GIVE ME THE MAD CHILDREN WHO DANCE IN RAIN

Several quotes from the first page of this book ("The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping" by "Nasdijj") have become rather famous, as follows:

“I want the mad ones.  The children mad enough to struggle and survive.  I want the children who have seen war.  The children mad enough to question everything.  The children who have had everything taken away from them.  The children who are broken and mad enough to attempt to repair themselves.   The children mad enough to spit and fight.  Mad enough to laugh outrageously.  Mad enough to make a music of their own.  Mad enough to see themselves as individuals.  I want children who will dance in rain.  I want the mad, crazy ones.  I want the ones insane enough to love hard, and brave enough to be vulnerable.”  

This lays out the bill of particulars for the story.  It is a litany for discarded, troublesome kids, the kind that plague streets and ruined buildings around the planet.  The feral children who have escaped society.

Then “I am haunted by deep, electric flashes of music, memory, dragons and madness.”    So now we know where the author is coming from.  He sounds a little druggy, but up for adventure because of already being a little out of control.  Men who are like him -- carrying Castenada in their backpacks -- haunt reservations out West.  If you should happen to think he’s an Indian, he won’t mind.  He talks like an Indian: everything an evasion, about masks and secrecy, “the power of the enigmatic, and of things that breathe fire and fly about the midnight sky.”  This is neither anthropological nor demographic.  Some will find it spiritual.

I will not defend my right to talk about indigenous people.  I have fifty years of friendship with the Blackfeet and their braided-in related peoples like Cree or Metis or Sioux -- even whites like myself and (lately) African Americans.  This has taught me to never try to define how they eat, what they do, the content of their religion, or the way they describe their families.  In this book I see the spine of the story as being a tension between the mainstream culture and the doomed individual human being, esp. the child.  

The “Navajo” then constitute a third context that goes at least potentially closer to the ideal, a way that allows a person to be themselves.  Rez life is faulty, it's impoverished, it’s inconvenient, it’s scary.  This is not a critique of the indigenous but rather its use as a shadow of what could be.  In fact, one whole stream of Western thought believes that Indians are noble, generous, and therefore worthy.  They are “Other” in the best sense, because they live close to nature.  The narrator is trying to be this kind of “Other” without quite being able to get past the ugly side of stigma and poverty.

The core question is what anyone can do to be saved in a world that simply won’t allow salvation since we all die.  It is a heightened anguish when it comes to our desire to protect and love children.  Yet we discard children to disease, carelessness, ignorance and predators.  Many, as described above (mad, wild), are wanted by no one.  And it is a fact that everyone dies in the end.  (The Christian dogma is about AFTER death.)  But this need not be grim if we take joy in each other, what we might call the laughter of unfolding, so full of surprises, so irrepressible.

The story starts in rain, a powerful force in the SW high plateau country.  The Navajo sun god “cast his sons out, sending them to earth with enormous, almost impossible tasks to complete” and “my little jeep shook.” (I know he still drives that jeep.)  He speaks of his wife.  (He is telling the truth.  Tina IS the author’s wife and she is as he describes: urban, educated, gifted, strong and able to save people, including the author.)

The next move in the story is to the writer as he is giving a reading, frustrated by an audience which has no interest in poverty and suffering.  They want the familiar but paradoxically also magic. (Water to wine.) This time it is the boy -- not his father -- who comes to the bookstore and asks to join the writer.  

Look back at the paragraph about children who are mad, gifted, full of energy, impossible to capture.  They stay in school only long enough to get a hot lunch.  They cannot be put on detention.  No one knows where they stay.  Their parents are missing.  In his sensational way, the author says, “We find bodies of nude boys in ditches.  No one knows who they are or where they came from.  Strangled and dumped in the desert.”  In my practical schoolteacher, animal control officer, and prairie pastor way, I accept this as true.  You won’t find the facts in the newspaper or with the FBI.  The only inaccuracy is that usually what is found around here is bones.  I guess they were bare.

So there are two ways to read this story, one as an initiated person who reads with recognition and the other as a person who is barely aware of this under-world and doesn’t really believe it’s true.  As a mediating context, the author goes to baseball -- that all-American summer ritual that so many people understand.   He says Awee is “something extraordinarily unique, something more beautiful than anything you have ever seen.  Something mad.  Mad to live.  

"Inside a dream.”  

He puts a paragraph break just before that last phrase.  Does he mean the boy wants to live inside a dream?  Or does the author want to tell the story as though it’s inside a dream?  Or both?  (If I had written this book and it was about a Blackfeet boy, I would have had him play basketball.  Not because that is a tribal thing -- though it is now -- but because in this climate you need an inside game and because kids play alone, sinking baskets through empty hoops.)

He says, “This entire book (and then some) could be about his eyes.”  I’ve written a post about the theory of “the Gaze,” but until I sent it to him, Tim did not know this body of theory.  The fact that it seems so apt and useful justifies its arcane and esoteric source in French philosophy.  

But this author is after change.  He says, “Change is one child at a time.  Change is one family at a time.  Change is changing the madness of culture into the spirituality of the individual one social structure at a time.”  (p. 15)  This book is meant to make one child so irresistible that we will be willing to change.  At the same time he hopes to discover how to change that boy, who is a kind of changeling anyway.  He is supernatural, described in the most hyperbolic terms.  But the real tragedy to this author is the neglected suburban boys from single parent families who pedal their bikes home in the dark.  They are weeping.

The author says baseball “. . . is about that abrupt unheaval where a human being in his skin and bones and iron determination meets the unmoved thing that is the earth.”   This is not a realistic story so there is no use trying to force it into questions about legal technicalities or conventional propriety.  Nor is the story pornographic.  But it is explicit in the ordinary way of children learning about peculiar stuff like jockstraps.  Talk about seeing and being seen.  Awee discovers his butt hangs out of the rig.  

The whole team joins his opinion and decides to risk their young maleness.  They win the game anyway, but it is the suburban losers who at least get a banana split apiece.  The ball itself is lost in the weeds on its way to China.  Boy and man go home together.  Not lonely now.

These are the basics as I see them.  Now to look at how they play out.

REFLECTING ON AN ESSAY BY TIM BARRUS

"An Honest Try", a portrait of Bill Cochran on "Tornado" by Bob Scriver

This morning I got an email inquiry about whether Bill Cochran actually was the model for “An Honest Try,” Bob Scriver’s motif for his big rodeo series that finally was his breakthrough to public consciousness.  I was pleased to report that not only did Bill pose as the rider of that bucking bull, he was a driving force behind the whole series, the guy who knew the difference between a bull that spins and one that hooks and how to ride them.  Concurrently I’ve got a conversation going with Daniel Herman, a history professor over in the rainshadow of the Cascades who sees the difference between white educated liberal “understanding” of Indians and real day-to-day relationship with them.  

The Blackfeet Heritage Center in Browning, MT.

Originally built as the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife

These sent me back to reread Tim Barrus’ essay called “Invisibility” in his anthology, “The Blood Runs like a River Through My Dreams.”  It’s well-established that Tim was only using Nasdijj as a pen name, but he WAS living on the rez.  He knew many tribal people who found that if they admitted he was their friend, they would be punished by authority figures who wanted to please white liberals, a great source of income and patronage.  (And patronizing.)

