JC Leroy (as Terence put it)

.... was like running through a crumbling haunted house, each room more horrifying than the last. And you never know when one of the wood floor planks would give way, dropping you into a bottomless abyss from which you'd NEVER, EVER ESCAPE!!!!!!!!!!!

Surely that bitch mother of his should be in jail, and I so badly wanted to and would slap the shit out of her (and I don't care if she's a woman). Who could guess with a casual glance at the trailer from outside what wretchedness burns inside. A child raised in such circumstances is destined to either be a brilliant writer or start another Manson family, and perhaps that's next.

The makeup lesson in Baby Doll is one of the very few rays of sunlight beaming through the prison bars of this stinking dungeon. Yet I found myself strangely turned on by the sado-masochistic eroticism/torture of the early part of Lizards. Wrongdoing on purpose so you have an excuse to get your ass whipped by a stern yet frenzied master. Or watch other handsome blonde boys suffer the same fate. Tragedy, torture and titillation all wrapped in one. The big bad wolf on the way to Grandma's house.

[This message was edited by Luxury Lex on 10-18-03 at 10:46 PM.]

I'm gonna kill...
Another Christian!

The religious material is so severe, uglier than the sex, but then it's because the Christians fuck with sex...
JT pens with vitriol the reality of the Christian's living nightmare of guilt, punishment, and washing clean of sin, and guilt again... and the marked PLEASURE both in the giving and the receiving of that torture.

I mean - Clorox as holy water? Mother rubbing her genitals down with Clorox after tricking? Because otherwise "They can smell the sin on you!"

When you realize the Mother was fucked with (and perhaps fucked) by the grandfather... herself tortured and made ragged by that 'sex-is-bad' circle-of-Hell - it IS enough to make someone into a Mary Magdalen whore... her whoring was her OWN processing of the shit.

In interviews JT is quoted as saying of course her parents and grandparents cannot deal with her writing, at all. Course not. But again you never hear her whine about what they put her through. There's just the facts of the behaviour, 'I saw this, he did that' - the purest indictment!

That issue of the parent giving you their worst - for YOU to process... what else can you do with their disgusting violence but use it, and thereby become The Artist?

Oh, right - you could also kill yourself.

I'm She-ing JT as she makes mention that she 'used to be' male-identified in one of her interviews.

I mean the image of the prick is so wrecked in her writing, not to mention that classic 'bad, bad, bad' when the erection happens.

Of course that's in the writing. Might not be with the person.

We have so missed you S'tan...

I really liked "Heart" - of all people, Alba gave me a ziney galley version years ago and I gagged when I finally read it.

Did Alba read it? Can you imagine that stuff in Italian... they must have got the galley from GVS.

I missed you toooo. I am back to do evil, and your bidding!

(My avatar disappeared for some reason so I had to go with the skeleton...)

[This message was edited by S'tan on 10-20-03 at 07:10 AM.]

Do you really think she's some other famous other posing under a pen name? Sometimes it all seems "too good" to be true.

I can't think of a more searing indictment of religeous zealots than the depiction of the grandparents in "Heart". Other than the Pope himself of course, who surely MUST BE insane (see Opposition Report) but also spouting the rhetoric of that historically insidious institution, the Catholic Church.

And those scalding hot baths! The vigorous scrubbing! And pouring bleach on your genitalia! So bad for your skin. What would the Fab Five say?

No, I think JT is a real kid, unless she's Bobby Miller in astral projection.

[This message was edited by S'tan on 10-21-03 at 09:03 PM.]

This story is so demented. I've read it four times... describing how he lived inside his mother's insanity. His devotion is absolute at this point. She thinks the walls are moving, he sees them and warns her when they're about to move again... Food is considered poison, there's an orgy of vomiting and descriptions of vomitus that will interest anyone familiar with acute self-loathing. That feeling there's something irrational and living in you. You vomit until you are turned inside out, and that's the point, the visceral rejection of the entire thought of existence...

