JT’s big IOU

9 comments on “JT’s big IOU”

1. Steven W. Beattie says:
   August 1st, 2007 at 8:39 am

   I still fail to see why Albert should be on the hook to pay back the option money. The film company optioned a novel, not a memoir. As I’ve said elsewhere, it’s not as though she pulled a James Frey and tried to pass the story off as true. (Although she suggested, under her nom de plume, that the novel was “semiautobiographical,” at no time did anyone ever claim that it was anything other than fiction.) The novel hasn’t changed, regardless of the identity of the author.

2. Judith says:
   August 1st, 2007 at 11:18 am

   A jury sat through a trial for approximately ten days. Of course, a person from the outside who is not following all the details would be confused
   by this topic. Part of the contract that was made included the marketing of the biography of the author. Considering the author no longer existed or
   was different than Antidote was led to believe, the jury sided with Antidote. The fact that Antidote tried to collaborate with Laura Albert after the fact,
   to salvage the situation, let us say, has been made into a careful publicity stunt that Antidote is ‘trying to steal her life rights.’ It is absolutely naive and
   plain wrong to the facts that Antidote wasn’t caught in a large public hoax or scam and that the making of “Sarah” could proceed as is . . . While it
   was ‘fiction’, Laura Albert pressed at every turn, over and over and over and over, that it was based on the life of a truck stop prostitute, junkie, street
   kid . . . all of which she is not. The book has become a joke for many. The biography of an author does effect the interpreting of a work of art. For
   the good, for the bad of that . . . a fifteen year old isn’t being held to same standards as a forty year old. Nor should they be. As well, a con-artist
   effects one’s perceptions of a work as well. For the good and bad of that.

3. Steven W. Beattie says:
   August 1st, 2007 at 2:05 pm

   While I agree with you, Judith, that in our current, celebrity-obsessed society, “[t]he biography of an author does effect the interpreting of a work of art,” I disagree that it should.

   Personally, I don’t care one whit whether Sarah was written by a woman in her forties or a drug-addicted, HIV-positive street kid: none of that changes the text one iota. I can see how people who were falling over themselves to praise the book’s “authentic” voice, only to find out that the voice they thought was so authentic was created out of whole cloth, could feel a bit duped. (As an aside, consider this: Laura Albert, a fortyish woman, fashioned the narrative voice of a teenaged runaway male prostitute so skillfully that many people (including professional writers such as Mary Gaitskill) were willing to believe that the events of the novel reflected the actual, real-life experiences of its author. Does that not make the novel more, not less, successful?)

   I’m not arguing for the value of Sarah as a novel. I read it after Albert was outed, and I thought it was competent, but not overwhelming. However, any critical exegesis of the work itself should be based on the text, not on any external factors, including the biography of the author. It is the words on the page that matter; everything else is — or should be — fifth business.

4. Judith says:
   August 1st, 2007 at 2:48 pm

   I agree with you that it is a reflection of our celebrity-obsessed world that the biography of the author matters so much, but I don’t agree that
   “writing should be writing” and nothing else matters. This is a discourse that has been controversial for quite some time when it comes to cultural
   criticism. Perhaps to you it doesn’t matter one iota who wrote it, but I’m assumeing you aren’t a transgendered street teenager getting their first representation in the mainstream publishing world. There was a lot of projection going on to the work as a result of Albert savvily creating a network of sympathy around her for the poor, begotten orphan.
   Argento’s film had a lot of applause and sold out screening in SF, and played to an empty theatre in SF after the hoax was revealed. People were supporting the ‘voice’ of a marginalized person. There was something sinister and creepy about the way Albert played on people’s sympathies and she
   is paying the price for that. But yes, it was uncanny the degree that she could imitate and fool so many people who you think would know better.

5. Steven W. Beattie says:
   August 1st, 2007 at 3:23 pm

   I saw Asia Argento’s film The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things at the Toronto International Film Festival several years ago, before I even knew who JT Leroy (”JT Leroy”?) was. And there again, the revelation of Albert’s true identity shouldn’t have the effect of consigning Argento’s movie to play in empty cinemas. I quite liked the film; Argento gives a brave performance, and I was terribly impressed by Marilyn Manson. But this had nothing to do with the putative “voice” behind it and everything to do with Argento’s skill as a filmmaker.

   I’d also hasten to add that Argento’s film and Leroy/Albert’s book should not be equated, either. Film and writing are two different media; the minute you translate a work of literature into a work of cinema, you fundamentally change it.

   And you’re right, I’m not a transgendered street teenager making inroads into the literary community, but if I were, I’d hope that any praise that came my way had to do with the quality of my work and not my personal situation or biographical history.

   I do agree with you, though, that there is something cynical and creepy about the way Albert manipulated the public’s sympathies for the “marginalized teen” she claimed to be the author of the books. My problem is, I’m not sure whether that says more about her, or about us.

6. Judith says:
   August 1st, 2007 at 7:48 pm

   True, true, but why should everyone else take the fall ? and Laura Albert should be able to continue to live off the fraud or the agreed sinister ways? If you agree that Asia got screwed by Albert’s doing, why would anyone set themselves up for a similarly problematic situation and make the film based on an ‘ideal’ that art SHOULD be judged without biography in mind. Realistically, we aren’t living in the world of T.S. Elliot, although that would be so wonderful. Reality has it unfortunately that some people get MFA pedigrees that do indeed help with the crafting of writing and punctuation, others do not. Some are born to situations where Rilke and Jung, and others do not . . . like the supposed biography of JT as a street kid autodidact with a terminal illness. I don’t think consideration to those conditions is necessarily problematic. Context, right? Under simultaneous consideration invevitably. We do this on a historical level constantly or so much work would be considered a lot less favorably for anitquated values. When it comes to JT, context of the writing was constantly considered. Hard to un-do that after the fact . . .

7. Helen says:
   August 3rd, 2007 at 2:09 pm

   As excerpted from Erica Jong’s “Seducing the Demon”. The poet Robert Pack used to talk about our response to works of art with this parable: “Suppose you see a canvas with a red slash across it and nothing more. You look at it and wonder what you think of it. Then suppose someone tells you that the artist cut off his right hand and made that crimson gash- does it change your view?”

8. Chris says:
   August 4th, 2007 at 9:48 am

   Helen: Of the artist? Absolutely. Nut-bar. And if it affects the work, it turns it into nothing more than forensic evidence of the artist’s mental illness. In the whole exchange between Judith and SWB, conducted very civilly and effectively, I think the key phrase was Judith’s mention of “cultural criticism”. If you see art as a series of cultural forensics, biography matters; if you’re interest is in the language/medium, it doesn’t. It’s probably more complex than that, but that’s a start.

   C

9. Helen says:
   August 4th, 2007 at 10:53 pm

   Chris: And what what is the language/medium being a medium for? Perhaps the soul and its’ struggle to survive within the culture . . . ?

Discuss