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La Nuit de Po sie de Cinematheque/ le Boulevard de Clichy la rue dans l'artillerie lourde/ la recherche et le secours/ les quipes/la douleur/ a poss d dans son virage/ comme vous/ le gar on/ change lentement dessin loin/ le d sir/ port vers quelque theatricality informe/ une blessure qu'il a comme le scandale/ sa main/ agraf lui/ Timoth e Le Tallec cinematheque.films.fr@gmail.com Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, Mary Scriver went to college in Evanston, just to the north of Chicago, at Northwestern University, graduating in 1961. Her focus was writing and theatre. On the way back home, she fell in love with the Montana Blackfeet Reservation and stayed until 1973, teaching high-school English. She partnered with Bob Scriver, a major Western sculptor. In 1973 she returned to Portland and took a job as an animal control officer and spent five years going door-to-door about complaints and responding to emergencies. In 1978 she returned to the University of Chicago where she earned both a Master of Arts in Religious Studies and a Master of Divinity. Until 1988 she was a Unitarian Universalist minister. From '89 to '91 she again taught on the Blackfeet Reservation. In the last years before retirement Mary worked for the City of Portland. In 1999 she returned to the edge of the Blackfeet Reservation with enough retirement money to concentrate on writing. Her biography of Bob Scriver, Bronze Inside and Out, was published in 2007 by the University of Calgary Press. She self-publishes at www.lulu.com/prairiemary, mostly materials about Blackfeet for Blackfeet to use. Mary Scriver works in myth and story. Living at the edge of the Blackfeet Reservation, in sight of the Rocky Mountains, she sits in her book-lined but humble house reading and writing. All lives interest her, past and present, but mostly the lives of this place. Sometimes an Internet address counts as place. Scriver's mother always admonished her to "take care of your little brothers." Now she listens to and for them, carefully, from great distances. In another life, Tim Barrus was the more infamous Nasdijj. His literary scandals have included such notorious books as Genocide, which was a nightmare's vision of a world ravaged by AIDS, The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, The Boy and the Dog are Sleeping, and Anywhere, Anywhere. Barrus was an editor at DRUMMER magazine and Knights Press. His writing awards under all his names are numerous. But what most people don't know is that he taught deaf children in San Francisco, emotionally disturbed children in Los Angeles, Native American children in New Mexico, Head Start children in Michigan, and blind children in New York. Barrus considers Paris his "home in exile." But with Cinematheque Films, he's always on the road. There are people who think Tim Barrus is a fiction himself, but he's flesh and blood, and his home is where his hat is hung. Most of the following conversation with Barrus took place at Connemara, the Carl Sandburg estate where Barrus was filming Until They Arrive Home Again. There is an argument among the adolescent boys of Cinematheque Films. Most of them are film students. Their disagreement has to do with how to attach the poetry they've been writing to the animation they're producing called Tilting at Windmills. "It's not really an argument," Tim Barrus says. "It's a process. There is a difference. This time it has to do with the conflict between hope and the reality of total destruction. What else should poetry be about?" The US National Endowment for the Arts might claim to know. They moved to shut down one Cinematheque Films production that Barrus (no stickler for etiquette) called Artistic Poets and French Sex Bitches. Their condemnation makes the discussion -- what is art -- germane. Mary Scriver might know. As it happens, she thinks about art quite a lot. Barrus has brought his Parisian film group to the Blue Ridge Mountains in the States where they've been filming "Until They Arrive Home Again," a poem by Carl Sandburg. Barrus and I are sitting on a bench beside Sandburg's lake on the Sandburg estate outside of Flatrock, North Carolina. It's a long way from Barrus' loft on Place Vendome. And sitting down for any length of time (especially for an interview) is not Tim Barrus' style. The adolescent boys--Barrus calls them "My Grunts"--are arguing and setting up tripods and video cameras at the edge of a dam where the lake drains into a mountain creek. The creek is filled with snakes. "How do they come to any sort of artistic consensus?" I ask Barrus. He pauses. "They kick it around. Sometimes they kick a thing to death and that's okay. Certainly, they've been doing that with Carl Sandburg. They're not Americans. They're European so it's a little different. Sandburg doesn't intimidate them like he might a group of American adolescents who grew up with Sandburg in classrooms. I brought them here not to just understand Carl Sandburg but to develop some kind of 'take' on America. Most of them have never been to the States." A writer for Esquire, Andrew Chaikivsky, suggested to Barrus that he do a film on Sandburg versus Genet. As it turned out, Barrus decided to do separate projects on the two authors. The Sandburg film will eventually sit in his Paris darkroom and the Genet project (partly filmed in Larache, Morocco) sits on his desk in a billion bits and pieces. "Like really bad books," Barrus claims, "films are made by editors." "What does Tilting at Windmills have to do with Carl Sandburg?" Like Mary Scriver and Tim Barrus: "Everything and nothing. Actually, I think they've given up on Carl Sandburg and that's okay, too." "Does that mean this film isn't going to get finished?" "No. It only means that they've been touched by something. This time it's Sandburg's struggle with hope and hopelessness. So they take what they've learned and they go work with it. They iron out the issues. They leave Sandburg in his grave for a while and they try out the stuff they're wading through and then they'll come back to Sandburg. It's how it works. I'm not going to tell them they have to stick to my timeline or agenda because this is art, not Hollywood. I am not compelled to follow the rules of either Hollywood or Manhattan publishing. "Sandburg sided with hope and strength and America as a kind of muscle." Hope and strength as the steel of America. A Sandburg theme. Vis- -vis Chicago. Vis- -vis the America Barrus left (he uses the term kicked out) and the more fundamental America Scriver lives in. A place of sweeping landscapes. If there's anything both sweeping and fundamental that connects Barrus to Scriver, it's not landscape; it's that elusive thing we call art. Landscape is just a part of