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, writing under the name Timothée Le Tallec. Everyone knew Le Tallec is Barrus. You were Le Tallec for as long as you were Nasdijj. Adopting a foreign culture. Going native. But you came to it from the context of someone who was so far underground it was hard to find him — just like it was always hard to pin Nasdijj down — I mean, if you ask me the fact that the guy didn't even have a last name was something of a red flag. 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?"
"Timothée 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. [My 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 the kind of stuff that 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. 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 whom? My computers were supposed to be overloaded with so much viral incoming that they'd simply shut down. That was the goal.
"So I simply forward everything all around the world with a variety of servers — not to obfuscate as I do my name, but to protect my software with so many filters at every checkpoint, and then on to the next checkpoint, to block 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, and 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 of the cameras 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, during the 1950s 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."
