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JC Leroy (as Terence put it)

daddydaddySage
What up with J.T. Leroy anyway?
Obviously a good writer, that's not the question.
Nightmare????
A self-proclaimed recluse, why is he on Page 6 every day?
Presswhore????
And why so many "celebrity readings"?
What's that about?
Moving Kembra Fowler (a celebrity asked to read) out of a booth so Courtney Love (a bigger celebrity asked to read) could sit.
What's that about?
Why "The Coral Room" on a Sat, night?
What were they thinking???
PR????
And why was Gary Indiana shouting, "J.T. Leroy is a fraud!" outside the club????
So many questions.

Anyone?
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xnowhereboyxxnowhereboyxMotherlover
Does JT live in NYC now??? I remember it was such a big deal when he moved to San Francisco. Well, it was a big deal for about a week. It seemed like an interview with him was in every magazine, and he would always refused to be photographed for the interviews. And he would show up for the interview wearing a wig and a disguise, so people were wondering if it was really him every time. He would go on and on in the interviews about how he's a very self-secluded person, but would go into detail about where he liked to hang out, and when he was usually there. If the interview was in a gay magazine or paper, he would talk endlessly about his girlfriend and a supposed baby he has with her. If it was in a regular publication, he would talk about a mysterious band that he was in, and that he was tired of writing novels. If he moved to NYC, it's most likely because people got sick of him back in San Francisco. I know a few people that got caught up in the hype and were on endless quests to try and meet him, but I never bothered to read his work and thought he was a publicity stunt. I heard that he didn't write his first novel, he was just some guy brought in by the publisher to say it was his autobiography. But if Madonna and Courtney Love are big fans, there has to be something to him....

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Thank you ladies and gentlemen. I'll be here all weekend. Don't forget to please tip your servers.
xnowhereboyxxnowhereboyxMotherlover
I can say from first-hand experience that posting anything about Gary Indiana will get you hexed and you'll lose everything....

If you axe me, I think JT Leroy is an author with a brilliant publicity-generating mind. I like a few authors who are supposedly publicity shy, and if you don't like publicity you don't do things and stunts like JT Leroy. I think he learned a lot from Madonna when he met her --- he makes the press come to him while he pretends to despise the attention.

Speaking of not liking attention, I better get ready to go to CM and avoid everyone.

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Thank you ladies and gentlemen. I'll be here all week. Don't forget to tip your servers.
hatcheshatchesSage
When I lived in San Francisco, the hottest celeb guest to have at your party was the mayor. Which wasn't hard to do. At that time he was Mayor Alioto, with whom I shared a lawyer, as well as many moments with, in the law office's lounge, so it wouldn't have been hard at all. I remember thinking, "But why would I ever want to?" Who wants a mayor at your party?
I also remember when Yoko Ono came to SF and announced she was moving there. Oh, the furor that ensued; finally a real life celebrity in town to gossip about! That lasted for about a week. Then she announced she would NOT be moving there. The disppointment and depression lasted for months!
I guess my point here is that San Francisco is a very very small pond. Adore it as I do, I also adore it for what it is not, It is not a glittering glitzy fashionable place full of the latest celebrities-du-jours. It is not even the epicenter of Old California money. That is, almost unbelievably, Sacramento.
But perhaps Mr. Leroy is the clever one. It is easier to test the waters in a small pond like SF before flipping to one of the bigger ones like NY. If that is the case, I will bet his next pond will be the really big scummy one-- Los Angeles. And that he will never write a single word again!
S S'tanSage
Your query:
And why was Gary Indiana shouting, "J.T. Leroy is a fraud!" outside the club????

Because Gary is a good editor.

Miss Fluff please relate the evil bon mots.
Someone should start a Gary Indiana topic to
record all the genius dis. Then venture in who would dare.

It was Miss Chivity who dubbed her "JC" not me. And as she said, So what if she's a presswhore, if it gets the masses interested in writers it
gets our approval.

And "for some reason" incest sells even more than regular sex, viz Lord Byron. So fuck your mother and tell all.

I will go look at the Le Roi thread.

Terence

[This message was edited by S'tan on 09-19-03 at 01:05 PM.]
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S S'tanSage
oof I'm in the Le Roi thread.