a bigger picture. Pun intended. I asked Scriver, "It seems incongruous that you would know Tim Barrus. How did that happen for you? Barrus scares most people like the boogeyman. A monster I think he sometimes employs to his own ends it keeps people away." "When I read The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping I thought he was really Indian and I recognized as authentic much of what he said," she replied. "When the scandal of him not being an Indian broke, I was interested because there's always so much more story. I know Indian charlatans and some of them are Indians! But writers have always felt entitled to assume different identities and it's never been a capital crime until now. Are the Bronte sisters discredited because they used pseudonyms and pretended to be male? "Once I knew Tim's 'real' name, I Googled and discovered more books, so I read Anywhere, Anywhere, and saw that it was not about porn, it was about loving each other and helping each other. Why should anyone care whether Barrus saw combat in Vietnam before he wrote this book? "As a teacher I knew gay high school boys who tried to help their partners. As an undergrad theatre student I knew lots of gays, some of whom became famous like Marshall W. Mason, the theatre director. As a Unitarian minister, I knew other Unitarian ministers who were quietly gay and who died of AIDS. In Portland I knew Rodger Larson, who wrote What I Know Now, a gentle and tender book about a boy realizing he is gay. I kid Rodger and his partner Andy as being 'teddy bear gays,' with tummies and beards. But I don't like labels. I like to know the stories of people, not labels. I am not gay. There are many kinds and ways of being gay. And the same goes for not-gay." "You have had the opportunity to know both Anglo and Blackfeet artists. It's obvious that Anglo artists have more opportunity to expose their art to the art world, or at least, that part of the art world that is economically inclined to attach sometimes-enormous value to a work of art. RC Gorman would have been one example of a Native American artist who broke this barrier. Is this a racial discrimination issue or is it simply hard to get noticed?" Scriver is always thoughtful and she never judges her interviewer. "As for Anglo artists having more opportunity than Indian artists, I would argue the opposite. Being a romantic 'Indian' is an advantage in the arts." "Working in bronze seems amazingly difficult. Not too many people are doing it or can do it well." Scriver is patient with my obvious ignorance. "You are perfectly situated in Paris to find out about the Beaux Arts School and the Great Shift from marble sculpture to bronze sculpture, which made work like Rodin's possible. Also, the work that is related and key to Bob's bronzes is that done by the Animaliers, a set of sculptors who specialized in portraits of animals, usually pretty ferocious! But also domestic animals. Rosa Bonheur and Barye are two favorites of ourselves. This shift to bronze is related to war, the expertise gained in the making of weapons, especially cannons. There is a strange symbiosis between cannons and monumental bronzes: one is forever being melted down to make the other." "Personally, I find the big spaces of the American West to be intimidating. Why is so much of this particular sculpture focused on images of the American West?" "It's mostly timing. The expertise and American foundries arrived with the opening of the frontier and the need to celebrate the Civil War heroes. More recently there has developed a new kind of casting that is much easier and cheaper. We used the old-fashioned 'Roman block' method, but this modern ceramic shell casting -- which gets slightly less admirable results is everywhere now. Small foundries in unexpected places." Scriver speaks of small foundries and Barrus often speaks of small publishers. A connection? Barrus thinks so. "The techno-revolution has the art world shrinking (or shrieking). Some people would say expanding but I would say it's shrinking. It's becoming more ubiquitous. Like publishing, it's so about mannerisms. There's more edge in pornography than in the world of art. In fact, it was the landscape of porn that imbued the Internet with technology that worked." I would call much of the art on the Internet public art. "Public art is becoming more and more abstract," I say to Scriver. "Contemporary public art is almost entirely an abstraction. Why do you think that this form of art attracts more controversy than traditional public art that is more realistic than surreal? The Cinematheque video that the NEA had such a fit about was public art. It just wasn't public art that necessarily portrayed America as a great and shining city on a hill." "I think it's turning back the other way. The great abstract contemporary movement of the first half of the 20th century is now retreating, though you wouldn't know it from the mainstream magazines. Art of the West or Southwest Art and a few others document a plethora of realistic bronze monuments across the US. We seem now to be reconciling the abstract with the realistic, maybe because of the amazing technologies of image which are often so trompe l'oeil, forcing us to reflect on what is real and what is an illusion or what we want to see." Which brings me to questions about gender and stereotypes. "Cowboy art seems very male. Gorman broke with that tradition." "It's true that his motif and trademark was the Navajo woman with her chin in the air," says Scriver. "It's so distinctive that there have been New Yorker cartoons about it! But his secret was excellent contacts who were interested in promoting him. Don't mistake me: he did fine and unique work, but that's not the same as marketing." "Could an artist with this kind of background who defies tribal tradition ever return to the reservation? Isn't the loss of his presence a loss for the tribe?" "Tribes are not romantic. They are cut-throat competitive, both between each other and within. Their reaction to Gorman probably depends on whether they see him as competing with them or being a possible sponsor. I never heard of him sending money back to his tribe. Navajo politics are as vicious as any and he may have felt he was well-off to have escaped." Barrus knew Gorman when they both lived in Taos, New Mexico. "He got a lot of those contacts in San Francisco. Mary is talking about when he was the most famous nude model around. He was Navajo and he was usually nude when posing so both were pretty authentic. Those were the early years." Barrus is going to see that as more the marketing of a mythology than anything authentic. He maintains that marketing is the American obsession and violence is the real American life. He's an expert on the identity of the authentic. Or