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.