I loved the flourish, Hattie of "And he will never write another word again!" Not that I
wish that on anyone. But read T. Capote as the
paradigm of excess publicity/socialite approval =
equals writer's block.

I got the book anyhow.

[This message was edited by S'tan on 09-19-03 at 10:07 PM.]
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LF Lady FluffMotherlover
S'tan--
The conversation went as follows:

VIP GARY INDIANA: "When you see JT, tell him to (expletive deleted) off!"
NON-VIP LADY FLUFF: "I don't imagine that I will see JT, as I am not a VIP (Iron-fisted gatekeeper had made this shortcoming painfully clear to Lady Fluff)."
VIP GARY INDIANA: "Well, I AM a VIP, but I am not allowed to bring my BLACK boyfriend into the VIP area, so we are leaving. This is (expletive deleted, again and again)"...

I'm afraid that's a bit anticlimactic, but I dare not risk embellishment for fear of voodoo repurcussions... Anyway, further research leads Lady Fluff to believe that much more sinister forces were at work. I mean, if Courtney Love needs a spot to sit, it doesn't matter who you are, she is evidently still more important than you are. Yikes!
hatcheshatchesSage
Why did Courtney need to sit? Is she preggers again? Was she tipsy? Or was she wearing 8 inch stilettos? Those would be the only reasons I would let old Courts cop a squat on my stool. Kembra is just too nice. What could they have done if she had refused? Thrown her out?

And St'an, though I do think Truman's "Answered Prayers" debacle was brilliantly mad and tragic, I would never wish the cursed Block upon anyone either. But those back pages of Interview have been littered with photos of similar cases for some time now. Though sadly none as major as Mr. C.

[This message was edited by hatches on 09-20-03 at 12:06 AM.]
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S S'tanSage
Around page 50-something I started to doze off,
there was too much argot, hootin' and hollerin', and the magic realism wasn't holding intact.
Neither was the vaunted "incest" stuff so awfully shocking to me. Anyone who does sex work implicitly is "permitted" to do so by their Mother or Father. Big wow.

But as I read on and found myself in a somewhat overstimulated state.
I started writing like crazy in my diary and realized...
I had been seeded. My mind was racing (and still is) - the effect was fermentive... Perhaps this effect is what must be making everyone so alert over the writing.

The central perfect image of this book is the boy transformed: a hermaphrodite glory, lying on a fresh bed, locked in a room, blonde, young, eminently desirable, quivering with anticipation, protected by the powers that be.

A very metaphor for the adored Artist.
The focus of all the johns/publishers/flaks,
quivering under tentative blue collar worship,
and not to mention that of not-so-hirsute/intellectual males,
but hey they're all doling out the cash and the homage.

Now every artist dreams of such attentions: to be a Maestro by virtue of one's syntax.
Over-worshipped, yet the thing worshipped remains untouched.

This again seems a metaphor for where JC is now in the media eye. Like his protagonist, he escaped the hermetic seal.
Once the perfect artist, alone under the colored lights...
now subject to every kind of vile caress by crass lovers.
He has earned his "bone." But there is that inevitable vitiation after the drugs (i.e. adulation) wear off.

[This message was edited by S'tan on 09-24-03 at 01:06 AM.]
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S S'tanSage
Certainly the detailing of the permutations in the sex trade are right on the money, not only accurate but emotionally correct. Beautiful imagery, great argot, fantastical Americana...

This book has done what it was meant to: has elevated its writer out of a pretty bad life. So was he really a lot-lizard?

A book that attempts to get one out of an underground imposes yet another fate on the writer: one discovers one may be
damned by one's subject matter; and ironically cannot ever avoid the resumption of the metaphors one would so love to escape...

But as the public demands more more and scurrilous details - and the further away you
get from the actual experience...
The organism that created the work is altered
forever. It may continue to evolve and
become more powerful. Or it may become its own travesty.

Anyhow his new pimps have entrapped him.
He's a lot-lizard of another ilk.