Mother goes completely mad, and he follows her there. A living schizophrenic nightmare perfectly described. I mean paint it all black: they dye their hair, their clothes, everything black... the beautiful mad language. A little boy playing with lumps of coal like dolls, the mother coal, and the baby coal,and the bleeding coal and its heat from hell, I
mean it makes me feel like I'm crazy too while I'm reading it.

I might have to recant JT at this point.
I mean on the second read of the story "Las Vegas" I realized he's describing taking a shit
in his pants. At first read I only thought it was a fart.
Now really. Totally unedifying.
A fart was enough. Shit is over-writing.

[This message was edited by S'tan on 10-22-03 at 05:24 PM.]

I made the same mistake the first time I read that passage as well. Later I went back, re-read and realized it was actually SHITTING.

Perhaps it was over-writing, but I'm the type that enjoys the overdone, over-the-top things "dropped in" from time to time.

Perhaps it's his way of saying he is not just her victim, but also an obnoxious brat who deserves to be ditched, what mother wouldn't drive away and leave a stinkin' little bastard by the side of the road.

I do love all those images of being ditched, though... in Baby Doll, when he leaves the trailer for the dog house, but then turns around to check that it was still up on blocks, and hadn't suddenly sprouted wheels.

Everybody leaves.

And Sarah's misguided determination to perservere as a mother, like a bargain basement Courtney Love. I mean, what value is there to dragging a little kid along on her shenanigans? It's one more mouth to feed, one more body to cloth and besides the kid seems to obstruct her objectives at every turn. It would be so much easier for her to give him up for adoption, or leave him with the foster parents or the grandparents. But she keeps slugging away.

The park ranger turned and ran.

FUCKIN FOSTERS!

It's true--Sarah's odd and sudden need for him is distressing.

So much to catch up on. S'tan, we'll dish soon!
xo

Yes Michael let's... Now go check up on what wig JT is wearing this week so we can dress like ha for next Cabaret... or for the "Wonder Bra" party? That sounds suitably demented...

"The park ranger turned and ran...." HA! Lex, I did smirk over that, you can imagine what a total sleaze she must be!

Did you like that use of the word 'cast' and 'casting' though, for how she describes her pickups... "She's casting". It's a mixture of throwing out a line for fishing, and hiring someone to be in her movie.

From my experience in the sex business, some whores like to have their children around because it 'verifies,' in their minds anyhow, that they are real women, in fact MOTHERS, and not just depositories for faceless sperm. But then in "Sarah" he's not supposed to tell anyone he is the son... well it's obviously nothing she really thought through.

JT says in one of his interviews, if he had been allowed to stay with the 'fucking fosters,' he would never have had all those experiences to process and write about... and wouldn't have been a writer. But really who the fuck knows. He might have still been a little pants-shitter. Jane Austen stayed in a few rooms all her life and it didn't make her sensibility vacuous. I really am over the conceit that crazy shitty fucked up lives make interesting prose.

[This message was edited by S'tan on 10-23-03 at 07:28 PM.]

"I really am over the conceit that crazy shitty fucked up lives make interesting prose."

I second that! It's so contrived.

Glam baby, tell me a story. Ya, you see that alot in bad poetry/slams. Spilled guts have no literary value in themselves; when the poem does not resolve, it's just more goo.

Michael, you erased your post. Negatively tinged though it was (that you don't believe you're creative) you are magnetized by the context of the creative and do add to the setting! That is worth alot. Don't malign yourself, neither for having had a decent childhood.

I know first hand the awfulness of having a shit-for-mother. Mine was more along the lines of "You're weird, you're wrong, you're an incompetent, you're crazy."

End story, she tried to justify her belief/need to believe I was 'insane' by trying to have me committed. I was very 'experimental' as per the times, taking drugs, lots of sex, etc. But no serious trouble... Fortunately my father (a writer too) refused to agree to my incarceration, and anyhow they soon were divorced. I escaped & left for school, then moved to NY. At one point I didn't speak to her for 14 years.

You are lucky you will never know the disgusting inversion of a Mother actively trying to ruin you. Someone betraying who should have loved you 100% - it's an abyss...

