Month: January 2006

By the way, I wanted to mention that tomorrow night kicks off the new season of The Rake’s monthly happy hour of literature–the one we call “Raking Through Books.” It’s an opportunity to come to our favorite watering hole, Kieran’s Irish Pub, rub elbows with your fellow Rake readers, and, y’know, generally participate in the Cultural Conversation. (Plus: Delicious complimentary appetizers!)

The new season brings a new format, of sorts. Our guest will be novelist Julie Schumacher. I’ll be facilitating a (hopefully) interesting conversation about fantasy literature (think Narnia, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter) and the intersection of children’s and adult literature, among many other things. Ms. Schumacher, you probably know, is also a professor at the University of Minnesota, where she specializes in monsters under the bed and that sort of thing.

The microphone switches on around 5:30 p.m. in the Titanic Room, to the rear of Kieran’s. Hope to see you there!

I read with interest Warren St. John’s continuing investigation as to the “true identity” of J.T. LeRoy. You’ll remember the little dustup about a month ago when New York magazine raised doubts about the real identity of LeRoy, suggesting a person of that name does not actually exist. LeRoy, who has been writing professionally for ten years, had recently written a lovely piece for the New York Times magazine, which had led to another assignment writing about a television show. But the Times, feeling a bit woozy from all the recent scandals among its writers and reporters, is now in the habit of drowning the dog to get rid of the fleas. They cancelled the assignment. Or, as St. John says so delicately, they “reassigned the piece.” (I’ve already bitched about this at length elsewhere. This is an area where the Times really does not cultivate much respect or sympathy from the general freelancing community, but no one wants to speak out loud and piss off editors at the World’s Greatest Newspaper. Like this: The ethical thing to do is to honor an agreement and pay a kill fee.)

My main point here is that no one seems to have gotten the memo on post-modernism. Folks, read the text and forget the author. LeRoy has written dozens of fascinating stories, critical reviews, essays, short stories, and novels, and any nitwit can apprecite the consistency of voice and sensibility.

St. John’s piece today provides the service of identifying the person who has “portrayed” the camera-shy LeRoy in public. St. John writes:

“It is unclear what effect the unmasking of Ms. Knoop will have on JT Leroy’s readers, who are now faced with the question of whether they have been responding to the books published under that name, or to the story behind them.”

I guess my view is that St. John is here part of the problem rather than the solution. If I were to attempt a translation of what he’s saying, it would go something like this: We are a culture that remains obsessed with celebrity, with the cult of personality, and a person like J.T. LeRoy exists in an uneasy limbo–celebrated for his actual work, but increasingly persecuted as a person (of whatever basis in reality) because of his unwillingness to play by the rules of modern celebrity (be a real, pinchable, and charismatic person who spends as much time as possible in the klieg lights).

LeRoy’s agent, Ira Silverberg, is himself apparently feeling duped by the public imposter, and his point (as quoted in the Times) seems to be a more serious moral one:

“To present yourself as a person who is dying of AIDS in a culture which has lost so many writers and voices of great meaning, to take advantage of that sympathy and empathy, is the most unfortunate part of all of this,” Mr. Silverberg said. “A lot of people believed they were supporting not only a good and innovative and adventurous voice, but that we were supporting a person.”

The point is well taken. But, hypothetically speaking, I wonder who is more cynical: The person who claims to have HIV but does not actually exist, or the one who needs a bona-fide celebrity to be infected in order to care about the plague of HIV. More to the point, every day our sympathies and empathies are cultivated and manipulated by fictional characters in literature, film, art, and theater. It is our obsession with celebrity that has us worshipping the beautiful talking heads that pronounce the words and dance the dance of the culture’s true prophets, its (normally anonymous) artists.

It seems to me that reaching a final verdict on the reality of J.T. LeRoy is a reductive process of slowly subtracting Big Truth in order to sell a smaller truth, one that will fit in a Monday morning newspaper. It is still an interesting whodunnit, of course. But I worry that the current environment of vigilantism in journalistic circles will unnecessarily put an end to the career of a worthy and interesting writer, whatever his or her true indentity.