[This message was edited by S'tan on 09-24-03 at 01:08 AM.]
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sweetiesweetieSage
Despite the attention he has willingly or unwillingly gotten, I for one love his books. I compare him on some levels with Hubert Selby Jr, for his knack of depicting the lowest depths of humanity with some sort of beauty. Personally I have witnessed similar creatures growing up in the midwest with southern roots and alot of white trash on one side of my family. I am able to "smell" the carpeting in the motel rooms and feel the grimy toys he drags from new home to new home. Sarah to me was a much too short journey with alot of flaws, but we are also looking at a writer that had barely finished high school. The guy is YOUNG!!! I find it very strange that we as a culture have to constantly pick at artists to see whats underneath. Myself included, I am fascinated by a young man whose imagination could create such despicable characters and yet make them somehow redeemable at the same time. Its wonderful to find rich characters that are painted on the surface as so evil, and then when the crust comes off the top, you peek in to see what made them so. If you seperate Leroy the "presswhore" and Leroy the young writer who has a whole lifetime ahead of him to create, maybe you could get lost in his work a little better. GOD I want to play a TV lot lizard if Gus vanZandt does Sarah as a movie. I have the perrrrfect cowl neck mini sweater dress and high heeled moccossin boots.
bobbybobbySage
Loved "Sarah" . Been there. Done that. I wish I had written about it first. But I am very impressed with that little things ability to weave a realistic tale about such a life and make us all wonder if he lived it or not. I say good for him.

It will be interesting to see where he goes from here.
Even Augustine Borroughs followed up "Running With Scissors" with more of his own life story in " Dry". Now that was a scary book. Reminded me of all our lives in this generation.
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S S'tanSage
Bobby,
There is still time for your tales
of lot-lizardry... I guess you'd just have to
feel the imperative.
More interesting would be your travels
through the coils of religious fantasmagoria.
I still believe in the psychedelic powers of
that dust from the Nepalese burial grounds.
I mean my take on the erst-while wizard Allan L. would make a truly sick short story.

I would not call "Sarah" 'realistic' in any
way, shape or form. What about that diner that
served up gourmet delicacy? (I think that was an extended metaphor for NYC/SF chic restaurants as just another version of the truck stop, where all sorts of other delectable trade may be had...)

Or every one of the truckers in lingerie...?
Or a hermaphroditic hooker lying
unviolated under artistic lighting... or her pimp
never fucking her.... etc. etc.
They call that "magic realism"...

xxxx

PS: Now I have even more books to buy.
My inclination to never buy new fiction is
being undermined.
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bobbybobbySage
Well at the very least Miss Leroy has helped to break my own writer's block. I seem to be spitting out some new work since I devoured her book.

And as far as the religous ramblings of my experiences, I think you may be onto something, It's always about finding the right angle for me.

And Al L. would indeed be a ferocious story for you to tell.

Can't believe I'll miss you when I hit town on the 8th..BooHoo
Michael MadisonMichael MadisonSage
S'tan-- Just catching up on this topic, and I very much enjoyed your analysis of the book on 9/20. It's one of the best I've read yet, and I really am keen on your feeling that the book has a "fermentive" effect. It's a great descriptor... Because, though I've read the book just once, I've played so many parts of it over and over in my mind (in a way somehow different than any other book I've read)...I do feel that the acrid sights, sounds, tastes and odors have, and continue to, ferment in my mind...and increase my amazement of the story.

And Sweetie-- if we're not being "Mrs. Plopped" by Mr. Leroy, I find his youth and apparent brilliance immensely alluring, too.

"The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things" is equally wonderful...it's set before "Sarah" – and is so rewarding (reading it after getting so much from "Sarah")"”it answers a lot of questions.

[This message was edited by Michael Madison on 09-28-03 at 09:46 PM.]
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S S'tanSage
Now reading it a SECOND time to
try to pinpoint where I start percolating... this
uncanny effect it has, you too Bobby?
Hoping to see if
its illusions will take deeper hold, if its luxurious syntax is truth.
Not sleeping and mentally overstimulated...!
Is it the sexual frisson? (But for me the eroticism isn't the whoring as much as les images de pimpage.)

Thanx for the insight in re the second book Cher M. Madison
by Wednesday we should be all boned up, homework done, ready to blather on literarily into the wee hours cross banquette, bar and sidewalk.
xxxxxx
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S S'tanSage
What the fuck have I done to my eyes but read every single one of the articles on "JC" Leroy at

http://www.jtleroy.com/press/articles/Atheywrote.htm

[For the uninitiate: 'JC' instead of 'JT' in our argot signifies "Just Come Out" as in 'somewhat clueless,' as in 'Just a Child,' as in 'Not Quite Hip Enough.']