This essay is about a man called “Mose Zah.”  Rest assured that it’s not his real name but he was a real Navajo.  He was an old rodeo hand dying of AIDS, which meant that people drew away from him. Where the infection came from is unknown.  He seemed to love “buckle bunnies” almost as much as horses in almost the same come-and-go way.  There are many old rodeo hands on many reservations who are quietly dying of somethingorother, not necessarily even AIDS.  Some die alone.

Particularities are always important in writing, but Tim is capable of a poet’s specific lyrical displacement.  He combines the same old obvious with a sudden luminous re-framing.  For instance:   “His was a world of hay, Wranglers, Airstream trailers, sweat, heat, and dust that seemed to cling to the inside of his mouth, strange and sweet and rising from the ground.  His was a world of hanging on even as the animals that screamed to scrape him off flung him with their forthright weight into the dirt where he sat briefly stunned and coiled like a spring about to spring again.  His was a world of manifest masculinity where the boundaries between women and men sometimes seemed set in stone.” . . .

Aussies out there, out back.  Nothing fancy as rodeo.

“He was never all that discriminating about women.  He always seemed amazed that they wanted him.  You hold the light from a woman like you hold a winning hand of aces close to your cautious smile.  Something in me thinks the women were a camouflage.”  At any rate, for whatever reason, no “buckle bunnies” came to take care of him.  

"Buckle Bunnies" are rodeo groupies.

Maybe Mose just cherished his singularity.  “It was a life he lived as easy as a song, and all the notches on his fence post represented his conquering certain ornery animals who had warned him they would kick him if he dared to ride them, and he did.  One hand held high in the air between the shifting gravities halfway to the moon.  All his women and all the animals he rode could bounce him abruptly off into a shuddering and a scrambling of his cowboy bones.”

The story action is simple.  Tim takes the old man in his wheelchair out to see his horses, then brings him back exhausted and feeds him canned chicken noodle soup.  The horses are what matter.

“And then we hear them dully in the distance.  Horses with their colts running toward us in undulating melt.  Horses with their fear in their nostrils crashing through the neighbor’s corn.  Mose’s eyes singing some pieces of a song I do not understand.  Relieving paralysis, the coming of the horses.  The horses run in pounding breathlessness all around both our graves.  These holes we dig as men, as friends, as fathers, as sons, as husbands.  His riotous thoughts hold electric imaginary reins as if to ride sprays of wind upon the backs of spilling horses, bursting into life with their breath again, the grateful running of the horses, stirring all the prairies of the universe with sacred leaps, and thirty seconds of this stirring is all you ever had because that is all there ever was and that is all there is.  Thirty seconds and the color of smoke all around you as you wonder at the awesome running of the horses -- flying and falling and biting in a buzz of flies -- resonating something carried forward in the urgently escaping terror of the horses, whirlwinds into the specter of his sleep.”

Tim’s writing has always been confronted in terms of the politics of certain subjects, never in terms of the actual writing.  If you look carefully at the above, you’ll see that he uses lyrical displacement -- that is, he chooses a word just next to what you expect (“singing eyes”) or pushes one grammar category over to another, often nouns to verbs, Hopi gerund style.  "SACRED" leaps?  A moment to reflect, then you consent, but you only get thirty seconds.  This is serious, not pretty.

The key to much of his writing is what the French and feminist theorists call “the gaze,” or so I think, though I haven’t done much reading in that school of theory nor has Tim ever suggested it.  But it’s only natural for someone who has spent a life in photography, always looking for the still and telling moment, the frame that finds the story, the point of view that reveals the subject -- never mind what it tells about the viewer, which is the viewers’ problem anyway.

This emphasis on the seen -- though often accompanied by sound (buzzing, resonating, song) -- is part of something hard to talk about:  projection onto a surface both enduring stone and evanescent (like Indians).  Consider the suggestiveness of this scientific definition:  In optics and acoustics evanescent waves are formed when waves traveling in a medium undergo total internal reflection at its boundary because they strike it at an angle greater than the so-called critical angle. The physical explanation for the existence of the evanescent wave is that the electric and magnetic fields (or pressure gradients in the case of acoustical waves) cannot be discontinuous at a boundary, as would be the case if there was no evanescent wave field. 

This sculpture is made of Chinese soup spoons.

It is as if the gaze is actually a projector that might swing away or be switched off unless it hits a screen, a boundary.  Then it is a capture, a binding.  Lately Tim has been talking about what images do to time.  We regard greatgrandparents long dead, or search the faces of strangers, or famous people for as long as we wish, as close as we want.  Flickering time -- now we remember and now we don’t.  Once we were little children and now we are old.  Are we here or are we not?

For Mose, red-blooded cowboy and full-blooded Indian, his blood now carries frailty.  His defenses are gone; he is hitting his limits.  He cannot be cured by chicken noodle soup -- but he can be comforted.  He can be given a moment.  This is not about any subcategory of humanness -- this is its essence.  The act, a few hours, is now made permanent in writing, a word-picture of this old cowboy taking soup from a spoon held by a man.  That’s what Barrus is really about.  The freedom to be in the moment.

THREE CASES OF BOOK BIZ

In 2006 a great hue and cry was raised about Tim Barrus using a pseudonym (Nasdijj) and writing from a pseudo-identity in three books (published respectively in 2000, 2003 and 2004.)  Also in 2006 I self-published a book called “Twelve Blackfeet Stories” but there was no hue and cry though I'm white.  How come?

Before 2000 Sherman Alexie complained to Tim’s editor (who had previously been Sherman’s editor and who asked Sherman his opinion) that Tim had plagiarized his writing.  A panel of experts hired by ICM, Tim’s representing agency, sat down and compared the writing of the two men but found no copying.  (IMHO there is no similarity at all, and I’ve read most of both men’s work plus a wall-full of other Native American writing.)    

No one accused me of copying “Twelve Blackfeet Stories,” even though most people, in spite of the blurbs, assumed that I had written “my” version of those Napi stories that are rewritten and rewritten, becoming paradoxically more Christian (to please the missionaries) and more obscene (to please the new anthropologists who hadn’t learned Latin so could no longer hide those passages that way).  Anyway, there wasn’t much publicity and though I handed out free copies to a few key people, no one actually read it.  Books tend to be political objects.  

I designed a really nice cover though, bright red with moccasins over the controversial foot/feet vowels.   I was not rebuked for it.  The locals might have gotten stirred up if they had realized I got the moccasins from “Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains” by Bob Scriver, (which is photographs of his notorious million-dollar collection) and that each of my twelve stories (which are generational tales meant to illustrate historical moments up to and including the present) is prompted by an object from the Scriver artifact collection  (a copper tea-billy, a medicine bundle pipe, a horse fetish, a bear-knife, and so on).  But they had read neither Bob’s book (a picture book) nor my book.  They only spread rumors.  They didn’t read Tim’s books either -- just opinions about them.

What’s puzzling is that Tim’s books, which actually were TRUE in the sense of being his real experience, were reviled for being false, and mine was simply ignored, but now if you google it, copies are for sale everywhere: India, Australia.  The same copies that can be downloaded as a pdf for free from my Lulu site:  www.lulu.com/prairiemary are now sold online around the world but no royalties or evidence of sale through Lulu are arriving.  You can find Tim’s books on the used book sites:  abebooks.com, alibris.com, powells.com, and even through Amazon.  Prices are rising.