And what do they care. For the space of your childhood, they distract themselves from their self-hatred by gambling with your life.

There's nothing in the world that makes up for it, I would hazard to say not even a bloodie best-seller. The alleged problems his family has with his successful writing is of course with the subject matter; but moreso that they have now been 'caught,' and did not succeed in running the boy JT down. Shoulda kilt him when they had'im.

Preparing by popular demand another ranting dissertation on this final story in "Heart is Deceitful..." I think it's the perfect coda to all the horrendous abuse, a rickety triumph, as self-consciousness rises... as well as a dominatrix I appreciate hearing the side of the 'subject', what he's suffering through.

Anyone have anything to say about this story - til I get back to you...?

Daddy I might want to request we move this whole thread over to 'Hopelessly Devoted.' Don't you think. It may have more of a shelf life there too as we comment on new appearances of Le Roi...

Only one thing puzzles me: Are we born this way or were we made into what we are by people like Sarah and her father?

Just finished " Heart.." and still trying to think this one through.

I think the best etiology the moderns (after 1920) can muster on this issue is: a lack of breast-feeding and caressing at the infantile stage between 6 months and a year. In that scenario the mother stopped breast-feeding before the infant was 'done,' or the infant's connexion with her is in some other way interrupted. This makes the child what they call 'orally aggressive,' which then evolves into the sadomasochistic faculty if you will.

If this is so, there is not much you can do to re-determine yourself (at least until you've gained maximal self-acceptance.)

Wilhelm Stekel stands upon the determinating force of VIEWING violent activity at a very young inpressionable age - the excitement thereby confused with/fused into the sexuality.

Stekel states that "...in sadomasochistic men, the faithlessness and/or promiscuity of the mother/mother figure is extremely determining; positing for his sexuality either punishing sadism towards women, or submissive placativeness towards women who do not love him."

In my essay on this subject I extend this to "In sadomasochistic women, again there would be a type of 'Don Juan' character in the father, rake-hellishness and cavalier attitudes which create in the woman a similar punishing archetype, or a fixation upon men indifferent to her. How does this occur in the psyche?"

[Quote Stekel] "The parent is despised for the promiscuity; the hatred splits off and carries over to the entire sex; then, the sense of guilt and overcompensation result in a deification of the original, dishonored incest object.'

Deification! So the beloved is a god we worship - or gleefully blaspheme. But never again are we free of that god."

http://www.sternangel.com/whobecomes.html

I am finishing up reading "American Psycho" before I get back to JT. The sadism of that character, Patrick Bateman, is totally unsubstantiated and therefore it's very irritating to read. We're convinced he performs disgusting mutilations only because he can't get a good table at the swankest restaurant in town? Ridiculous. It had better end well.

I met Miss Ellis once years ago when I was temping at Random House around the time that American Psycho was first published. Pretty much the entire staff, especially the staff of Alfred A. Knopf, was in an uproar that senior management had dirtied the reputation of Random House and its imprints by agreeing to publish such poorly-written filth. Miss Ellis came to the office one day to meet with an editor, and shaking her hand felt squeezing a cold, dead fish.

In my hierarchy of reading there is Literature, then there is Good Trash, and finally Bad Trash. American Psycho is definately in the latter category, as are pretty much all of Bret Easton Ellis's works with the exception of his first novel, Less Than Zero. Even that work became tiresome after a point when the novelty of the free associative narration experiment wore off. Perhaps Less Than Zero would've worked better as a short story. I attempted to read both The Rules of Attraction and American Psycho but put them both down when it quickly became clear how bad they were and that Miss Ellis is a one-trick pony with her fixation on trust fund kids and designer labels. Both novels were populated with despicable, reprehensible characters with little or no redeeming qualities and there was simply no one to cheer for. Like a dry, joyless fuck. American Psycho reads like a misogynist wet dream. She probably hates humanity in general.

After the book ended with a big boring splat of existential vacuity (Sartre did that nausea so much more poetically), I decided to see the film again as it did seduce me into reading the book.