And all I can say is: Why BOTHER over whether JC will produce again, or not? One writer even worried the artist was on the "Truman Capote Highway". Wasn't that the first dark example that came to mind here,though?

What is wrong with writing a few books and having done with it? How many writers can keep on writing and keep on being great? It rarely happens.

Capote's first book "Other Voices Other Rooms" shocked with subtle implications of gay sex and incest. It was based on childhood experiences... He titivated the literary world with sensuous diva-like photos of himself lounging, an obvious homosexualist. But what made him classical was "Breakfast," drawing himself as the struggling writer in NYC, spying on that glamourous WHORE Holly Golighty!

The heterosexed/cleaned-up movie gave him world-wide credibility...

But - curse of the subject matter - you can't tell me any actress playing SARAH will ever compete with Holly.

Capote's absolute artistic downfall was high society, and all the drinking that went with keeping up the role as entertainer, wit, arm-doily, court jester, confidante, etc. Very close to the role JC is enacting now. This world became his material, and Capote did not completely understand that WRITING about these women would effectively destroy his relationship with them.

So he dallied between fawning on them and slashing them to the bone, as his brain required. Beautiful, precious, moneyed, leisured women. Wives of enormously wealthy men who bought one-of a-kind couture, and one-of-a-kind artists. Ladies who didn't want to have their secrets told.

Le Roi's 'Sisterhood' are all Hollywood high-profile divas. Photographed into extinction, if you believe in that Amish idea of your photo stealing your soul. (I do.) Very beautiful, artists in their own right, but an altogether more vulgar and rapacious gang.

How forgiving will they be when they discover, as they MUST... if the writer is to LIVE... that all these heartfelt loving conversations li'l sweet cornpone babydoll JC has with them all night long... will be turning up in one of the books... if not the NEXT book... as MATERIAL?

[This message was edited by S'tan on 10-22-03 at 11:11 AM.]
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daddydaddySage
quote:
Capote's absolute artistic downfall was high society, and all the drinking that went with keeping up the role as entertainer, wit, arm-doily, court jester, confidante, etc. Very close to the role JC is enacting now.


Stanley,
I trust your literary wisdom totally.
but...
I've always thought that Truman was just way ahead of his time with the roman à clef stuff. Today these women would be THRILLED to be imortalized with scandal.
I think "JC" (short for "just come out" -for all you lurkers) is not a very good name for J.T. As a granddaughter of Truman he really seems to be in touch with the early 21st century. The one Truman & Andy Warhol saw coming.

Just what we need... another enigma.
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S S'tanSage
Thanks for the dialogue!
Roman a clef always has been with us. 'Liaisons Dangereuses' is a great example. That book was a total scandal and banned when it appeared. The author was forced to write a book on the Joys of Marriage or some such drivel to clear his name. (That book was NOT a best seller...)

In any event, what happened with Truman is he
wrote in a 'fiction' (Answered Prayers) the details of a murder of a high society gent, by his wife, one of the grandes dames... The lady had gotten her name cleared, but Truman basically blew the whistle on her. When she learned 'her story' was the material for his book, she killed herself.

She might have killed herself anyhow from guilt. In any event, Truman broke confidence as they say and no one forgave him for it.

JT's divas might be thrilled, but then again may also turn against him should he ever use them for material. All I was saying is that with all the chatter about whether he is going to burn out, or not, etc., it makes sense that he will use what he now is learning about and involved with for material. And that these dames probably aren't too aware of that possibility.

Or he could continue to mine the whore thang from now until the TV series.

Anyhow this is WH Auden's quote that's used to such good effect in the Capote bio:

"No writer is a gentleman."

In other words, all is fair game with one of us
Recording Angels.

Iceberg LeRoi, moving up and out from flat-backing, to turning out a gaggle of truly highclass ho's. The success is enviable and
I am sure his shrink is thrilled with the abreaction, i.e. the transformation of painful material into something of value.
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S S'tanSage
As I was waking up this AM I was thinking the quote was
"A writer is not a gentleman."
That is more elegant.

A short story - HERE? But Daddy wouldn't that be TOO LONG??? heheheheh
One can go to my website. You might like "Reluctantly Betrothed to Stan" as to how I got the name.

