Death and the Salesman

As noted below, NasTim's new work, now titled A Debris of Stones, has been evolving online. Previously, I hadn't linked to it for the convenience of the stray passer-by; I had only found an onward link to it while rooting around in cached texts from his abandoned former blog sites. Now, however, he has linked to what amounts to Version 2.0 of the project-formerly-known-as-Immolation from LitKicks (which is, as far I as can tell right now, his only public presence at the moment), so the link is included.

This latest incarnation of the project retains much of its earlier content. It is still, in large part, about the brutal death of a journalist at the hands of youthful members of an amorphous film crew, a group who, for reasons that are unclear, consider as a matter of Life, Death, and the Future of Art the making of what is sometimes described as a teenage folly and sometimes as a "major" picture. The actual death of the journalist, formerly a particularly vivid passage of carnage and revenge, hasn't yet reappeared.

The principal innovation in this draft is that the author is now making an all-out sales pitch for the project as some kind of breakthrough in the study of youth culture and emerging media. He seems genuinely gobsmacked that teenagers are posting MySpace profiles, watching YouTube videos, and in general interacting electronically, and he's all too eager to share this newfound knowledge with the world. The audiences he claim will be gripped by the carefully market-calibrated creation that is Debris range from punk-loving teens to those fascinated by literary scandals. He presents what he says is statistical research into the MySpace profiles he has created and claims a large, immediate international audience for them, talking with an almost Amway-like optimism about vast, untapped markets.

In short, he appears to mimic everything he has always said he most loathes about the contemporary commercialization of publishing. In a writer not known for subtle indications of feeling, that he is apparently doing so straightforwardly in hopes of marketing this "Novel Query and Film Proposal" somehow seems unlikely to be close-to-the-bone satire. Of course, the entire project is carefully labeled as fiction and, despite being hosted on Blogspot, not a blog, so I suppose anything is possible. Actually, it's always seemed that NasTim's biggest beef with publishing has been not so much a sophisticated critique of its methods and practices, but that it doesn't wholesale put out anything he creates, just as his primary dissatisfaction with journalism appears to stem from one practitioner thereof having discovered his long-term bilking of a small but credulous band of readers who derived some kind of inspiration from his masochistic fantasies of deprivation, racism, and his own selfless devotion to the weak, vulnerable, and extremely cute.

A Debris is presented as the work of a duo made up of Niko Samos, who, based on the text, is alternately more or less Nastim and an incredibly gifted, complex, and (need I even say?) highly sexualized 16-year-old, and Timotheus Talos, who seems more clearly the de-Navajoed gentleman who is in a position, as author, presumably to deliver that literary-scandalphile audience. Old habits of half-truth (even in the middle of outright invention) seem to die hard, for Niko Samos is also billed as a "PEN Book of the Year" award winner. You needn't bother to look that one up; of course no Niko Samos has ever won a PEN Book of the Year Award. There is no such thing. Now, of course, another author a couple of years ago picked up (as one of five writers so recognized that year) PEN's Beyond Margins Award under circumstances that later proved rather murky; perhaps that is what is implied here?

For those who still marvel at how long NasTim was able to get away with impersonating a Native American based on what seems to have been a fairly lightweight understanding of the culture's intricacies and profundities (anyone up for a mutton taco?), it will be interesting to note that "Niko Samos" claims as his favorite movies, according his this-is-not-a-blog Blogger profile, Never on Sunday and Zorba the Greek. It's only surprising that he doesn't go in for lounging about eating spanikopita while listening to Nana Mouskouri in a chiton, he's so Deeply and Authentically Greek.

As for the actual quality of ADoS, I hesitate to opine. A couple of female characters have been introduced, ranging from "Timotheos's" Italianate wife (she has elderly Italian relatives who, if male, are Life-Embracing, and if female, are Formidable - they might as well be played by Peter Boyle and Doris Roberts) to actresses who wander about with some of the left-out feeling shown by Viva when Lonesome Cowboy's male leads are all busy doing each other. There is much ado about the beauty, purity, tendency toward corruption, and astonishing talents of the film-making lolitos with whom the author has become involved. There is a great deal of fairly unreadable talk about the Importance of the Project, the Hauntedness of Greece, and and other Serious Topics. It seems all to add up to Nasdijj Redux, with AIDS replaced by celluloid and the spiritual world of the Dine tossed over for the gods of Olympus. What remains constant is the portentousness, the relentless cultural appropriation - and, of course, the boys.

Child Prodigy?

Here's something that's confusing me: NasTim* complains repeatedly (and copiously) in various settings about the decades of rejection and ill-treatment he has received from various elements of his nemesis, American Publishing. At one point, he waxed wroth about insulting rejection letters received from The New Yorker 40 years ago; in the current iteration of his LitKicks profile, he say, "The same arrogant low-life characters in this who weren't speaking to me forty years ago (since writers like me are scum) aren't speaking to me today. Ho fucking hum."

Now, first of all, this might seem pretty rich to many an aspiring author, coming as it does from someone with as extensive and varied a publishing history as Tim Barrus / Nasdijj / Leslie Bovee/ if-his-claims-are-to-be-believed an Award-winning Lesbian Author He Has Not Yet Named / and Allegedly More. Anyone who has put forth and had someone put between covers everything from Daddy's Lover Boy (which rests on the shelves of the Stonewall Library and Archive in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, autographed to boot) to Geronimo's Bones would seem to have little to complain of in terms of publishing's basic willingness to accept his work. Remuneration, of course, is another matter, as is popular success; there, too, anyone who claims grandly to have refused to allow The New York Times to review one of his works would seem to be on shaky ground.

But the real crux of the matter here is chronology: 40 years ago, Tim Barrus was a Lansing, Michigan high-school student, round about 16 years old. He may well have been sending juvenilia off to The New Yorker, but is it really fair to condemn an entire industry these many years later on the grounds that those effusions were not recognized as the early works of genius they may have been? Or might behavior a little more recent have something to do with any cold shoulder that Tim Barrus may be receiving from publishing houses large and small? Things like, to quickly come up with a short list, a record of deception; an apparent inability to separate out the skeins of truth and fiction in his work; a tendency, if various news sources are to be believed, to bombard publishers, agents, and others with (virtual, digital) reams of frequently profane e-mails; and, not least and not to be unkind, a tendency to write a very great deal and re-write little or not at all?

Here's my secret wish, to change the subject: I'm hoping that somewhere, somehow, there is a bold investigative journalist who is just about to establish definitively that Tim Barrus is Kola Boof. That, somehow, would be the icing on the cake of this little corner of American literary history.

Meanwhile -- Drakon's back, and A Debris of Stones takes shape. But more anon...

* This is the moniker given Barrus by one of the commenters herein. I like it so much I think I will adopt it and try to give it just a fraction of the currency that, in a different way, Dan Savage has bestowed on "Santorum." To "Anon" -- thanks!