I spend a lot of time puzzling over this.  Some of it is about category.  Tim is a “genre” (people’s popular writing) writer as well as a specialty niche (gay porn) writer.   No one cares much who writes genre popcorn so long as it’s a good story.  My guess is that when the “Nasdijj” books were promoted in the “literary” context, the rules changed.  People get very pretentious about literary writing and want to analyze everything for truth, justice, and semiotics -- like the French who so love Jerry Lewis.  In fact, no one in France is horrified by Tim’s scandal, not even the S/M stuff.  (It’s seems mild now, anyway.)

I have stigmas:  I am female (but not as pretty as J.K. Rowling) and I am local.  And I write “literary” as well.  I’m dumpy, contrarian, and over-intellectual.  But I have discovered a group of women writers somewhat like me, even in my age group.  The trouble is that they’re lesbian and transgender.  Not that I hold it against them, but I’m not.  I wouldn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up.  (Sometimes that happened in the ministry.  Usually needy guys.  I was NOT accommodating.  In fact, I got pretty cross.)

Over the years since 2007, which is when I made contact with Tim, thinking he was Nasdijj, I’ve been very curious about what “really” happened in 2006 when Matthew Fleischer’s article called, catchily, “Navahoax,” appeared in the LA Weekly (NOT the LA Times).  Aside from a tabloid-type story about a murder, Fleischer had nothing else notable published before or since.  Tim himself won’t talk about it much.

Every few days I google three people:  Bob Scriver, myself, and Tim Barrus.   The great furor of Tim’s “hoax” has sort of died down and a pentimento (I wish it were a REpent-imento) of the causes of the hoax have emerged.  Bob Scriver is also no longer “hot,” ironically because of all the entrepreneurs who tried to corner his work and demanded that he make lesser, cheaper work that was easier for them to sell -- thus eclipsing his really fine monumental work.  I’m not talking about the Lewis & Clark statues, which were finished and placed.  I mean the Blackfeet portraits (“Transition,” “No More Buffalo,” “Return of the Raiders”) that were meant to be the basis for a promenade in Browning.  The small pieces churn through the auctions, leaving the impression that Scriver was a minor artist who did trivial work.   So much of fame and fortune is simply happenstance.

Blog posts about Tim since he left both writing and the United States to explore videos and continue his work with boys have almost disappeared while, interestingly, the readership of his books sneaks upwards and a new production of “Anywhere, Anywhere” is sometimes mentioned.

And me?  I can’t even get arrested, as the saying goes.  Although, there’s a certain formerly very friendly male official of the Western Literature Association who was so horrified by the knowledge that I was writing with Tim Barrus that he forbade me to ever contact him again.  So much for rough and rugged frontier types!  I am woman, hear me ROAR!!  Cougars go everywhere!  Even Connecticut!

All through this, I can’t help feeling that if I were a man, if I were in Manhattan, or even if I were Queer, everything would be much more advantageous.  Because all is platform and people understand those platforms.  They do not understand anyone who doesn’t HAVE a platform.  If I call myself “Prairie Mary,” I ought to have a prairie platform.  (Whatever that is.)  If I entitle a book “Twelve Blackfeet Stories” they ought to be Napi tales, the familiar myths, because that’s their platform.  

If you do things that have not been done before, if you work with people who are not on the approved list, if you belong to yourself -- well, you’ll just never be rich and famous.  Okay.  So be it.  I’ll put that on the list, along with reviewers who think that smarmy (if patronizing) praise will get them invitations to the beds of minority writers, with liberals who like to keep the books of flashy iconic Indian writers on their coffee tables, and academics who can’t keep up with either the high theory or the low morals of Paris.  

CURATING TIM BARRUS

There are those who would say I’m not entitled or qualified to “curate” Tim Barrus.  First, as his “co-writer,” I have a vested interest in portraying him in a positive light.  Okay.  Keep that in mind.

Second, some -- probably including Tim, and certainly his boys -- would say that I have no context for the exotic situations about which he writes and in which he has lived.  So the first criticism would be that I know too much about Tim and the second would be that I don’t know enough.  Let’s just say they cancel each other out.

There is no single context that can do Tim’s work justice.  Until now he has mostly been addressed by aggregators of “gay” writing, lists rather than much discussion.   “Gay” writing falls into a host of categories, still unsettled.  Tim’s definition of “Leather Lit,” which is meant to describe himself, is only part of his work.  The S/M world is intense, private, and voluntary.  Work with the AIDS epidemic, with human trafficking and the support of adolescent boys at risk are perhaps more major.  Some of this work rests on  his experience as a special ed teacher.

Ironically, much of the evaluation of his writing was done in the belief that he was half-Navajo, which seems in some minds to have been voided by the revelation that he was not, though there is a large and respected body of writing about Native Americans that is written by white people: the Hillerman mysteries,  “Laughing Boy,” “When the Legends Die,” and even one written under false pretenses by a neo-Nazi:  “The Education of Little Tree,” which is still published by the University of New Mexico Press.  PEN, the writer’s organization, gave Tim their “Beyond Margins” prize (which does not specify an NA writer) and did not rescind it since they are aware of the phenomenon of “noms de plume.”  Much of what Tim knows about NA’s is from Chippewas in Michigan.  Many of his critics didn’t even realize there were Indians in Michigan, much less what tribe they might be.  He has worked with other SW tribes.

In a never fact-checked biography by the “Gale Reference Team” which produces the “Contemporary Authors” series for libraries, several reviewers are quoted: 

In Salon, Maria Russo says,  “The ‘singular language’. . . blends Native American mythological rhythms and imagery, stirring Whitemanesque catalogs and unadorned observations about life on and around the reservation, Nasdijj’s terse, elemental sentences don’t so much follow one another as nestle on top of the next, like a desert rock formation.  His anger as the ‘white people world’ just about reaches off the page and shoves you, and yet there’s a disciplined quality to his fury.  For all it’s descriptions of drunken violence and crushing poverty, the book has a gentleness at its core.”

In the Washington Post Book World, Christopher D. Ringwald wrote:  “much as a drumming circle or meditative chanting may bring participants to an altered state, Nasdijj’s repetitious, episodic style taps a deeper consciousness.” 

In Kliatt Edna M Boardman said:  “He may be one of America’s great writers today.”

In the Salt Lake Tribune Online, Martin Naparsteck wrote:  “some pages. . . will shred your heart.  Some will boil your blood.  Seldom has one book contained so much pain and anger and so thoroughly drawn the reader into its emotional sandstorm.”

In the Austin Chronicle Online, Michael Robertson said,  “Nasdijj rough-hews the English language until it takes stunning forms.  He dismisses narrative linearity because memory is ‘the exploded junk from hand grenades and words become the most elemental stuff, crushed rock and flowers to sift through his fingers with disciplined intensity.’”

In the New York Times Book Review, Ted Conover, a journalist who has made his reputation by walking on the wild side, wrote “This is an outsider’s book; Nasdijj has sympathy for the downtrodden and anger toward the world that marginalizes them. . . . Nasdijj exposes a pain so deep in the Tommy chapters that he breaks your heart . . . this is a fascinating book, unlike anything you are likely to have read . . . his book reminds us that brave and engaging writers lurk in the most forgotten corners of society.”  It was Conover’s student, Mathew Fleischner who tried to build a career by labeling Tim Barrus a hoaxer, carefully leaving out any hint that he was a man who wrote under many names for many reasons.  One of the reasons for that was to protect Tim’s family, but this protection was shattered in the scandal.