Full disclosure, for what it’s worth: I’ve spoken to J.T. LeRoy, and I think I know the answer to the Question At Hand, but I intend to keep it to myself. Why? Because it’s not particularly useful to anyone–not me, not LeRoy, and not his readers. Is LeRoy who he says he is? To me, it is not an essential element of the narrative, except among the most superficial sort of literary ambulance chasers. I suspect most of LeRoy’s acquaintances feel the same way, which explains why this modern mystery has persisted for as long as it has.

A while back, I was saying I thought my old friend Ana Marie Cox deserved to be writing IN the New York Times, rather than being written ABOUT in the New York Times. (I haven’t seen her novel yet, but the fact that she even wrote one hints at the fact that she has some facility with the language that goes somewhat beyond the clever 50-word anal-sex jokes.) This week, she managed to do both, on the same day! Nice work, Ana Marie.

Close readers of everything ever printed within the last five years will know that the last time Ana Marie wrote longform for a print publication, it was here in The Rake. Hereby claiming our bragging rights, I think we’re entitled to our little portion of celebrity fairy dust, to sprinkle on ourselves here in the outback.

Media alert: For those of you who know that the second best thing to do on a Friday night is to watch TPT’s Almanac and imagine Eric Eskola wearing ONLY his scarf–I’ll be representing the Rake in a couchsit with other more interesting local media folks, including the gracious Dylan Hicks, the lovely Heidi Raschke, and the witty Claude Peck. Topic is reported to be a look back to 2005, and a look forward to 2006 in the wonderful world of art and entertainment. We’ll appear at the end of the program, so probably be getting bombed in the green room…

I’ve been reading with interest Ann Bauer’s provoking story at Salon, “Food Slut.” More interesting than the piece, to me, has been the somewhat predictable but volumous flamewar that has erupted among readers who are arguing the finer points of food criticism as it appears in most modern glossy magazines, many of them sawing on their tiny violins for the dyspeptic Bauer.

Bauer has a special talent for writing stories that polarize readers. She tends to take noxious positions that reflect somewhat poorly on her person, but she is such an elegant and intimate stylist that she usually edges out a win with the tie-breaking sympathy vote. Personally, I’d love to see her write about something other than herself, and I did enjoy many of her less narcissitic food and restaurant pieces in Minnesota Monthly.

It’s telling, I think, that she seems to have a special taste for reductions. All writers, about food and not food, try to reduce the cacophony of their little corner of the world into a trickle valve of distilled meaning, but they must be careful not to let it be curdled by the acid of falsehood-by-simplification (or its herbal cousin, the composite character or event), and I worry that Bauer indulges sometimes in this kitchen shortcut, much as she doesn’t have time to thaw her hamburger before she pans it.

True, when the cold-pressed virgin truth you are supposed to arrive at is “Write positive reviews about our advertisers, dammit!” “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all, dammit!” it leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

I was surprised to see, by way of MNSpeak, that a new local beer brewery has arrived called “Surly.” That’s a brand already known to dirt-bag bicyclists and gas-huffing bike couriers here and everywhere. The original Surly is, of course, a homegrown steel-and-wool bike operation affiliated with Quality Bike Parts out in Bloomington. The original Surly makes a number of popular products, but the closest they get to brewing beer, as opposed to merely drinking it, is the Jethro Tool–a combination lug tightener, bottle opener, and prog-rock memento. The close association in some people’s minds of beer and bikes may cause some cognitive dissonance; or perhaps it will just help along in the process of reducing brain-load to match the naturally occuring reduction of brain-capacity seen in at least one dirtbag beer-chugging cyclist, namely me. If my beer and my bike share the same name, I suppose that frees up a few more brain cells scheduled for demolition in my enthusiasm for both.