not. Barrus maintains that scandal only is. Barrus lives in exile and Paris is that. For him. This particular American life has been lived in the trenches -- not the suburbs as Barrus' critics contend. Barrus wouldn't know a suburb if you pushed him out of a moving plane into one and there are a lot of people in publishing who would volunteer to do exactly that. His American life is about exile and the edge. So are his complex books, which Barrus claims are about survival. "I can't say or predict that My Grunts will side with Sandburg. America as a kind of muscle might sound visionary to an American. I doubt that it sounds too visionary to them. America the workhorse and the train and Abraham Lincoln and pride or a singular nobility through work may be American themes that American culture wants to reflect upon itself, but I'm not too sure that is how the rest of the world reflects upon America. Actually, if I'm going to teach them about America, I would, indeed, bring them here." I ask the questions. Barrus gives the answers. Or sometimes it's the other way around. This is typical Barrus territory. Getting him to organize his thoughts can be like pulling teeth. He's thinking ten steps ahead of the here and now. "How do you think they see America, the American story?" "I note the use of two words that keep popping up in their discussions. One is brutal. And the other is ruthless. I can't say Sandburg would have necessarily disagreed." It can be difficult to talk Barrus down from the suicidal relationship he has with both film and books. Right now, he's staring silently out across the shimmering lake that is always so fogged in the morning. He says fog can help film although no Hollywood director would agree with that assessment. But Barrus is not your typical anything. This American life, indeed. I spoke with Scriver about the Santa Fe art scene, which I was recently able to take a brief look at. I noted that that on one level, Indian art is pervasive, but the people with the galleries are not Indians. "Yeah, well, if you'd gotten into the 'cowboy' art scene, you'd have found that the dealers weren't cowboys. Artists are products. Galleries are businesses," Scriver says. "Isn't there a cultural disconnect between Indians selling art on the sidewalk on blankets and white gallery owners making big percentages?" "Don't underestimate the Indian in a blanket. He may be making as much money as a gallery. At home he may not wear a blanket at all. The 'image' of the poor primitive Indian sells art." "Is there the same kind of disconnect in Montana?" "The disconnect here is more a matter of East and West. The big money and the fancy galleries are owned by Easterners. Both cowboys and Indians are product. There's a weird and possibly sick little dynamic here where a wealthy professional -- often a doctor or lawyer -- adopts an artist and controls him (rarely her). Alcoholism often is part of the dynamic. The professional 'helps' the artist by acquiring the art for low prices or even nothing, then storing it until the artist dies (young) and the value assumedly goes up." "Do any Blackfeet artists go to Europe?" "Blackfeet who get to Europe go a little crazy! You'll want to read Jim Welch's book called The Heartsong of Charging Elk, which is based on a true story of an Indian man in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show who became ill and was left behind in Marseilles. He goes 'native,' that is, becomes a Frenchman! There are almost always some Blackfeet over at the French Disneyland doing fancy dancing. You ought to go look for them! One older Blackfeet woman who likes to emphasize her tribal affiliation told me, 'Once you make it to France, you'll never have to pay for your own meal or hotel again! The French just love us!'" "In Europe art schools are everywhere. Are there art schools on reservations?" "Just the regular public schools, but the reservations have tribal colleges that might have big art departments. The thing is, a school imposes standards, and one of the hallmarks of 'real' Indian art is improvisation in materials and unique vision. You can't go to school for this. It comes from confidence and the ability to really see." "Many white Europeans see Indian art as more craft that real art. How do they go wrong in assuming this? Why do they assume this?" "Those nutty Germans try to become Indians, because it was a big part of a national philosophical back-to-nature movement. They admire 19th century objects, which are art because the Indians decorated everything in their lives, but they were defined as crafts, sort of collectibles, thought to be primitive. Everyone always thinks that their OWN art is 'higher' and 'realer' than that of someone else. Anyway, the modern Indian art movement has assimilated the abstract art of the twentieth century and -- at least in the Western US -- has absorbed many Asian contexts and givens, which is quite un-Euro." Where Scriver's America seems a sweeping place, Barrus' America is littered with Lincoln, Sandburg, and disconnect. I am sitting with him in rural North Carolina, hearing words like "brutal" and "ruthless." The setting is idyllic. The Sandburg home sits up on the hill not far away, comfortable and elegant. "How do you get brutal and ruthless from a place like this? This is seriously nature." "You note the disconnect. Between a place like this and what's just outside a place like this." "You mean North Carolina." "North Carolina and all of its military and racist glory. Sandburg did go to the conflicted Lincoln. Sandburg did go to the depression and the agony. But America sees what it wants to see and what it sees is someone not too controversial whose work they can bring into American classrooms to bore the fuck out of everyone." Tim Barrus and controversy. The man courts it. He went into exile completely on his own volition, even if he does bitterly claim to have been pushed there. Paris doesn't really care one way or the other -- exile is ordinary -- even if they cared a lot in North Carolina. And they did. The death threats Barrus gets on a daily basis are breathtaking. His assistant, Kilian Sullivan, says the threats can be a real drain. "Tim ignores them but they come with a certain sadness attached," Sullivan says. Barrus does not call them breathtaking (he's wrong). He calls them American. He is distinctly not comfortable here. And when the subject of boys and Tim Barrus comes up, American culture goes, as he puts it, totally ape shit over nothing. In June, Scriver reviewed Barrus' The Boy the Dog are Sleeping in her blog, Prairie Mary: This week I decided that I would reread The Boy and His Dog Are Sleeping, just to see -- now that more than a year has passed -- if it were as good as I remembered. It was. Three of Tim