PS to Bobby: I am definitely senile. I already
wrote the Allan L. story, called "A Case of Moral
Insanity." I will send it to you, since
with 47.5 brain cells left I doubt in my lifetime it will get it scanned and online.

"Once upon a time there was a young hairdresser,
and when he was good he was very very ..."

[This message was edited by S'tan on 09-30-03 at 03:46 PM.]
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S S'tanSage
oooh now we have a face to go with
all the frou-frou-ha-ha-ha...

from the articles:

"In public, LeRoy maintains a Warhol-like mystique. He wears wigs, female apparel, and oversize sunglasses, and he seldom says a word. And yet he can give better phone than Warren Beatty, drawing powerful women into his world with his raspy, girlish drawl."

"Dennis Cooper, his mentor responds: 'The question is, What is he going to write about in the future ? He can't keep talking on the phone to Tatum O'Neal and Shirley Manson. Writing is difficult. He doesn't like being alone, and he has so many fans.

"Says Mary Gaitskill [authoress]: "One of the first things [JT] ever said to me was, 'I feel like this is just another hustle, like maybe I'm hustling the literary world.' I said, 'If your writing is good, it doesn't matter.' "

Gag! Of course it matters whether you hustle, or not. That's JT's entire issue. Selling yourself can be virulent to your entire bloodie organism. Only a white-bread vanilla poptart would have the depth to say it's 'okay' to hustle.


S S'tanSage
You better read ha' before you trash her...
Don't hate ha' before you knows ha'....

Well I was harrassed by Mlle. Madison last Wednesday, whether I had done my HOMEWORK...
egads I love the rigor! Beat me with red pencil! And no I hadn't, no - I had NOT yet read "SARAH" the second time.

So honey I STARTED... 90 pages last night, and so far -
she holds up beautifully! It is orgasmic, luscious, well for me all the material is SO real.
For the white-bread Vanillas - I see why they are creaming! I personally would not have put it ALL so bluntly, but she could, and did, very prettily...

It is dirty, and magnificent.

Hoax:
(I admit I signed a contract to mention JT in every single one of my posts from now on the M'Boards. Hmph! Yeah, I's just another 'ho in the 'Sistah-hood'... But is there degradation in worshipping a true Master/Mistress?)

WHAT IS THE NAME OF HER EDITOR???

My own penny-dreadful edit will be coming soon... She is not bad at all, the second read is definitivement BETTER than the first...

but sorry, did find a few too many cliches that slipped through!

Sidebar: Wonderbar has LOVELY cocktails, feature the "Pineapple Cheesecake" which really is divine.

I just had my birthday, so am not rigourous enough at the moment to edify further.
Tomorrow?
Definitivement avant Paris.

[This message was edited by S'tan on 10-06-03 at 03:22 PM.]

[This message was edited by S'tan on 10-22-03 at 08:46 AM.]
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S S'tanSage
Dear Handsome,
I just got Heart/Deceitful in the mail from faithful #166, but should I configure Paris under the toils of LeRoy? Standing out on the sidewalks of St-Denis, will be enjoying my own slew of tricks. Why read about it when you can live it.

Empress told me when she was unhappily at JT's last reading, someone tried to lay a racoon penis bone necklace on her! And it wasn't from Pimp Daddy Glad, though, but a publicist! Oh sorry same thing.

How can you take an image like that, and turn it into a product. I forgot to ask if it was real, or plastic, well it's all plastic!

Anyhow yes more interesting conversation will be ours in a few weeks. Almost done the second reading of "Sarah." What strikes me now is how very well she describes the minutiae of emotion. She is indeed one of the psychic lot-lizards that way.

Thinking lately of Jean Genet and how he continued to live as he always had, in little hotels in Paris... Furtive, downplaying the self, probably still finding young thieves to blow...

You have to be true to your subject matter, so it doesn't curse you. Giving away replicas of a sacred talisman for publicity purposes is a boner.


Luxury LexLuxury LexSage
Okay, I confess. I've been meaning to read J.T. Leroy for some time now and I'd just never gotten around to it. When this forum started however, it became critical! Yes, yes, 'tis true ... J.T. had never popped my cherry! Go figure.