Good to be back. Funny how a week away can recharge the batteries, and the fear and loathing of a return to the office–how many fires to put out? How many angry emails and phone calls? What unfortunate mistakes revealed? What oversights in the budget, and disappointments on the spreadsheets?–quickly dissipates in the good will of the New Year.

That, and the continuing dominance of the Minnesota Wild. I’m not kidding. I was most disgusted to get home Monday, find that my TiVo had recorded the Wild’s Saturday game against the much-hated Canucks, only to learn that the silly device had recorded the pay-per-view channel, which I had not paid for and therefore would not be viewing. I need to work out this kink. Unfortunately, the Wild are bouncing around between at least four channels, and each channel lists the games differently. Since TiVo operates on a database according to channel listings, the only way to passively record the Wild wherever they might appear is to use a keyword search. Anyway, I won’t bore you with the technical details, other than to say that so far TiVo has found only one way to really annoy me, and that is relative to sports events. It is unforgiving of overtime and stops recording at the end of regulation no matter what the score (a real liability so far this season). What’s worse is that it appears to have no way to facilitate a “season pass” to every Wild game on whatever channel it might appear. It’s no good at all.

So I’m really bitching and moaning about technology here to deflect my disaapointment at missing what must have been a whale of a game–the Wild beating the Canucks finally on their fourth try this season, and apparently really shaming Naslund, Bertouzzi, the especially cretinous Ruutu, and the rest of that thuggish Vancouver scrum. The Canucks are one of the only things I dislike about Canada. (The other would be Canucks fans: annoying in their knowledge of the game, but never using their powers for good. Two years ago, I got in a barefisted email brawl about the WIld’s “ugly” dump and chase style, which I correctly identified by its simpler and more noble name, forechecking. And anyway, the Wild handed the Canucks a glorious shit sandwich in that memorable playoff series. Touche!)

Last night was an another amazing win, this time against the Red Wings (who have the nuts to call Detroit “hockey town,” a slap in the face to every little berg in the fine state of Minnesota–know who the US Women’s Olympic hockey team is playing tonight? The Warroad high school boy’s team!), and the Wild are surprised to find themselves suddenly at the helm of a rocket that’s blasting straight at the heart of playoff contention.

Dwayne Roloson was especially impressive in the net last night–almost blasphemously so. You may have been as surprised as I was to see him take the second intermission interview on OLN. (Nevermind his protestations to Michael Russo at the Strib; you can count the number of times Roli has appeared in TV intermissions this year on one hand and still keep a firm grip on your beer stein.) Hockey is a game that is ruled by superstition–it makes baseball voodoo look like ninth-grade algebra, when it comes to crossing fingers, tying shoes the same way, wearing the same lucky socks, drinking at the same water fountain, carrying the same lint in the watch pocket, and so on. And no hockey player is more superstitious–i mean SCARY superstitious than a goaltender, who must carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. Even though the world will forgive him for both good goals and bad goals (you really have to blow it at the professional level, or be a Canuck tender, to catch the open wrath of hometown fans and teammates) you will not forgive yourself. For many years, goalie coaches taught their acolytes that no matter what the final score of the game was, you had lost it if you’d allowed four points or more. I’ll go into greater detail some other time about a particular subject that riles me–the proliferation of “flop” goaltending– but not here, not know. Suffice to say that the Wild last night clearly identified Detroit goalie Chris Osgood’s weakness–the two-hole, low on the glove-hand side–and they nailed it at every opportunity, which paid off twice and set up the win.

The main thing going for the Wild right now is an astonishing ability to a) kill penalties in what OLN annoyingly keeps calling “the NEW NHL,” and b) really capitalize on very minor mistakes. The more I watch modern pro hockey, as compared to, say, the college or high school game, it is precisely this point that keeps standing in high relief. Pros find very tiny cracks and instantly turn them into bullseyes. Right now, the WIld are finding the breaks, taking them, getting the bounces, and winning games. And it’s a joy to watch ’em.