such a powerful object: it branded me. It’s by a faggot, for faggots. No hetero would be caught dead with it in his hands.
In the book’s afterword, Dennis Cooper says ‘It does everything it’s doing in three-dimensions.’ Castle Faggot is a real space, an orgy of dead faggots and an amusement park. It’s a scatological Disneyland and a place for faggots to die. It’s a book that at once inspired and destroyed my own work, took a real big shit on it. Derek, as I try to, leans into consumerism with joy and horror simultaneously, locates us in the products we buy and the sugary cereal we crave. It’s also totally absent of literary goop, full of human goop, faggot goop; it’s slender ninety pages make it the perfect artefact. He doesn’t mince words, but he’s a mincer. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted to be.
I hold a real space for myself in my writing and feared it came off as forced, the I character always some more handsome version of me. Derek doesn’t need to include his name for us to know what sickly disturbed fag is talking. When he does do it, it comes off as a joke. As if we didn’t already know. His input is never conceited or dishonest; he pushes out from every shit-smeared hole laughing, screaming, self-loathing. He made me better at inserting myself into my writing and inserting myself into another man.
Castle Faggot isn’t just one of the most important pieces of post-AIDS writing, it’s one of the most current pieces of post-AIDS writing. It writes to a world which, honestly, didn’t really experience that tragedy, but which is littered with its bodies. Derek McCormack saw a dead faggot and thought, I’m gonna write on this, or I’m gonna write in this, or I’m gonna write with this. The whole book is a dead faggot crying out against our century, lost in an amusement park, how is this even possible? It’s a mass grave of a book.
At some point in the book you have to flip it upside-down, be reminded you’re holding an object; but you’re also forced to read backwards, rescind into a haunted past of faggotry and debauchery. He plays physical tricks with his work that make him a sort of architect. Nothing has ever been written like it, but we need more, and that’s why this book is so important. It sets a precedent. Derek takes the faggy artists of old—the fin-de-siecle writers, or ‘fag-de-siecle’—and transforms them into post-AIDS monuments, puerile shit-filled replicas. It’s a children’s book for faggots. It’s the children’s book I always needed as a child but didn’t know I did. It’s a book that reminds us that, as faggots, we’re already dead; but in being written, existing, it encourages us to go on and create. It’s like the faggots’ nuclear bomb, our weapon of mass seduction. It’s hot enough to melt Walt Disney.
Castle Faggot is, to me, the logical progression of all faggot art, the consolidation. It’s an exhibition piece on communal existence with AIDS and a call for young faggot writers to acknowledge that they come from a lineage of shit and death, that it’s inescapable, but that there are new things to be done. It explodes traditional narrative expectations and arrives at some other end of the novel, some new territory. It faggots the writing process and the book itself is a dead fucking faggot.
When I finished reading Castle Faggot I held it the whole way home. On the tube I wore it like a band t-shirt. By this point, though, I didn’t just want to be branded, an obvious faggot where I’ve before been called ‘the straightest person’ gym bro in my art class had ever seen; I wanted to be a model for Derek’s work, for someone, anyone, some faggot, to look it up, read it, and start writing, start breaking the mould.
Apr 29, 2025
Top Recs from @robertdayton
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I just joined a few days ago as my friend Chloe recommended it (she also wants a mug). I find it neat like early Tumblr -or MySpace which I loved until it stopped loading and felt forced to join the cold and creepy Facebook which kept on getting creepier and creepier and then made Instagram creepy too. I have been finding the internet really nasty lately what with AI, Twitter, Spotify, and all these techie supervillains running about. This does feel nicer.
15h ago
Be sure to enjoy their hairy, sexy version of Good Vibrations in the middle somewhere...
1d ago
Though we were Canadian we came from American Gregg Turkington's band name list. And today is not a day to celebrate USA.
5d ago