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!