Barrus' books, out of an unknown dozen or more -- some of which sell for hundreds of dollars now -- were published under the nom de plume of "Nasdijj:" The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, Geronimo's Bones, and The Boy and His Dog are Sleeping. The first two, in my opinion, are rehearsals clearing the way for the third. A man is asked to take a boy, not to raise, but to care for until the boy dies because the boy has AIDS. He will never grow up. Why take the boy? Because once the man was the boy. He'd been a suffering child and this was a way of getting his revenge: doing what the adults in his life should have done. Why tell us about it? Because we need educating. The power of this story comes from a combination of rage and compassion. In the midst of it, the author must protect the identities of his parents and the many boys he has known while teaching and house-parenting in the southwest. (But now his parents have died. The boys must be nearly adults.) So the story is simple. The man does his best for the boy, trying to pay the bills by writing. The man's wife and daughter are not with him but they are in support. Just as the man is exhausted and Awee is about to die, Crow Dog, a boy who did grow up, comes with the dog, Navajo. All this is not a great sacrifice, but rather a great love affair. Maybe it is time-limited but it is far from unrequited. And it really happened. A small cluster of characteristics, esp. in men appears to make them more attractive. I would suggest that this triad is also characteristic of artistic success. Some call it "Demon Lover" or "Heathcliffe Syndrome." Also it is called the "Dark Triad," because it consists of three possibly genetic characteristics: narcissism, possessiveness, and scheming. These are at the heart of abusive relationships when they are dark, because they carry an emotionally magnetic intensity that intrigues others. But I would suggest that they can also be something good, depending upon intelligence and empathy. For instance, narcissism is "all about me," but when informed by empathy ("I feel your pain") it can be powerfully connective. Possessiveness ("I own you") can also lead to protectiveness ("I will allow no one to hurt you") and scheming, the ability to form strategy in pursuit of a goal, is value-free. It's the realistic purpose, to what end, that gives it morality. I propose that Tim Barrus has inherited this triangle from his father, just as he inherited his father's strong body and mind, but that his mother's heart kept the triangle full of light. Barrus' empathy for Awee is due to his own childhood abuse and then the (self-inflicted in adolescence) shotgun wound to his abdomen. It is a kind of reliving. His possessiveness gives him the will to enforce the necessary AIDS regimen on Awee in spite of the boy's objections and complaints, and it is his defiant plotting in the face of medical authority that keeps the meds coming, even when they aren't medically prescribed, as well as charting their usefulness. I see these as the underlying forces of what happens in this short, powerful book. But there are matters of style, description, dialogue and so on to consider, because this is writing, which is an art form. This book is true, but the memories are "displaced" and sometimes disguised to protect people, which is different from an "unreliable narrator" -- a story told by someone we feel sure is lying for their own ends. To me it seems clear that the events of the story happened and that they are as accurately described as they can be in a memoir, but that sometimes Barrus is Awee and sometimes he is himself. The emotional "facts" are true, authentic and real, but facts like the name of White People Town, the hotel, or the hospital are just left out. A few key people, dear to Barrus, have their real names: Tina, Kree, Navajo. If he had known that a stalker full of hatred for Barrus would threaten and harass them, he would have given them disguises the same as he did his mother and father. (If you write about real people, Richard Stern advised us, use reversals: switch genders, make the brunettes into blondes, give them new occupations.) Awee is not nonexistent, invented. Barrus did teach troubled boys with considerable success because his occasionally rough life-style gave him strong street creds. The motorcycle didn't hurt either. He and Tina have fostered and mentored children all along, but to name individuals would be to expose them to hyena media with their own dark triads. Barrus' earliest attempt at redemption, fighting his son s autism and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome rather than AIDS, did not end in death but in despair when he couldn't save the boy and had to put him back into an institution. He was gutshot all over again. (Don t make stupid distinctions between genetic and adopted children.) Much of this book is dyadic conversation: Awee asks, Barrus tells. Such an unequal relationship is risky, but in spite of the boy s neediness the story gives Awee great poise, considerable skill as a softball player, and even a little romantic episode of his own. In my experience with Blackfeet boys, this is not unrealistic nor unhealthy. It is also most common in our culture between a man and a woman who are in love, which is what gives it a sexual overtone even if there is no physical contact. We convert everything into sex, but the eroticism here is motherly: nibbling toes, smelling necks, brushing back hair, and constant cleaning -- like a baby. More than anything else, Barrus enfolds and gently rocks Awee as boy becomes infant again. This is both the beauty of the story and (perhaps) the source of some of the virulent jealousy it seems to trigger in some. To repeat, my theory would be that Barrus' mother, a master gardener and a nurturer (this is in her obituary), was not able to break free from the dark triangle in her husband, partly because of her need to help him and partly because of a need for his shelter, but she was able to transmit enough of her good qualities to keep her son from being an abuser. (Freud called it "repetition compulsion." One can't escape, but one can transform.) Other forces helped: members of the art department at the university where Barrus hung out (people who did not color inside the lines), the hospital where Barrus' life was saved, and then the unfolding Age of Aquarius in San Francisco and Key West. Somehow he was a full participant in the throwing-off of social shackles while as a single parent raising the daughter from his first marriage in a way that produced a healthy, intelligent, contributing mother and teacher. Two "tribes" or groups in America have survived through forming underground communities: Indians and gays. They are skilled at evading authority