Since then Tim’s blog/vlog short pieces combining word and image -- some of his most arresting and vivid work -- present the problem of being multi-media.  They can’t be evaluated without including the whole post, which means viewing images and video on a computer.

A whole body of print, some of it enraged invective, resides in comments meant to expose, embarrass, accuse, punish, and somehow move publishers off their commitment to a stupid and damaging status quo.  His assailing of the “wall” around Manhattan publishing did not cause its collapse, but he was identifying the problems as loudly as Joshua marching around Jericho with a brass band and was gratified when it fell.

Poetry on Facebook came as grace, unexpected and lyric if dark.  Often just a sentence or two in response to a poem, most often by Carolyn Srygley-Moore, or sometimes something longer, these are mature work.  Now many of them appear with his photographs on Rachel Chapple’s webside dedicated to AIDS prevention and the fight to find a cure.  http://www.real-stories-gallery.com/

By the time Facebook closed its doors to Tim, he was unable to travel.  He posts material from early in his life, sometimes about his life as a whore before carrying AIDS made him a lethal weapon.  I know nothing about the literature written by prostitutes but I would be surprised if many of them addressed the practical issues of safety and child care.  (Children are also a result of sex, in case you didn’t realize.)  Westerners have long been fascinated by female whores on the frontier (“Lonesome Dove”) or the Frenchified bordellos of New Orleans (“Pretty Baby”).  Now that they have realized that men have sex with men as well as sheep, they may still be startled by Tim’s matter-of-fact domesticity in Vegas, where he preferred to live with the female sex workers rather than the males.  I’ll say this:  Tim is a man who makes loyal friends no matter the context.

The gay photographers and writers of San Francisco and Florida, Tangiers and Paris, produced fine work and included famous names, but were snuffed early by AIDS and drugs.  Tim (b. 1950) was just a little late, hitting his stride as the virus was isolated and tests were available.  But then came the meds that made him a survivor, merely suffering.  Avascular necrosis, the result of huge doses of predisone necessary to save his life from fungal pneumonia, requires repeated surgery and uses up all book profits.

There is one context that Tim prefers to leave off-limits: his family.  I itch to call on social theory that might destroy the myth of the safe white suburban home where children are protected.  Interposing himself as a human barrier, Tim managed to save his descendents, some biological and some psychological.  He does not wish that to be undone.  Just let me say that he has remarkably stayed close to boyhood friends.

What remains is to look at specific writing.

WHO READS THIS BLOG?

In tough times, whether those are due to social change like the industrial revolution or immigration or the shift from rural to urban, whether due to stigmata like ethnic or racial categories or sexual allegiances, or due to violence in revolution and formal war, or due to frontier exploitations like cowboys and shanghied sailors, boys have been used as kindling for the fires of men. Whether working in coal mines or as chimney-sweeps or as armed mercenaries, boys are expendables. There is always a fresh supply. Survivors are often ready to turn and exploit the next generation. But a few try to explain, educate and protect boys. Tim Barrus is one of those persons. I have joined him as a sympathizer and co-writer. I have said our two readerships are quite separate and he has challenged me to point out my readers. I think I’ll just use this blog.

Tim explains his boys as being “at-risk” in multiple ways. First, they are HIV-AIDS carriers who must obey a rigid regime of drugs to stay alive. Even then the meds are not always effective. Since my background is academic, governmental and religious institutions, that suggests readers along the lines of healers and change-makers. They are not interested in the erotic possibilities. They want clues to the management of the pandemic. For instance, this sort of risk is inevitably entwined with drugs. Marijuana makes the nausea of the antiretroviral drugs tolerable. Injected drugs spread the virus. Sex for sale also demands drugs in order to tolerate the work. Some boys had infected mothers.

Originally I met Tim through his Nasdijj books so it’s always my point of reference, but this frustrates Tim because to him it means the “memoir wars,” a dead end. In my opinion, the NA faker accusations were mostly smoke-screens. The real issue is why abuse, neglect, alcoholism, broken families and so on are fine to write about when the people in the stories are Native American (not us), but suddenly disbelieved and disallowed when the people are “suburban white”? Why is the same book suddenly unworthy if the author is cloaked, a practice common since before the invention of movable type? And why does white and “suburban” mean privilege? Are minority awards just “pity prizes?”

If white writing about Indians is a great crime, why is it all right for Tony Hillerman to write murder mysteries about Navajo people, describing their ceremonies and legends? This is not a hypothetical question for me as I AM writing about the Blackfeet, their ceremonies and legends, their history, individuals that I know, political patterns, and so on. I am perfectly willing to support and encourage actual Blackfeet writing. I am NOT going to ghost write books for them. If they can earn MD’s and PhD’s at high prestige universities, which they do, they don’t need me. This is not the 19th century where some gentleman writer from back east comes to get interesting material to exploit in a book. Those who did (McClintock) made records that are invaluable today.

I should disclose that Bob Scriver -- after I had been divorced from him for years -- was savaged in much the same way as Tim Barrus except not about writing. Bob simply needed money and was being harassed by AIM (threats of arson), so decided to solve the problem by selling his artifact collection. Philip Stepney, the curator of the then Alberta Provincial Museum (now the Alberta Royal Museum), had been trying to capture the Scriver collection of artifacts for many years. The threats and actions were drastic and dire. Not least were the consequences to Bob’s health, including mental health. Stepney himself, carrying a curse, died of a rare cancer.

After Bob had died and his estate had disappeared into Montana Historical Society storage (the money diverted to lawyers), the same threatening tribal people were irate that he didn’t leave everything to them. They didn’t really want the stuff. They have even less money to manage the collections and properly protect the archives. They wanted the political capital and to quietly sell what they could for personal profit. Ask about the Museum of the Plains Indians. It’s an old story on the rez. It’s what people who have been colonized learn to do. Ask around in Kandahar.

Bob’s situation was more painful than Tim’s in one way. In the Sixties Bob and I became Bundle-Keepers, so quietly it almost amounted to secrecy, but a matter of spiritual importance to us. Instead of selling off artifacts to museums back east, we were keeping the ceremonies alive, investing money in their perpetuation. Those private objects weren’t sold until after Bob’s death and even then some of them were not sold, but rather seized at border crossings and covertly given to individual Blackfeet. Being a Bundle-Keeper is an obligation I respect and have tried to fulfill in part by composing the Blackfeet materials available here and at Lulu.com/prairiemary. I do not attend ceremonies. At any rate, this is a source of solidarity with Tim.

Next after that is an interest in the morality of sex that I relate to the UU ministry. Of all the categories of right/wrong, this one has been most derailed by technological development. Birth, death, and sexual behavior have all been revolutionized along with the ways we value human identity and organize our society. We have been forced to recognize that homosexuality is present in about ten per cent of all mammals. Scientists studying voles discover that sexual fidelity is controlled by one gene. Artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, surrogate gestation, DNA identification, and organ transplants, all meddle with assumptions deep in our behavior and legal arrangements. They no longer fit very well. The ensuing issues of guilt and secrecy have real consequences, sometimes evil. Much work to be done here and many quietly ponder the issues.

