from Times' Select...
another point of view... sort of a 'Farewell Charming Old NY' mixed in with JT...
The City's New Motto: ˜See You in Court'
By CLYDE HABERMAN
Manufacturing is all but gone from New York. The information technology industry, while on a roll, does not quite have the Silicon Alley '90s buzz. This city is in danger of falling behind London as a financial capital.
Thank goodness, we still have lawsuits.
... We have people of unparalleled dedication, like a lawyer who said he had worked 30 to 40 hours "” worth nearly $10,000 in billable time "” to fight a $65 parking ticket. Last week he won. Where else would you find someone willing to spend so much on so little, all in the name of justice?
[Or the case of] Mamadou Soumare, the unfortunate immigrant from Mali whose wife and 4 children were among 10 people who died in a terrible fire in the Bronx three months ago... he has filed [a claim] with the city comptroller's office. The notice was a required first step in a possible $100 million lawsuit "” repeat, $100 million "” against the city.
Among those named by Mr. Soumare was the Fire Department, which he said had "failed to respond in a timely manner." Never mind that firefighters arrived 3 minutes and 23 seconds after 911 was called. Never mind that the call had come disastrously late because people in the burning house had wasted precious time trying to put out the flames themselves.
The notice of claim does not mean that Mr. Soumare, who is in this country illegally, will definitely follow through with a lawsuit. But it means that he might. If he does, he will show that he truly understands American ways.
As does a company called Antidote International Films, which is suing a writer for fraud in federal court in Manhattan.
The company paid $45,000 for the rights to "Sarah," a novel that made a splash in 2000, in part because it was supposedly written by one JT LeRoy, said to be an H.I.V.-positive, teenage male prostitute out of West Virginia. Only there was no JT LeRoy. He was the invention of the actual writer, Laura Albert, 42, a mother with Brooklyn roots.
Antidote, which was entranced by the autobiographical back story of the nonexistent author, was not happy. It was so unhappy that it had six lawyers "” enough people to form a hockey team "” in court yesterday trying to get its money back.
Is Ms. Albert a malevolent fake? Or is she, as described by her lawyer, Eric Weinstein, a "complicated person" who created the JT LeRoy persona because "this is how she communicated with the world."
In case anyone may have forgotten, we are talking about a novel, by definition a work of fiction. What difference, some might ask, does it make if it was written by a young male hustler or a middle-aged mom?
It's not as if Ms. Albert is the first writer, female or male, to create a false identity. Mary Ann Evans wrote "Silas Marner" as George Eliot. Isak Dinesen, of "Out of Africa" fame, was not a man, but a Danish noblewoman, Karen Blixen. George Sand was the French Baroness Dudevant, Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin.
The list of assumed identities goes on and on. It includes Joyce Carol Oates, who 20 years ago wrote a pseudonymous novel, "Lives of the Twins." She hadn't intended to play "a trick," Ms. Oates said at the time. She simply "wanted to escape from my own identity."
In a 1987 essay, she said that with a pseudonym "there is the possibility, however quixotic, of making a fresh start" and "not being held to severe account for it."
But then, unlike Ms. Albert, Ms. Oates didn't get caught up in the thriving New York world of lawsuits, where it is all about being held to severe account.
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/nyregion/19nyc.html?pagewanted=print