figures and some are generous among themselves with resources and knowledge. Some have a lot of money. Some of them will attack full-force to maintain the secrecy. How do I know this? Oh, walking into rooms unexpectedly, having friends in those groups, teaching on the rez. They can be unreasonably jealous. I don't know specifics. I don't ask. Why did critics attack Barrus viciously? Why did they insist on ferreting out contradictory facts? Why didn't they go after The Education of Little Tree, the much earlier memoir-style fictional novel written under the pseudonym Carter by Earl Carter, a one-time KKK member? (The book was bought by the of New Mexico Press and has sold millions of copies, a huge windfall for an academic press. It also became a movie.) Or why not attack Lancaster, the author of Piegan? Not a nice man. Both of these writers endorsed the cultural illusion of the noble savage. Barrus harshly criticized the way the United States has treated Native Americans. Why didn't reporters go to the Navajo reservation and make a pitch for their needs? Barely mentioned in the book is that Barrus himself was suffering from avascular necrosis. While Awee was dying, Barrus' bones crazed and shattered. The three Nasdijj books were written to pay for hip transplants to get him out of a wheelchair. (Memoir sells better than autobiography.) His publishers were fully aware of what he was writing and who he was -- they didn't write checks to Nasdijj and they didn't buy plane tickets for Nasdijj. But as soon as the media made accusations, they disclaimed all consent or encouragement. They abandoned their author as Barrus did not abandon Awee. Barrus reacted with outrage that scared people. At the inevitable end of the book -- Awee's death -- Barrus escapes emotionally into a kind of nature mysticism. The last paragraphs are shattered triangles: the control is lost, the strategy fails, the words fall into near schizophrenic "word salad" of cryptic image and rhyme. He says, "the universe does not hear me" (the death of narcissism) and "death just cums" (the final eroticism). This is more than emotional -- it is religious in the broadest sense but not in the sentimental Hallmark tradition. Barrus was Nasdijj for ten years. In the end, shunned for impropriety, he escaped to the future: video/vlogs. Still wrestling with crumbling bones but determined to avoid painkillers other than the traditional stuff like alcohol, he has gone international with a pack of videographers about the same age as army recruits. They help him put his shirt on in the morning. They "mother" him as he "fathers" them. You can catch Tim and his crew on YouTube or Blip.TV. Look for Cinematheque Art. They win prizes in Europe. The whole issue of Barrus and boys seems distinctly American. The articulated notion of Barrus having sex with the boys he teaches film to causes the boys themselves to laugh so hard, they're rolling on the ground. Jules Rousseau is sixteen and French. "It's hateful," Rousseau claims. "They think intimacy has to be sex. Sometimes it's just intimacy. America seems to have a real problem with it. I think people are jealous of Tim. He's our teacher and it's called a relationship." "The poetry video they're putting together (between the Sandburg shoots) has to do with tilting at windmills," I noted. "You used the metaphor of the Windmill in your My Derelict Hotel Poems as Timoth e Le Tallec. Everyone knows Le Tallec is Barrus. You were Le Tallec for as long as you were Nasdijj. Adopting a foreign culture. Going native. But coming to it from the context of someone who is so far underground it's hard to find him just like it was always hard to pin Nasdijj down -- the guy didn't even have a last name which if you ask me was always a red flag -- at least I thought that whoever was using this name was trying to tell us something like the name can't be real. Virginia Heffernan at the New York Times calls Barrus your "realer-sounding name." Although the author tours helped to end that mystique. I assume that was corporate publishing. Isn't there something about tilting at windmills with all the names." Timoth e Le Tallec gets real serious here. "I tried but I couldn't avoid the tours. They get deadly serious about how much money they've invested in you. Lawsuit is always thrown around as a reference point. I hated the tours. I had to do them with broken hips, crutches, wheelchairs, and an assistance dog. Navajo would sit under tables on stages. People always liked her more than me. I got a blood clot on a flight during one trip, and ended up hospitalized at UNC Hospital where I was fighting for my life, and medical staff was definitely confronting me on who I really was. I don't know who 'everybody' is. I don't believe in the idea of an 'everybody.' My literary critics would have you believe that is what they are, literary critics, but I know who they are. I know what they are. Some of them were gay men who were and are outraged that I turned out to be someone who isn't actually one of them. The anger there is pretty horrific. I've left the Le Tallec stuff. It was attracting too much attention with where will he turn up next. My Derelict Hotel wasn't even finished, and I had to leave it because of the attacks. The Morocco material, in terms of what these people scream about, once again turns out to be stuff Americans who hate sex, and assume everyone but them is having it, go after. It was harder to find you, to get to you, to shut you down, before the Internet. Now, if American culture doesn't like you, and you're coming to the Internet as a different culture with different values, the Americans can shut you down. They own it. They don't seem to understand that a metaphor can be poetic, too. I don't know why the reactions are so intense or mean there, but I don't think they teach much poetry in America. The NEA claims it has a vast reach into classrooms, but it's laughable. No Child Left Behind and testing has a vast reach into classrooms. The NEA's reach isn't even symbolic. The NEA, who I tangled with -- or the people there -- went behind my back to web-servers, and considering the fact that in this post 911 world, web-servers view governments with dread, and governments are now imbued with a certain anti-terrorism gravitas, it's easier to take down the offending poetry than it is to engage the poet in a face-to-face confrontation. This is government censorship by intimidation. This is the new censorship. You don't know it's happening. Your work just disappears. Writing sex is so much more threatening as an idea than portraying it literally everywhere on the Internet. They can get away with putting it into the same context they put terrorism only this would be a cultural terrorism. Real sex or straightforward porn