Actual babies are an issue Tim and I do not share. He loves babies, has two little granddaughters of his own, wrote an article about baby massage, and early in his working career in a Chippewa construction camp (he was the teenaged cook) cared for an abandoned baby while its mother was in jail. When he says this, I believe it. He has put many years of work into the protection and nurturing of disabled children, including diapered teenagers. I have not. I have no intention of starting. He can tell me about it. On the other hand, I’m absorbed in the discoveries about human development, especially the brain, so I meet Tim there. This is a literary and philosophical alliance that may be of interest to others.

Another difference is my interest in local history, geology, governance and people. I tend to post my family issues to separate blogs, like www.swanrivermanitoba.blogspot.com. Book and movie reviews are of interest to my readers, but not so much Barrus. We share interest in art and the Human Potential Movement.

Tim and I do not make money from writing. I’m on social security. He’s paid to direct Cinematheque, his at-risk-but-gifted boys’ school that turns out videos. We don’t have to make compromises or pretend to be who we are not. We don’t spare each other. Eyes on the goal please. The goal is of our collaboration to increase understanding and provision for boys at risk. This goal will not go out-of-date.


TIM’S RESPONSE (I asked for it.):

The public/private thing comes roaring in here like a trainwreck.

I have learned some things I did not know.

Pedophiles. To the boys, they just come with the territory. My own reaction is anger. Their reaction is fear.

It makes no sense to me (it never will) that these men seek to have sexual encounters with males who are infected with the HIV virus. I just don't get it.

The boys are afraid of being victimized -- hurt -- physically.

I used to dismiss this fear.

I was wrong.

The boys have been hurt -- physically -- because I was not diligent enough.

It will never happen again.

We're public (some art is public, some isn't; if we were just a group home it would be different, but we are an ART program) but only to a certain extent and it is a high-wire balancing act.

I was horrified when Tristan was fist-fucked by a pedophile and Tristan almost died. Other boys have been seriously harassed. One boy got in trouble with the law when he beat a pedophile who had been stalking him relentlessly.

It's the stalking that is a new one on me.

It's the length these people are willing to go (travel to a foreign country) to find the boys.

The last go-round was a man who called himself a journalist. He got way too close and it was my fault.

I will never do another interview. It's dangerous.

This is all new territory to me.

The people who do NOT go away (they are driven) who would (and have) hurt them.

So we are out there to a certain extent with our art. But not so out there with our somewhat vulnerable selves.

It's always an issue.

In fact, it has been brought to my attention that kidnapping is a possibility and I need to be vigilant.

How is all of this drama possible.

It's not that the boys are victims as much as it is that people SEE them as victims who can be victimized (I am learning it is a cycle) again and again.

I have a fourteen-year-old who wants to film a documentary about homelessness. In the past, I would have said: go for it.

But now the image of a fourteen-year-old out there on the street with a camera by himself is more than scary and I have said no to this project.

I try not to become conservative. But my first responsibility is their immediate safety (many of them have parents who have abused them and are on the warpath to find them) and it is a burning, explosive issue. I have hidden boys from fathers. I have moved boys around like it was a game of chess. I have seen the cigarette burn scars on their bodies. I have seen the X-rays of bones broken and healed over but not well and not correctly, I have seen the bruises, I have seen the broken noses, and I see the terror all the time.

I once thought that doing art would be the (esoteric) challenge and being safe was just down toward the bottom of my list.

I was dead wrong.

Yes, we do make art. But this is about STAYING ALIVE so we can.

I wish I could say law enforcement is a help. That's a laugh. Law enforcement sees the boys as the problem. They get locked up all the time for violations like breaking a curfew law instituted in 1939 that no one pays any attention to. We avoid law enforcement like the plague. Please don't write to me about law enforcement being our "friend."

This is the real world. Not day care where little boys want to be firemen and policemen. In our world, the status quo sees the boys as analogous to pieces of meat. Hanging on to your humanity is the biggest challenge of all. -- t

(The best way to access the Cinematheque videos is through Facebook. You'll see some of his readers there.)

______



I thought this image might be too rough until I read the following linked story.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/jun/16/holocaust-on-stage/

DE-HOAXING TIMOTHY R. FOX, Ph.D

A quick Google reveals that Professor Fox has had two main jobs since 1990. The first was four years (1990-1994) as the managing editor of “The Pet Dealer Magazine” in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The second, from 1994 until today, has been as an associate professor at “Chinese Culture University, Taipei.” His degrees are a BA (‘83) from Rutgers and the Newark College of Arts and Science; MA in Poly Sc. (‘84); M.Ed. Teaching English as a Second Language (1992) from the same school; and Ph.D. from Tamkang University, Graduate School of English (2004). His dissertation was entitled: “Writing is Fighting: the Politics of Resistance in the Works of Frank Chin.”

In Taiwan in 2007 at the International Symposium on Diaspora and Ethnic Studies, National Sun Yat-sen U., Fox presented a paper called “The Hoax that Hurts: the Pathology of Playing Indian in an AIDS Memoir.” I’ve downloaded it and read it. It is a rehash of easily Googled material, all of it criticizing Tim Barrus’ “Nasdijj” books and holding him personally and malevolently responsible for them rather than publishers, who supported the identity while knowing Barrus. Fox clearly has no insight or even information about the state of publishing in the US, the conditions on reservations of any sort (there is no evidence that he has ever visited one); or the politics of either Indian reservations or Native American writing. He’s simply recycling, mostly the LA Weekly chop job.

As Fox’s thesis title reveals (“Writing is Fighting”), he is interested in writing from an aggressive political point of view, presumably one that agrees with his own aims. Since he is in Taiwan, like James Mackay in Cyprus, he is not accountable to the usual overseers of scholarly accuracy and worthiness. Nor has he done any real research. He does not know that Sherman Alexie, the chief attacker, had previously had the same literary agent as Barrus but had quarreled with him, so that the agent had every reason to throw “Nasdijj” in Alexie’s face. He does not make a comparison between “The Blood Runs like a River Through my Dreams” (which was published in Chinese -- I have a copy here) and Alexie’s short story that became “Smoke Signals.” (They are nothing alike.) He does not note that the attack on Barrus coincided with the need for publicity for “Smoke Signals.” Nor does he note that Alexie had considered himself a cinch for the PEN prize for minority writers that “Nasdijj” won. Alexie, the white man’s Indian, never speaks with forked tongue, eh? Is too noble for human motives?

Fox, who seems to know little about publishing, believes that if a white man writes about Indians, then the Indians themselves will never get published. Actually, it appears that it was the bogus “The Education of Little Tree” which sold so well, as cliche genre will, that it persuaded publishers to try issuing Native American books, some of which became so popular (Louise Erdrich, James Welch) that they were eventually shelved with regular fiction. In fact, “The Education of Little Tree” really WAS written by a racist, (Asa Carter, Governor Wallace’s speech writer and a member of the KKK) and still sells so well that the University of New Mexico continues to publish it and is said to make millions off it.

The wave of philosophical reinterpretation that came out of Algierian and French philosophers with anti-colonial sympathies: Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Said and a host of deconstructionists, post-colonialists, and psychoanalytic reinterpreters, was so compelling that it wiped out the previous norms of narrativity and modernity. When I was in seminary, the ideas were everywhere but uninterpretable without a Tom Mix decoder ring, which was mostly a matter of attitude. In fact, this stuff was dubbed “the politics of resentment” AKA “you owe me money.” By the time it got to the reservation tribal colleges, it had been reduced to a Wheaties boxtop from which the address was missing. But the attitude was there.