Now the movie does extract the best lines from the book... there is no doubt observing those 80s-style fatuous yuppies ruling the universe is weirdly exciting. It's a ruling class, after all, and sadistically joyous. He details them very well. Christian Bale is a great cast and when he cracks up and confesses into the answering machine, that sweaty mess he becomes, the hysteria... "I had to kill alot of people..." just stunning.

Seeing shots of World Trade in the background, it came to me this material could now be viewed as a very mordant political satire. That Patrick Bateman's self-indulgent, homicidal, shallow soul = America, and his many victims could be boiled down (hmm?) to aspects of the rest of the world -if anyone was up to analyzing the variety of mutilations. And the expensive eating habits are so revolting as compared to famines the world over, etc. (Now you see where JT got some ideas, possibly, for the high-faluten Doves Diner in "Sarah"!)

In other words, I don't think the forms the murders and sadism take are just random 'filth'... An American Psycho: a paradigm obsessor over details, uber-consumer, fuelled by cocaine, who cares only for appearances, who destroys others unfeelingly... actually 'American Psyche.'

Totally agog at the reviews on the back of the book where Norman Mailer compares ha' to Dostoyevsky. Please. The style is jerky, unwieldy, emotionally gawky, and I too would have ditched the book after the third description of what the fuck couture they were wearing, if I hadn't had the gorgeous Bale in my head as an activator... But there ARE people who read couture the way the 'Psycho' does, and base entire value judgements on an outfit. In your opinion: are they insane?

Yes, the book is disgustingly misogynistic, but alot of American men are. The detailing of this 'horror of the female' is pretty total. Bret is very conversant with evil-mindedness, and could himself be cruel, e.g. the torturing of the bums. But I don't think that matters... because he's revealed to us some of the secrets of his sick brotherhood.

Alas I have not seen the film version of American Psycho and so I can't comment on it. However your political take on it is very interesting, and an example of how time does things to movies and the way we interpret them and feel about them.
Films that were flopped or received tepid enthusiasm from viewers initially can be hailed as classics twenty years later, etc. Sept 11th certainly cast much of the 90s in a different light than was possible for us to see before. And films are a whole separate art form anyway.

Getting back to the written version of Psycho, I don't have a problem with the endless couture descriptions in and of itself. And audience fascination with the workings of the ruling class is certainly a time-honored tradition to which I also subscribe. In fact I enjoy it, so long as there is soul behind it. I actually am drawn to authors who give their readers a king-size bed of description regarding characters clothing choices, personal appearance, hairstyles, etc (one of my favorite books of all time is Scruples by Judith Krantz, a perfect example of Good Trash and a high-fashion bible to boot). But if there is no passion, then the work reads flat, dull, uninspiring and vacuous. Of course one could retort that the coldness and vacuousness is Miss Ellis's entire point, but I felt that point was already well struck in Less Than Zero. Perhaps American Psycho was his attempt at representing the more monstrous side of that vacuous scale, but whatever.

Granted as authors we are repeatedly drawn to portray the same themes and subjects over and over. Will Miss Leroy have anything else to talk about besides child abuse and prostitution, now that she's already run us into the ground with it in two novels? Time will tell. And granted also that versatility as an author is far less important than quality -- better to write five really great books about one subject or theme than to write five so-so books about totally divergent topics. Miss Leroy, at her young age, has already written Literature. I guess the difference between her and Miss Ellis is that the former's style triumphs over everything else. Not so with Miss Ellis.

I will lend you the DVD if you don't rent it. And I agree on the comparison. I compulsively began reading "Sarah" again last night, and with total pleasure because of the language.

I wouldn't venture back into "A. Psycho" because it's just ramshackle and boring. B.E.E. inches towards literature in the last pages, with moody rambles about the vacuousness and meaningless of it all, but as you say, grand meaninglessness is not enough. You have to say it very well, so there's pathos.

The only Dostoyevskian aspect of his work I see is the confession that no-one believes. That was almost Raskolnikov's fate in "Crime & Punishment"... ALMOST. He had to force the police et al to believe him - and at last THEY DID. That book ends in a gorgeous frisson of redemption that Bateman only writhes towards on a cocaine hangover.