doesn't have a whole lot of new ideas. But poetry does. There are things I have to assume here. And one is the old idea that a poet has to leave the States for whatever reason, and can flourish more creatively in a place like Tangier, and it is not an accident that Tangier is a Muslim environment. You would leave the freedom of American democracy for a Muslim country to create art, and art they think has to do with sex. So, yes, I would assume a pseudonym here. Why. Because vindictiveness is powerful. It doesn't just rest or stop with the NEA. People read Genocide and think I'm paranoid, but I am more than convinced -- I know -- that the same people who pretend they're actually literary critics have two voices. One is the voice that follows me around on the Internet like a rabid little dog at my heels, and this includes the academics at the NEA who use the power there to maintain a certain academic status quo. The other voice is a harassment they don't want you to know about. It could be and has been harassing a web-server. It can be and has been personally harassing my kid on the phone. It can be and has been an attack on my computers, and I can document that, too, but to who. My computers were supposed to be overloaded with so much viral incoming that they'd simply shut down. That was the goal. So what I do is simply forward everything all around the world with a variety of servers and -- not to obfuscate as I use my name -- but to protect my software with so many filters at every checkpoint, and then on to the next checkpoint, that to date anyway has blocked most of the incoming. I still typically get a hundred thousand hits of junk mail that I never see. When this doesn't shut me down, they go for the jugular. Apparently, according to prevailing logic, I am supposed to take the we are going to kill you and your pets and your family stuff as an annoyance, but when it's so consistent, and has lasted not days or weeks or months, but years, it's not periodic; it's something you can't say how you'd deal with it until it happens to you. One way I've dealt with it has been to change my identity. So then the outrage becomes he's committing identity theft. Identity theft is taking an established identity, not establishing a new one. Sometimes you feel so underground you feel buried. If they can't shut you down they will simply bury you. It seems to be the American way. Most of my work is buried. I go underground. I don't know how you can continue to look forward and create new work at the same time you're always defending your existence from people who are literally -- no metaphor -- going after your life from three steps back in the past. You call it tilting at windmills. I call it survival. I'm embattled. The people in my life are embattled." "There's a lot of tilting the camera's focus both personally and at Cinematheque," I say. Barrus smiles. "Actually, from what I've seen of the animation, no one is tilting at the windmill. What I've seen is that the windmill is totally destroyed by helicopter gunships that appear to be very, very American. It's adolescent. But so are they. War and violence has had a dramatic impact on what they see as artists. What they're really struggling with is this thing they have to share as filmmakers, and even more than that, as poets and storytellers, and that is the conflict between hope and hopelessness. That does speak to American culture. I'm not really sure we're here to get Carl Sandburg. Sandburg was more embattled than I first understood when I came to where he lived. The evidence for that is Mrs. Sandburg. Everything about Connemara can sustain itself if cut off from the world. This was the 1950's and all the anti-communism hysteria. If what the Cinematheque crew comes away with today is just their little animation about how windmills are destroyed by the destroyers, or the helicopter gunships, or an anonymous military they have constructed with their drawing and art, that's okay with me. Sandburg will have provoked them. What really touches me personally like a fist shoved up my ass is that they're adolescent boys writing poetry. When I first said Carl Sandburg, they rolled their eyes. Oh, there goes another old geezer who wants us to do the work of old geezers when what we want to do is animation. There he is imposing the past on us when what we want to do is address the future. But I know something they don't know yet. There is no future without a past. One does not exist without the other. Maybe we'll fail at this Sandburg film. I can afford not to care. They're adolescent boys -- with everything that means about culture and chaos -- and they're writing poetry. They're putting that poetry to video. You tell me where the failure is in that." As for the idea of failure, both Barrus and Scriver might go rather immediately to the notion of traditional publishing. "How easy is it or how hard is it to write and get a book published today that deals with American art in the American West," I ask Scriver. "Depends on the book. Mine, which is very atypical, has been hard to get published. People expect big picture books which they buy if they can't afford the actual art or to show off how important their art is. Publishing is not about art: publishing is about marketing." "Is there a difference between how open mainstream publishing is versus the way in which smaller presses are in terms of their willingness to publish for the audience who would read such a book?" "I don't think there is such a thing as 'mainstream publishing' anymore. it's all broken into specific audiences, including the one that thinks it's mainstream, i.e. "best sellers." Is 'chick lit' mainstream? That's what's selling!" "Who are your readers and do you hear from them?" "I'm only hearing from a few people. I have many more readers of my blogs. Often the people who respond to the book have a personal connection with Bob. This book of mine is meant to remain useful for many years because it contains so much art history and I don't think there will be a lot of response until word-of-mouth has gone on for a long time." Strange. No mention of death threats. "The art world is always in flux," Barrus tells me. "Even if that flux is bogged down with convention. We've got one guy -- Nino Fabriano who is fourteen -- from Florence, doing adolescent anime, when Nino's training is as an artist, and the kid is talented, has been pointedly traditional." "Isn't that a failing as a teacher?" Barrus shrugs. "The kid came to me to get away from the suffocation of the past. I think all of them right now are feeling some of that by being here. The idyllic setting is sheer bullshit. I find it quite amusing that the rushes I've seen of their windmill being bombed by a military gone berserk are created in part by Dutch