So I rushed out to St. Marks Books. They were sold out of Sarah but I picked up The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things.

Harrowing. Brilliantly written, but really horrible stuff. The abuse of this boy never ends. I really wanted to kill that bitch mother of his, I mean really SLAP THE SHIT OUT OF HER. That is until the part where he hooks up with Grandfather. Yikes!

I'm still not finished. But frankly as great as it is, I'm not sure if this is the type of fare I can re-read again and again. Kind of like watching "Frances" with Jessica Lange. It was astounding, but so hurtful. I could only watch it once. Maybe I'm just a big crybaby.
S S'tanSage
I agree it is painful to read. But his style is the triumph, don't you think... Apparently the subject matter of Heart/Deceitful is much less stylized. (Now I am definitely not taking it on my trip...!)

On a related note, I rec'd the film "The Piano Teacher" for my birthday, and it's enough to put any tourist off S&M... Total candor - that being a 'true sadomasochist' is not actually much fun, OR glamourous. No pop cool there at all, no groovy fashions, or spooky techno equipment. Just the urge: its horrifying need, subject to (often vile) power play.

This is what offends about the brou-ha-ha around JT - that somehow it's COOL to be or have been in degradation.All the more offensive his fan base of privileged women, for whom real sucking-and-fucking whoring isn't an 'option' in any of their contracts.

But JT'll never go back to the truck stop again... Tell your tales of mayhem and heartbreak, only to realize they're not so much caring about you as getting OFF on it. The very people who bring you out of it - now, on the way up, they're jacking off on you. STILL!

He has a fan-base of more protective caring types, who raged about the "I Fucked JT Leroy" t-shirts. (That was one of the articles in the earlier link here.)

Bye for now... Carry on!
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Michael MadisonMichael MadisonSage
S'tan-- yeah, I'd say leave Heart/Deceitful stateside. But then, I leave most books home when I travel. I find reading books when I'm away from home is either pointless, because I'm too distracted, or counterproductive because I feel I'm getting something skewed thanks to strange surroundings. I prefer the familiarity New York, and esp. of home or the subway for reading books. Prefer newspapers and mags when away. But that's just me? Anyhow, Lex, I wish you'd borrowed my Sarah first before digging into the other! Razz i just so enjoyed getting the backstory afterwards with heart/deceitful. Prob no matter tho.

Where will JT take us next? Further down the highway to the next truckstop...or someplace different altogether? Could there still be another prequel?
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S S'tanSage
and read "Heart/Deceitful" on the way to Paris, and then the second time all the way back...

'COAL' assuredly is one of the most heinous things ever put to paper! How is the kid still living after that? And not a scrap of self-pity, moralizing, or whining through any of it. Too great.

And the cigarette lighter torture? The mother should be in jail (if it's true)... but (as my father said as he lit another cigarette) "all great writers have terrible childhoods." So don't ask me to be good, because my evil is transforming you, darling! What a killer.

I am very disappointed you guys didn't keep
ragging on JT. You went and let the end of his penis get cold...

Somehow JT and the boy-king Louis IX (crowned at the age of 12) became one in my mind, whilst rummaging in the ancient dungeons of the Louvre.

more later. I have jet lag.

[This message was edited by S'tan on 10-18-03 at 08:44 AM.]
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Luxury LexLuxury LexSage
.... 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.]
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S S'tanSage
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.


Luxury LexLuxury LexSage
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?
S S'tanSage
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.
S S'tanSage
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.]
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S S'tanSage
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.
Luxury LexLuxury LexSage
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.
S S'tanSage
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.]
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S S'tanSage
Glam baby, tell me a story. Smile 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.
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S S'tanSage
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...
S S'tanSage
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.
Luxury LexLuxury LexSage
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.
S S'tanSage
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.
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Luxury LexLuxury LexSage
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.
S S'tanSage
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.
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Michael MadisonMichael MadisonSage
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?
S S'tanSage
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.]
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bobbybobbySage
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.
Michael MadisonMichael MadisonSage
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
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S S'tanSage
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.]
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S S'tanSage
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.]
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S S'tanSage
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
Luxury LexLuxury LexSage
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!
bobbybobbySage
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.
Razz
S S'tanSage
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.]
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GlamnerdGlamnerdSage
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.
S S'tanSage
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.

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