But again, my take on "A.Psycho" as a political satire would view that lack of punishment, the moral dead zone, as the reality Amerika now inhabits. No matter how brutal we are as a warmonger or a culture-tyrant, no one punishes us because we're just too important. We buy our way out of every crime we commit.

yeah, Lex, interesting to see what Mlle. LeRoy serves up next. Makes me wonder: is he the son of Sylvia? His laid-bare exposure and brain-sizzling bluntness is not altogether unlike that of the Plaths and Lowells. And the past year has certainly seen him, in Plath's words, "Overexposed/ Like an X-ray." So what happens after the lot lizards? Will he try his hand at totally fiction fiction, or like Sivvy, find he writes best as a narcissist? Though S'tan, as you said early on, maybe we just shouldn't care what's next... he's given us two gorgeous books. Do we deserve more?

We should not ask writers to be product - we have no right. To be compelled to produce creates bloated nightmare like Mailer and Anne Rice. (Sorry Chi.) Only in modern Amerika.

Do you think "Sarah" proves she can abstract herself out of the subject... that she can become fictive? Seems so, compared to Heart/Deceitful.

Usually (they say) novelists take a while to evolve... She has alot of living to do yet. The next works could be some sort of reflection on the Hollywood scene and celebrity. I hope it will have that blunt and cruel way about it... Or less prosaically, she might implode/explode her entire thematic in some "Ulysses"-like orgasm of beauty.

But right now if I was her I would be loungin' around daydreamin' while I could.

Now we have to go see "ELEPHANT" which JT wrote with Gus Van Sant. When it won the Croix d'Or or whatever it is they cop at Cannes, GVS called up JT and said, "We won." JT I believe is given no writing credits, and she didn't think she deserved that phone call. (You see I've memorized alot of her press.)

I hope they show some version of that S'tan moment when Trenchcoat Mafia asked the kids, "Do you believe in God?" And when they said "Yes" they got blown away.

[This message was edited by S'tan on 11-03-03 at 12:28 PM.]

I think S'tan is right and more..I think Ms. LeRoi will serve us up big time just as soon as she can get and stay in touch with her deepest heart. I can understand the double edged sword of feeling accomplished and a failure at the same time. Let her swim her way outta that and we may yet see a great novel about the whole human condition. I believe that JC has what it takes. He should run away from Hollywood just as fast as those little legs will carry him and move to NYC where they help scrape the shit from you while planting your seed in the manuer to grow. And there are so many good teachers there.
I just started Sarah again for the third time and it is still fresh. A rarity.

You live for ha.

Anne Rice = another fave example of Good Trash. At some point I need to resume the Vampire Chronicles. Sorry to say I only got through the first three. For shame. But my list of "To Read"s keeps growing and growing .....

6 train, uptown this a.m.: I'd literally just finished reading the last word of the heart/deceitful chapter, "foolishness is bound in the heart of a child," when I stood up to exit the train and a man beside me shoved past by putting his New York Post in my face. The headline: "PASTOR: I GAVE BOYS 'HOLY SPANKINGS'" I'd forgotten how upsetting this particular section of the book is. So fucking fucked. And then to see this...

Here's the clip. Spooky. It's right out of JTL.

web page

November 3, 2003 -- NEW HAVEN, Conn. - The Rev. Walter Oliver believes that God is on his side.
If not, Oliver could face up to 30 years in prison.

Oliver is charged with two counts each of assault and risk of injury to a minor for beating two child parishioners of his former church in New Haven. Jury selection in his trial is scheduled to begin this week.

He freely admits he beat the boys, who were 11 and 12 at the time. They were beatings in Jesus' name, he said, and carried out with love according to the adage, "Spare the rod and spoil the child."

"I call it a 'Holy Spanking' - that's God's mandate to keep law and order," Oliver said in an interview last week.

He said he was acting with the permission of their mother in his official capacity as the children's pastor.

He hit the boys several times on the bare buttocks with a black leather belt. The boys were not bloodied or seriously injured; prosecutors said the beatings left marks, an allegation Oliver denies.