boys. One of whom's brother is in Iraq. I like the fact that the past is so oppressive to them. Maybe it's because the past is oppressive. Go figure. They're the future. The tragedy would be for them to come away from this experience with the attitude that poetry itself is a dead thing. It's not. And they're not fighting me on it anymore or they would have slapped some rock and roll on their video and they didn't do that. The music video is the past as well. They're reinventing something. I'm not sure what it is. But I am sure I would never in a million years tell them they can't make what they're making because it doesn't keep its coloring between the lines. The people in poetry will tell you that video poetry is a poet reading his work to a camera. They would laugh at that. They want poetry to explode and maybe engage in a car chase, or in what I've seen of what they're doing, become a spaceship sort of like a flying island. Their imaginations run wild and that is what I want. It's not about Tim Barrus. It's not about some stupid typically American controversy. It's not about the Grand Poobahs who keep poetry in its cultural place, those people would be appalled by boys making poetry; it's about wherever they want to take it, and the wonder is that they're bothering to take it anywhere. Maybe their vision has no hope for anyone. Maybe when they're done, the world they have created in animation will be totally destroyed. Not unlike Europe was, not a Europe they know. But I find something hopeful that the Carl Sandburg film has sort of become dull as bones in the face of what they want to make on their time. As a teacher, I want to rock and roll with that. Their struggle between what is hopeless and what is hope IS Carl Sandburg. They're up all night putting their own subversive film together. They want me to read the poetry and I might. I might have to set Sandburg aside to do that." "After everything you've done to get them here." "Wherever they're going, they're getting there on their own. Make no mistake about it. Tim Barrus is here for the ride. They're teaching me far more than I could teach them anything. All I can do is provide opportunity. They don't even need my support. They're going to do it anyway. Every morning when they pull me to show me what they've done -- I have arrived home again." The idea of home is everywhere in the work of both these writers. I ask Scriver: "Do Indians live in the town you live in or do they mainly live on a reservation?" "Of the Blackfeet, 8,000 live on the rez and 8,000 live off. Valier is off the rez, but only barely. My neighbor to the east is Indian. Eagle Speakers live a block to the north. There are other Indians in town. The town is very wary of them, but if they keep their yards nicely and pay their bills, everyone forgets they're Indian." "Are Indians in America required to live on a reservation?" "Not at all. The government would like to close down the reservations. American Indians never had to stay on reservations except in the early years when the whites wanted their land. In Canada they tried to keep the Indians "at home," but they also prevented white people from going onto the reservations. The result is that they have kept more of their culture." "Are there stores on reservations?" "In the US you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between any small town and the reservation. Tim was on a much larger rez where things were poorer. Around here sometimes the rez has better stores and amenities (like a laundromat) than the white towns, which are shrinking and falling apart. The image of Indians and reservations is a constructed one, in large part coming from 19th century art." "In Europe it is illegal to sell tribal art as a tribal artist if you are not really from the tribe you say you are from. People who do that can go to prison. Are there rules like that in America?" "Yes there are, and there are many games played with this. Tribes have the right to define their own members. It's much too hot an issue for anyone else but the tribe itself to mess with. So when Ward Churchill wanted to make money by selling "Indian art", the tribe that liked him made him an honorary member. He looks Indian but genetically he is not. So is he, or isn't he? Some people hate the ambiguity. They want some kind of scientific certainty when even scientists know there is very little of that in the human world." Soon, the film interns at Cinematheque will be editing whatever gets filmed back in their Paris studio. Barrus will resume work on his film on Genet and Scriver will remain in her beloved West. The windmills are all still there. There might not at least superficially seem to be any connection, but when you get underneath the skin I do see more than a few. I met Mary Scriver here at Cinematheque Films in Paris, via the Internet. We have one intern, Kilian Sullivan, who does nothing outside the context of his art but answer email. We can be scattered all over the planet and Kilian is Cinematheque central. He had been corresponding with Mary Scriver for a while. I saw her book, Bronze Inside and Out, on Kilian's desk, and he loaned it to me. I had to get in on this and started corresponding with her myself. Ironically, when I first met Timothy Patrick Barrus, it was in a way not entirely unlike the way I met Mary. I was involved with a repeat trick at the small hotel where I was living in a tiny room. My room was crowded with cameras and computers because I love cameras and computers and because I was an Internet whore. My bed was an Internet chat room. I was a little famous. I know a tiny bit about that underground world Scriver and Barrus speak about. What the Internet did was take me off corners of Boulevard de Clichy. I used to have this wild fantasy about how glamourous it would be to be chased by paparazzi but meeting Barrus dashed that one high and dry on rocks like a shipwreck. I had this thing, maybe it was a fetish, for older tricks. For one thing, they could afford me. But I'm real clear about the attraction. My dad abandoned us and at least for me everything begins and ends there. There are a ton of guys out there like me. I am not alone, though I felt very alone. I had a booming business and I am painfully aware of the dangers of becoming too close and too involved with tricks. This trick's name was Paul and he was everything I could have wanted. He had a wife and children. My fantasy was that he would adopt me and I could live as a member of this family. But it was a fantasy. I was used to tricks falling in love with me. It could be annoying. But I was not so used to falling in love with tricks. I think I scared the hell out of Paul. "There are alternatives to this life you lead, you know," he said. But I did not know and if I