Some say that’s what finally killed Native American literature because it put everyone in such a fighting mode that publishers and movie producers everywhere saw it as the “third rail” of American culture, the one that, if you touched it, would kill you. For the Indians themselves, it was probably the huge success of “Dances with Wolves,” a return to good old narrativity, that so idealized Native Americans that nothing the people themselves wrote could ever match it. They were nailed back into the 19th century genre coffin.

It seems to me that that box is exactly where Tim Fox and James Mackay want to be. They have never recovered from reading “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” which was written in libraries by a white college professor and was about the END of the prairie clearances that enabled homesteading, very much in the same way that the Scots and Irish highlands were cleared for raising sheep. “Braveheart”/”Dunbar” seized these suburban boys on their way to grad school and they’ve never been able to give it up, somehow believing that their suburban growing up was only redeemed by their enormous insight into Native Americans.

They do not know that Michigan was always Indian country or that Barrus’ “suburbs” (in 1950, that’s not what they were) was not far from indigenous village remnants. They do not know that the huge dry Western reservations are like Third World Nations where people struggle with poverty as they do throughout the world. They believe little factoids about food, like whether an Indian taco can have mutton on it (never thinking about whether fry bread in the first place is an Indian food) the same way as they decide whether they prefer red or green peppers and how definitive of identity this is. Foodies to the end!

Both Fox and Mackay have a backup favorite subject: science fiction. Fox writes papers on Star Trek. I suspect they are more reality-based than the one he wrote about Barrus. It’s interesting to me that both these men have escaped their own culture in order to live in a more exotic place. In the 19th century whites often went to live with the Indians because they could not succeed in their original milieu. The trouble is that the 19th century has ended. The only way to live with 19th century Indians now is in fantasy.

BEN YAGODA & THE EGG & I

From the review of Yagoda’s “Memoir: A History” by Judith Shulevitz: “Ben Yagoda asks the question we’ve been waiting for: How do we know when we’re being duped? The answer is almost worth the delay, even though it’s a quotation from nearly a half-century ago: Think of the memoirist ‘as a person to whom you have just been introduced,’ a Times Book Review columnist named Raymond Walters Jr. wrote. ‘Size up as best you can the personality of the man or woman who is talking and take it constantly into consideration as you judge the truthfulness of what he has to say.’” For obvious reasons, Tim and I think about these questions.

Anyone who reads books carefully, anyone who has dealt with many people in a range of settings -- from those with every reason to deceive to those struggling hard to find rock bottom honesty -- ought to be able to reach a judgment. But it would be far from a guarantee. By now most grownups have come the conclusion that truth is conditioned on context anyway. (Since realizing that there is no “real truth” is part of being a grown-up, I’ve got a loop going here.) This evening’s movie, the second episode of the sixth season of “Wire in the Blood,” kept quoting Nietzche in which he says, “Power over Truth,” meaning what’s considered truth depends upon who has the power.

You already know about Barrus’ books, both by himself and with pseudonyms. (There were more than “Nasdijj” and, in fact, most genre writers use a lot of pen names.) Now, under our real names, Tim and I are writing a “Vook” which is such a new medium that no one can really define it except that it mixes electronic print with videos, so the context of “The Fallen and the Flight” is just as provisional as our credibility. No one knows how much power an ebook can generate, let alone money. Tim has frankly disguised the young men who make the videos. The only context for them is that they are members of Cinematheque, a guerrilla school for boys with art talent who want to get off the streets. They are intense and fragile at once, flammable. As an old lady, I find affinity with their HIV through my Diabetes II, so we’re all about blood and being stalked by death. The modern condition.

I got irritated with Tim the other day because he said he’d wanted to partner with me for my creds, which are academic rather than street-earned. He still has the idea that universities reward true achievement, can define it, put a value on it. He thinks that if I say he’s a genuine high grade artist (which I do believe) then people will stop blowing him off as an imposter. But I am not the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Anyway I long ago abandoned the illusion that a Ph.D. really means a lot more than that you’ve paid out a lot of money and jumped through a lot of hoops. Even being ordained is more political than sacramental. The lifeline I could throw him in this regard is pretty frayed. I want him to write with me because he likes my writing. It’s my problem. He’s reassured me again and again that he values what I write.

At the other end he was annoyed with me because I suggested that his support group -- not just the boys but adults with big creds -- amounted to an NGO. To him that implies a lot of people sitting around a table in a conference room, arguing and negotiating themselves into a state of paralysis: “suits.” He wants to be seen doing things as a guerrilla, coming out of nowhere.

Shulevitz concludes her review, “Truth is the least of memoir . . . though truth can’t be dispensed with. (There’s that little matter of having to speak in good faith.) The power to persuade is all. ‘Once in a while the person talking is just plain funny; the wink in her eye and the tone in her voice tells us we shouldn’t take anything she says too literally,’ [Yagoda] writes. ‘Then there are the prodigious story tellers. They look us straight in the eye, and have us from the first word.’” I’m the winker. Tim’s the prodigious one. The question is whether the good faith between the two of us, which is real, can include the reader/watcher.

A Vook is more than words. Vids of faces, esp. when Tim is earnestly speaking to the camera, all alone except with his dog, ought to tell you something. But we all know about Photoshop and CGI. Is there any such thing as visual confirmation of the truth?

Shulevitz suggests that the point of a memoir may be to justify a life. One critic suggests “[I]naccuracy is a problem to the extent a memoir depicts identifiable people, depicts those people in a negative light, (demonstrably) gets gists as well as details wrong, is poorly written, is self-serving, or otherwise wears its agenda on its sleeve. The more of these things it does and the more egregiously it does them, the bigger the problem is.”

In the Nasdijj memoirs the author disguised people BECAUSE he was depicting them negatively and “wearing his agenda on his sleeve.” They were certainly vividly written. It was the journalist unmasker who “revealed all.” He was the one who had a covert agenda (endorsing Sherman Alexie as a noble if victimized Indian) and who got facts and gists wrong -- on purpose -- in order to make his case against the author by ripping away all the protection from the people involved. The problem was not the subject of the expose -- the author of the memoir -- it was the writer of the expose, the destroyer of the author. That’s where the power is now: attacks and suspicion.

Yagoda’s book, like many histories of ideas, is clarifying and ultimately reassuring. We’ve all been through a lot over the centuries and the story is not nearly finished yet. My first awareness of authors came on a family visit to the home of the author of “The Egg and I.” My parents assumed that because they loved the book and movie, the author would love them. Actually, she was very patient with us and let us hold her puppies. Tim is not so different.





Betty Macdonald lived in this little chicken coop house and wrote about it in “The Egg and I.” These photos were taken in August, 1947, near Center, Washington. We forget how people lived during and right after WWII. Even today some people would be pleased with this little shelter.