Prosecutor Brian Sibley said religious freedom is "an outside issue" and not a legitimate defense for Oliver.

It also doesn't matter that Oliver was their minister, Sibley said. Oliver would face charges if he were the boys' father, he said.

"We're treating this like any other child abuse case," Sibley said.

Oliver, 66, is a native of New Haven and comes from a family of religious leaders. He said his parents were strict and pushed him and his two brothers to hard work. When the boys misbehaved at home or at school, they were spanked.

Spanking is widely discouraged by doctors and child-care experts. The practice hurts and humiliates children and teaches them to use violence to solve their problems, said Dr. Kyle Pruett, professor of child psychology and nursing at the Yale Child Study Center.


AP

I AM obsessed. But what is life without a good fixation? I too am reading "Sarah" for the 3rd time, it's absolutely pure. And better than waiting for Fyodor D.'s next novel.

I don't know about JTL moving to NY, Bobby. Why don't you get her to move up to PP-Town with you? For some of those lessons you are famous for.

HOLY SPANKINGS!!! When are they going to outlaw the Catholics?

On this very subject I used some quotes from Quintilian (Roman orator & educator, first century A.D.) in my essay 'Who Becomes a Sadomasochist':

"Quintilian denounced sadistic usages in education... Cruelty as an educative tool disgusts him, 'First because it is odious and slavish and dishonouring at any age; next, because anyone who is so base that he could not be improved by kindly persuasiveness and affectionate admonition, will also be insensible to blows.' This makes a powerful statement for the [sadomasochistic ] predeliction as a temperamental condition.

"Furthermore, 'it cannot be stated, without blushing for shame, to what disgusting orgies unworthy persons abuse the right to chastise.'

'Beating trains only slavish natures, embitters the child, and destroys his joy in his task.' "

Info on Quintilian:
http://www.msu.edu/user/lewisbr4/980/websites.html]http://www.msu.edu/user/lewisbr4/980/websites.html

[This message was edited by S'tan on 11-05-03 at 04:15 PM.]

Still, 30 years in prison for a different idea on discipline is a bit too much... Much as I hate those fuckers, I do NOT want to pay for their private masturbation rooms aka the jail-cell!

Whatever happened to the stocks and pillory?

Aside from how wrong or right whipping and spanking is... I love how Mlle. Le Roi describes her pleasure in bending over and getting walloped.

"How can you crave something your whole body rejects, and even increase the cravings the greater the protest from the body?"

"How can I explain the pain that burns like torture but soothes and excites more than a caress or kiss."

And those last two paragraphs of "Natoma Street" are absolutely ecstatic. Through the words some kind of orgasm rushes through me - strangely heightened by that insane last slash of:

"...even though my thing has long been cured of its ability to have erections..."

WHAT ????

[This message was edited by S'tan on 11-05-03 at 04:18 PM.]

So I'm reading it. In some ways I prefer it to The Heart is Deceitful, it's somewhat brighter. (so far, that is) "She-ra" has some independence and gets some validation, even if it is only from a truck stop pimp.

She-ra. I'm glad he left Sarah's bubble bath on the lawn.

Developing .....

I finished reading Sarah for the 3rd time last night and
I can't wait for the movie now... The truck chase when they
rescue ha from Le Loup is so well-written, how often do you read a book that just races to its end?

JT where are you? More more more!!!

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
"Turn to Evil,see how light-hearted you will feel." Genet

