Namedropper

Well, it's still all much of a muchness in BarrusWorld, but his usual loops are closing in again. He's spent much time of late playing with his sad little homunculi, dragging the imagined imps through various hoops and to his fanciful lairs, most recently in a highly suspect "Amsterdam" that - as with his writings on Greece, Paris, Rome, and elsewhere - suggests strongly that he's never traveled much further from Lansing, Michigan than Hendersonville, North Carolina.

What's interesting, though, to the real aficionado, is that he's circling back in on the things that really interest him, returning to the screeds against publishing that did so much to endear him to that world back in the days when he actually did have a publisher; the horrible injustices done to him when Tim Barrus was exposed as Nasdijj (or is that vice versa?); and returning to his old themes of all the Great and the Good he once graced with his presence. It's a familiar gallery of faces: Mapplethorpe, Capote, etc., and undoubtedly just a matter of time before Tennessee makes his obligatory appearance. NasTim stands outside what despite himself he still sees as a charmed world and looks in, and it's really rather airless and sad.

But - in the past, the re-cropping up of these themes has heralded a change. Perhaps he's getting tired of this particular pretense - the maverick leader of this group of underage junkie hooker artists that he's been toying with for some months now; the "co-writer" with the equable Prairie Mary on what must indeed be a very odd book; the occasional vlogger. What could come next?

If I had to bet, I'd say: yet another coterie, in some mildly changed way, of glitteringly tragic boychiks, all agog at the greatness of Tim - followed by tirades against publishing, narcissistically autobiographical bits about great days with Robert and Truman - and then yet another hemi-semi-demi-metamorphosis.

At least, from I can see, he's had no success (and, in fairness, doesn't really seem to have tried) in actually scamming people to believe this latest saga. The next one?

I'll keep an eye out and let you know...