NPR, NASDIJJ, JACKIE LYDEN AND ZEBO BOOZER

So I’m rolling along doing the continuity for the Vook we’re doing about Cinematheque, watching the vids, meditating, then trying to come up with something that speaks to the images. The third one is Tim with his motorcycle leather cap on backwards, confessing that he lied to Jackie Lyden on NPR about being Nasdijj. (She didn’t ask. He had not been unmasked at that point.) He apologizes. I have earlier blogged about listening to the interview and being amazed to hear Tim sounding like an Indian, “doing Nasdijj,” humble and gentle. (prairiemary.blogspot.com/2009/06/let-me-ask-you-this.html)

In the vid Tim explained how he was sequestered in a little room with only a microphone and presumably Jackie Lyden must also have been in a similar room facing HER microphone, thousands of miles away but sounding as though they were at the same table. He talked about how the audience probably assumed they were good buddies and would go out to lunch together, because everyone in Manhattan knows each other and hobnobs with the rich and famous -- isn’t that why we all struggle to write best sellers and be part of the inside group? But he says that, in fact, one does business by phone, letter and email and never meets even one’s own agent. These are business transactions, more like managing magazine subscriptions than being recognized and taken seriously. It was a short interview. You can find it by googling Nasdijj alongside NPR or Jackie Lyden -- probably.

This time with the vook, I thought I’d be diligent and google Jackie Lyden, though I assumed that she was one of the good gray ladies who went to the Sister Schools to get her fine education that made her so sympathetic even to faux pitiful Indians.

I was stunned. As Tim is always saying, “You will be surprised.”

It turns out that Jackie Lyden has since written a memoir of her own: “Daughter of the Queen of Sheba.” A reviewer says, “Lyden vividly captures the seductive energy of her mother's delusions, which were both an inspiration and a threat as she set out on her own impassioned journey. In her twenties she joined a traveling rodeo. Later, as a radio journalist, she interviewed Arafat and maneuvered her way through Baghdad at the height of the Persian Gulf War. Always, her mother's exotic fantasies were an irresistible lure.”

Jackie’s mother was first called just plain crazy, then manic-depressive, then bipolar. The labels change but the behavior remains. Jackie was also a victim of abuse, but I’ve only just ordered the book this minute, so I couldn’t tell you what kind or how much. Nevertheless, it sounds to me as though Jackie Lyden was in a position to really understand what Tim Barrus/Nasdijj’s life was really like and to have had some penetrating questions IF she had really been face-to-face. The weird media arrangements, meant to provide predictable “labeled” publicity, actually PREVENTED the kind of recognition and understanding between two people that would be worth listening to on the radio. This whole damn culture is crazy, but what label should we use: denial? Commodification? Separate padded cells?

Once I found out about Jackie’s memoir and ordered a copy, I began to plow through all the Google entries for her name and that was the second surprise: post after post by the same kind of haters who constantly stalk and threaten Tim and the Cinematheque guys. Here’s a sample from a blog called “The Straight Dope.” (The author is “the Scrivener” which embarrasses me because it’s similar to my married name, Scriver. He’s a dope all right. Dunno about straight.)

“NPR's Jackie Lyden, what do you require by way of fuck-you money? Because on many a Saturday and Sunday late afternoon I find myself wishing that you'd variously (according to my mood): a) find another job, preferably one that doesn't involve much speaking; b) otherwise be replaced as "Weekend Edition" host -- honestly, just about anyone would be preferable, including the guy who delivers bottled water to NPR's offices, provided he speaks any English at all; or c) get whisked off the planet by aliens fascinated by your affected speech, constipated delivery and vocal tics, and determined to scan and probe your larynx, pharynx, mouth, sinus cavities and brain until they solve the mystery of just how you manage to be so fucking annoying every time you open your mouth.”

Where do they come from, these anonymous haters and stalkers? I thought people who listened to NPR were liberal and a little overcivilized. I was prepared to tease Jackie about that, but nothing like this. This is low class, I’m-gonna-kill-your-cat talk. Why don’t they go listen to some cowboy shit-stomping station and leave Jackie alone? I found post after post mocking NPR people personally, calling them names and urging them to get off the air. Tim Barrus used to machine gun the hostiles and I have a sharp tongue, but we use our real names. These people (both genders) were looking for someone to hate who would have to take it, who would have to accept such bullying. ALL of them were anonymous. Out there in the dark. Themselves afraid to even be seen. Who spawns them? Where is Jackie Lyden now?

Here’s an idea for NPR: Suppose Tim Barrus is on “All Things Considered,” not as the person being interviewed, but as the interviewer OF Jackie Lyden. He could say, “Jackie, you were in Baghdad during the Gulf War. Tell me, are the Taliban there as bad as the American Taliban that wants to control and punish everyone?”

I expect she’ll say, “Omigod, Tim! These American Taliban are the worst in the world! They are trashing democracy and we’re letting them do it. They even hate and stalk the President of the United States.”

At the end Tim could ask, “Say, Jackie, in your days with the rodeo did you ever run across Zebo Boozer, the bucking Brahma bull that I once had to load into the elevator of the veterinary medicine building at the university so we could get him up to surgery and treat a bad wound?”

Jackie would say, “Good heavens, Tim! Are you kidding? Zeebo Boozer was notorious! I can’t believe you did that and lived to tell about it!”

It would turn out that they had acquaintances in common after all and go out to lunch together, like proper authors and media interviewers. No bull.

SO TIM BARRUS IS NASDIJJ -- GET OVER IT!

Years have passed.  Nasdijj is long over, the shadow of a first-person story informed by an author who had lived on the Navajo rez and whose ancestry went back to the Delaware tribal complex generations ago.  It was publishers, publicists, media mongers, who pushed the Navajo identity and then the accusation of misrepresentation based on the nom de plume.  

What’s important now -- after Trump and Covid-19 -- is seeing that Barrus was already living out a previous and still unresolved pandemic when Covid-19 struck.  Sitting by gay friends as they died of AIDS sharpened his determination to do as much good as he could.  He did that until the money ran out.  First was boys in Paris as HIV took hold of them before any effective drugs.  Then Appalachia.

Here’s the strategy.  Choose boys who can respond.  Unite them into a brotherhood.  Let them fall in love with each other and argue all night.  Teach them to read.  Do not criticize their morals but try to convert them to cleanliness and proper eating.  Give them something worth doing:  making videos (the Paris boys already knew), taking photos, becoming computer adept.  Be for them the adult who can fend off other adults.  Be WITH them, even if they hate.  Even if they die.  Even after.

Every pandemic is rooted in poverty, stigma, family breakdown, authoritarian oppression.  Drugs and alcohol are as much results as causes.

Some details in this following essay are wrong.  Barrus may have been born in an East Lansing hospital, but he grew up in a little farm town not far away.  His maternal grandmother's maiden name was Frost.  Not Scandinavian.  There are several wheelchairs in this story and a lot of "Mama Religion."

Barrus had been an editor himself. He published Geoff Mains' novel barely in time for Mains to hold it before he died.  I should probably just delete much of the rest of this post, but there are copies out there, I'm sure.

Barrus publishes now in comments on The New York Times articles and on other websites.  He says that if I tell what I know about him he will send the CIA, FBI, WHO, and the Dogs of War to shut me up.

____________________________________________________________

Okay, reader, see if you can follow this chain of logic.

Timothy Patrick Barrus was clearly an exceptional child -- very intense. He was born in East Lansing (which is different from Lansing) in 1950 before cities were surrounded by suburbs. There were still undeveloped spaces full of brush. His maternal grandparents lived on a farm not far away, near a town called Portland. Other members of his maternal family ran a local theatre and as a child he acted in plays there. Sometimes he played girl’s parts. I’ve seen a photo of him as a miniature Captain Hook. He had dimples.

He had a younger sister. She won’t be mentioned here again.