Sarah was great. I guess my experience differs from others in that I read The Heart is Deceitful first, then Sarah. So I got the back story before getting the main story. But for me after reading Heart, Sarah seemed almost like a comedy by comparison. Of course the characters are again reprehensible and really disgusting (the child molester with pictures of little girls all over walls, mumbling about his stepdaughter? yeeesh -- and that atrocious Le Loup!) but the work in general was so much brighter and funnier when held up next to Heart. Where Heart seemed all darkness except for the very ending chapter, Sarah had light and dark walking hand in hand throughout. Before reading either work my friends who had read Ms. Leroy told me about Sarah and called it "harrowing" but I felt Heart was much more so. The truck chase/rescue scene in Sarah is genius and wonderful, the whores who liberate Sam coming off as even heroic. Really racing to the finish with a Deliverance quality, escaping the hillbillys. Ms. Leroy gives the characters a kind of nobility that is missing from Heart, which was such an exquisitely written torture chamber. Pooh ("not like shit, like Pooh Bear") braving adversity and continous beatings while becoming the most famous ho in the state, her jealousy getting the best of her, but ultimately you see she's good inside and see she's really a tragic figure as she heads off to Hollywood. And the bond she shares with Sam, wanting fist kisses from Le Loup, their bargain basement Stanley Kowalski.

The whole Saint Sarah scenario is completely ludicrous and really, really funny while also depraved and sick!

I just got back from vacation in Seattle and Vancouver and what a following Ms.LeRoi has out there. I saw people reading it in cafes.
Just read Sarah a third time and still find more in each reading. I understand Lex , how it must seem reading "Heart.." first, and then "Sarah". But I love your insights into the
charecters.
Sat next to Ryan Landry on the flight back from Seattle. I gave him my copy of"Sarah". He read a third of it before we landed so I gave it to him.

I agree S'tan,
more please from J.T. Keep it comin' babe, we can take it.

Yeah, Bobby, we can take it baby...! I think JT shouldn't retire from prostitution, but go into hiding, open her own ho-house, and continue turning it out both ways. Kind of like someone else I know!

I've travelled on to the complete plays of Tennessee Williams, lines of which I love reciting aloud in the south'ren accent. JT works that way too, same loping cadences.

"What on earth can you do on this earth but catch at whatever comes near you, with both your hands, until your fingers are broken?" - TW, Orpheus Descending

"... I miss having my dates. The other boys always talk about having to get high to help them do and then forget their tricks. But I'm pathetically aware, now I get high to fill the time between tricks. Because, no matter how rough or tough the trucker, that point of soundlessness, that instant before they are spent, is the sweetest contact anyone can have with anybody." JTL, Sarah, p. 137

Take a deep breath and look over how JT places - and doesn't place - those commas. How can you not love ha.

[This message was edited by S'tan on 11-22-03 at 12:35 AM.]

Check out the current issue of ID magazine. It has an interview with Debbie by JT Leroy, and I must admit it is one of the best interviews with her I have read. He really got to the real person. Not an easy task sometimes. He didn't ask the usual 10 questions..."what was CBGB's like?" or "do you hate Madonna?". He actually got the closest to the real person I know and love.

Although I did finish Sarah, I still feel I dont have a strong enough opinion about him until I read Heart. Until then , check out ID.

I'm looking forward to reading that interview... and Glammy I really enjoyed our conversation pro & con JT the other night. I wish there were more negative opinions here, I really don't want to sound fatuous...

But I haven't run across ANY negative reviews in re the prose yet. Just people hating the hype -- well who doesn't.

Bobby, I finished "Running With Scissors" which you recommended as per a memoir of perverse childhood... I was pretty well-entertained by how stunningly stupid the mother was. But it had too much flat, psychological language. I don't even think he described what his mother much looked like. Unlike JT who was really both in love and hate with 'Sarah.'

I did not think the material was risen enough out of the yeasty psychologising.
And while JT doesn't whine over his own sad/tragic state of affairs, I though Augusten Burroughs was pretty much "without affect," to use a standard psychology term...
which might make him just another version of his nerdy emotionless father and brother. And I totally hated the 'recap' of what all the characters were 'really' up, by press-time! I mean I did not fucking care!

In other words, it's not as deep as JT.

To finish, was not as thrilled with the language, which is the real point anyhow. Not the weirdness.

And after the flamboyant sleight-of-hand of you-know-who...

In his work you do experience the suffering, which is what makes it a translucent reality, and binds you in some mysterious way to the author.

Debbie gave me one of the "Pussy Pucker Pots" lip balm that JT Leroy sent her for Christmas, the flavor is "Strawberry Snatch", sounds like something straight out of his book. I have yet to try it though.