had I would not have believed any of that would mean me. Paul was in real estate and handles leasing a lot of property in Paris. "Tim Barrus is in town," he told me. Paul had leased him a loft. If Tim is notorious in the straight world, he's way more notorious in the gay world. The irony is that he does not live in either one. His books are literally collector's items. Not all of it is porn but the porn is infamous. My Brother, My Lover is a book no one gives away. If you can find a decent copy, you keep it. Forget about a signed one. He won't sign books anymore. The most famous Barrus book is Mineshaft. It describes a pre-HIV world I never knew. My world has always lived in the shadows of the disease. Then came Genocide and Tim was the first to connect government policy to the AIDS horror. I did not know Tim Barrus but I certainly knew of him. I started buying his books on my first trip to Amsterdam. You couldn't buy them in Ireland then. I never thought we would meet. Paul connected us through Skype. Tim is very careful about outsiders knowing his exact whereabouts because the death threats against him are so intense. His film crew was shooting La putain folle dans le Pigalle in Place Pigalle and he said we should meet. I tracked him down the next day. He doesn't just take anyone into Cinematheque's inner circle. He has to know you and he takes his time. He doesn't take on vampires and there are a lot of people out there who take and never give. La putain folle dans le Pigalle would become -- like the typical Barrus book -- tinged with controversy and when that happens, and it happens a lot, Tim simply walks away. Most people only know him through the work. So they make this connection to sex that is more mythology than reality. It took me another year to actually make the move to the Cinematheque loft where I live with the rest of the film crew -- people who are not all that much unlike me. "Life is way too short," he says. "I'd read Mary Scriver's Prairie Mary blog before. Mainly because I wanted to steal the name. It's a great name -- Prairie Mary. It conjures up a vision of Laura Ingalls Wilder's great mad aunt emerging from a sod house early in the morning with her apron and her hands bloody from just having butchered a buffalo. It is so American. She's the only American writer I didn't scare. I had gone out of my way to scare everyone at a perfectly ridiculous art blog called Flyover. If the name is a problem, chances are good that so is the content. The name implies that you might want to fly over, but the content advertises art in this part of America more breathlessly than the Junior Chamber of Commerce. Prairie Mary was there. She was sort of standing back in the shadows listening. But I saw her eyes sort of roll upward a couple of times at some of the inane stuff at Flyover so I thought -- this woman sounds smart and interesting and she's better than this blog. So I wrote to her. I found out that one of the things we shared was a history of teaching. Teachers are so not valued in Western culture. They make no money yet we need them badly. Again, I had this vision of Laura Ingalls Wilder's great aunt in a one-room school with a Franklin stove and a woodpile in the back. Which is about as silly as Tim Barrus having orgies with boys. Once you get beyond the mythology the name conjures up, you find a rich life far more interesting than the mythology. And you know, that's exactly the sort of person I want my students to be able to communicate with. Someone who is more real and bigger than the myth they arrive with. You guys at Cinematheque find everything American intriguing. You've seen a little of it but you don't know America yet. Prairie Mary's take on art has a lot to do with work and sweat if you read the Scriver book. Personally, what I think it does is something no book is ever allowed to do, and I don't know that Mary would agree with this, but I did put it into the video we made, and that was about a stripping away of myth to reveal a reality that contained a love story richer than any myth could make. That's very difficult to do in publishing because it's not marketing and it would scare most publishers into running. Anyone who can do that has my vote for President." Mary calls the way in which this interview took place an "organic" process. I am pounding my head against the wall with this interview stuff. It seems so effortless for two writers like Mary Scriver and Tim Barrus to describe themselves. But for me to describe myself is a can of Irish snakes. And not the fictional St. Patrick kind but the real kind like the ones at the bottom of this Connemara dam. When asked if he could make a feature film what that film would be about Barrus goes immediately to Mary Scriver's life. "Both the lives and the art jump out at you from Bronze Inside and Out. Cate Blanchett would be Mary. Tommy Lee Jones would be Bob. Ronnie Howard would direct." Mary and Tim are the real writers. What I am is a whore who is trying to reinvent himself. I have always wanted to be a writer but being a whore is easier. A fictional whore would have more talent than I do. This is work. Let me be frank. I am a junkie and a whore. I am a junkie who isn't doing drugs and a "sex worker" who isn't turning tricks. Not anymore. I left Ireland at the age of thirteen. I ended up in London turning mostly Brit tricks. A French trick brought me to Paris and his promises of a life together turned out to be just that: empty promises. So for the past five years I've been working Place Pigalle which is the red light district of Paris. I was hardly the only kid doing this in the Pigalle. In the Pigalle, the Internet is used like a pimp. The Internet allowed me to become a web-camera whore (I was a "model"). By the time I found the program Tim Barrus was creating CinemathequeArt, a place for at-risk boys -- I was so strung out I was almost dead meat. But that's another story. There are a lot of programs that will get you off the street. But finding one that can do that and replace that life with one that has a focus, not on culture, not on just some low-rent job, but on you, is easier said than done. I have a long way to go and a lot to learn. But I have left Place Pigalle and I don't miss it anymore than I miss Ireland. Place Pigalle is not a place of pretend. It has a hard edge. It is a hard place and you would find addiction there as easily as the sex work. You would find a lot of art, too. As a sex worker, I learned how to worm my way into people's lives. I have wormed my way into Tim's and Mary's lives and I am getting a real taste for how difficult the writing life really is. But I am doing what I always wanted to do and I am doing it every day. I would not call myself a writer yet. But I have high hopes I am on my way.