His father was a shift foreman for electrical engineering for the City of Lansing, a handsome, brilliant, powerful man who was violently abusive, esp. towards his son. He was also seductive, competent, and daring. (Tim’s account -- I believe him.) He was an avid outdoorsman. Working class, which could probably be called lower middle class. Think "The Deerslayer," knotty pine rumpus rooms, "tapestries" of elk. I've seen photos.

In 1978 Tim’s parents moved to Pentwater and his father bought a fishing boat. Maynard was 47. He died of alcoholism and diabetes in 2003. I read the obituary. His mother was a master gardener, worked in a library (not a degreed librarian), died in 2006 of multiple sclerosis. She had been confined to a wheelchair. I read that obituary, too.

As a teenager Tim attempted suicide by blowing his guts out with a shotgun. (It was a “Western” household full of long guns.) He was saved but you can see the scar in photos, at least the frontal one. They say the exit wound is worse. He worked at a grocery store, as a nude model for art classes at the university, doing stoop labor, cooking, cleaning cages in the biology lab, and as an aide in a special ed school. (He says so and I believe him.) With the money he bought a motorcycle and hit the road.

He married young and worked for Headstart, which in Lansing in those days included many Chippewa kids. In Florida he and his wife adopted a foundling, a boy, who was damaged but manageable until a younger sister was born. I’ve seen the photos. He was blonde, much like Tim, and clearly devoted to his father, but eventually went totally out of control. The marriage died. Tim gave the boy back to institutional care, took his daughter, and fled to San Francisco.

He had a Ford Foundation grant in the Year of the Child (1979) to organize and present children’s art for the United Nations. He became part of the counterculture: artist, poet, photographer, activist, performance artist, and writer. Digger, Act Up parades, communes -- he was there. Bought his film from Harvey Milk.

He did write all kinds of pornography/erotics as well as editing magazines and running the Knights Press. He is the founder of the “Leather Lit” category of gay writing, part of the Eighties wave of increasingly sophisticated and skillful gay writing. Leather lit is considered S/M. I can document all this. He wrote a great deal of other stuff under pseudonyms, which is customary among writers of all sorts as well as actors.

Tim married for a second time in San Francisco to a co-worker at a program for autistic boys. His daughter was by now a teenager. I’ve seen the photos. She is married and has a daughter. She teaches overseas for her own safety since both Barrus' wife and daughter have been threatened. I've seen photos of her with a llama and with a penguin.

When the great AIDS plague hit San Francisco, Tim, Tina and Kree went to New Mexico where Tina taught kindergarten and first grade on the reservarion. I’ve seen videos of her teaching, probably among the earliest videos Tim Barrus ever made. I have a book bag from the school and a Navajo rug with a bit of hair shed by Navajo, the dog. Come by the house and I’ll show you. These two years are at the heart of “The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams.” This book contains twenty chapters. Only ONE is the story of the son who died, the Esquire story. (The one right after it, “And The Dreams Came Down Like Thunder in the Rain,” is about Tim’s father.) You’ll be happy to know that the real Tom grew up in special homes and is now middle-aged. Tim is EXTREMELY protective of him. Recently Tom was pursued by paparazzi so that to keep him safe he had to be removed from the place and people he knew.

This one-chapter story is not at all like Sherman Alexie’s story, “What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona.” Sherman Alexie’s writing is NOTHING like Tim Barrus’ writing. Sherman writes jokey stand-up comedian tales while Barrus writes Zane Grey Purple High Drama. Sherman’s plots and characters are like “Pow-Wow Highway” or “Stay Away, Joe.” The former was written by a guy whose Indian credentials were challenged and the latter was written by a white man. As an English teacher who has been on Native American lit internet groups since the Nineties, I cite myself. Sherman badly wanted to write a best-seller.

Interestingly, the story unmasking Tim Barrus in the LA Times Weekly was printed in 2006 at the same time as Sherman Alexie’s essay in Time magazine, almost to the day. Alexie’s movie “Smoke Signals,” based loosely on “What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” was just being released. Sherman Alexie had been asked to comment on Barrus' first book when it was first in galleys in 1999. You can verify this online.

Actually, the content of the Barrus story was closer to the memoir by Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich called “The Broken Cord.” But Dorris was a far more polite and conventional writer. Dorris committed suicide while Barrus was in Navajo country and people there were shocked and very much saddened. If you know Indian reservations, you know that suicide haunts everyone there.

In 2000 when “The Blood Runs Like a River Through my Dreams” was published, it was hailed as brilliant and authentic. If you read
through the reviews (I’ve been through hundreds of them), you see very few of the reviewers have done more than skim the book, or they would have noticed that some chapters are simply essays, occasionally history. When the book was so roundly condemned, it was clear that only the one chapter was referred to, and it was not read -- simply described from other descriptions. It is the second and third books that are presented as memoir. They ARE memoir, but disguised.

IMHO the whole issue of hoaxy memoirs was trumped up to feed an appetite for scandal and misery, like the old True Romance Stories magazines my mother wouldn’t let me read. There have ALWAYS been memoirs of dubious factuality. There have ALWAYS been white people who wanted to be Indians. Since the post-colonial political correctness theories, there have ALWAYS been writers who were attacked by Indians in online flame wars, usually by Indians who were of low-quantum, off-rez, urban origins, striving to make reputations for themselves. Often female. I’ve saved the emails (some people -- including Alexie -- will be chagrined to know) of many of those flame wars. Sherman Alexie was stooping or listening to bad advice from groupies, who included the author of the LA Weekly piece. (I’m guessing now.)

The issue of invented memoirs got mixed up with journalists who were inventing “facts” for the sake of their stories. Journalists do not write memoir. Journalists are supposed to be investigators and are supposed to stick to the facts, like lawyers. Memoir is not journalism. Memoir is an art form. Got that?

Journalism has turned yellow in the last years, pursuing personality above all else. Today in the laundromat I flipped through a stack of that were all about tats, pecs, sex, detox, more sex, babies and whose they were, etc. It’s our norm now. We force everything into that mold.

So all the reviewers who had said the book was brilliant (but secretly hadn’t really read it) now said that the same writing was worthless because it wasn’t written by an ethnic minority. This means that the whole edifice of publishers -- who are supposed to filter what they publish; reviewers -- who are supposed to be able to tell good writing when they see it; professors -- who are supposed to be experts on writing styles; Indians -- who are supposed to be able to tell other Indian writing; PEN -- which is an organization of writers (duh); and post-modern critics who said that writing should be interpreted and judged only on the basis of the writing itself and not the biography of the writer -- all that came crashing down. It was a fantasy.

The several publishers involved all wrote checks, ordered plane tickets, and looked at the passport of Tim Barrus (not Nasdijj). They knew better than he did that memoirs make more money for them than essay collections. The silver lining is that Barrus’ hips had been destroyed by avascular necrosis so he was doing publicity in a wheelchair, but the money from the books paid for his hips to be replaced. I’ve seen photos of him after the surgery. He’s shockingly gaunt. He says the surgery was easy compared to kicking the necessary anesthetic drugs.

Of course, he went right on writing. He can’t help it. That’s one thing he and I have in common. But he switched to videos in addition to print. I’m going to stick to print. Tim is okay now. So is the rest of the family, but the dog Navajo has "gone on ahead." Tim’s new helper dog is Isabella, also a Blue Heeler.