[New-Poetry] Drop that nom de plume

Sat Jun 23 15:48:15 EDT 2007

I can support Jim's statement as a witness,
(due piccioni con una fava : two pigeons with one broad bean (Vicia faba))


From: "James Cervantes" <cervantes.james at gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, June 23, 2007 9:38 PM


> Dang.  I knew someone would blab!
> 
> - Jim
> 
> p.s. - Prosecutors: Skip fox has been using the name Halvard Johnson
> 
> On 6/23/07, Skip Fox <skip at louisiana.edu> wrote:
>> Wait til they realize we're all inventions! Then we'll _never_ get out of
>> the courts.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>> [mailto:new-poetry-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of Halvard Johnson
>> Sent: Friday, June 22, 2007 10:00 PM
>> To: NewPoetry: &amp; Views
>> Subject: [New-Poetry] Drop that nom de plume
>>
>> Drop that nom de plume before it takes on a life
>> of its own.
>>
>> NYT
>>
>> June 23, 2007
>>
>> Jury Finds Writer's Alias Was Fraud
>>
>> By ALAN FEUER
>> JT LeRoy, the authorial "other" whom the writer Laura Albert employed
>> as her alter ego and self-protective proxy in the world, was found
>> yesterday by a jury in Manhattan to be not just a fictional creation,
>> but a fraud.
>>
>> Ms. Albert, 41, was found by the jury in Federal District Court to
>> have strayed beyond the normal limits of pseudonymous invention, in
>> part by signing a movie contract using her nom de plume. After the
>> verdict was announced, she stood with friends in the courtroom,
>> saying she had somehow known hours before that the jury's decision
>> would not fall her way.
>>
>> "I knew it this morning," Ms. Albert said, wearing at her neck a tiny
>> typewriter pendant with a legend that read "Write Hard, Die Free." "I
>> already went through it."
>>
>> As part of its verdict in the civil case, the jury ordered Ms. Albert
>> to pay $116,500 to Antidote International Films, which, in 2003,
>> signed an option contract with JT LeRoy to make a feature film of his
>> novel "Sarah," a tale of filial love and prostitution set among the
>> "lot lizards" of a West Virginia truck stop.
>>
>> When Antidote learned last year that the book had, in fact, been
>> written by Ms. Albert, its president, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, sued for
>> fraud and breach of contract, saying he had been duped and was
>> seeking not only the option money back, but damages and lawyers' fees
>> as well.
>>
>> Long before this somewhat narrow legal matter reached the courts, the
>> broader story of JT LeRoy, with its agitprop allure and celebrity
>> aroma, played out on the larger and much more garish canvas of the
>> press. After "Sarah" thrust the writer into stardom in 2000, JT LeRoy
>> became the damaged darling of the art house set, a street waif and
>> supposed son of a truck stop prostitute who, usually by way of
>> telephone or e-mail (he was "famously reclusive"), befriended the
>> likes of Courtney Love and Winona Ryder - at least until his
>> startling existence as a fiction was revealed.
>>
>> All the while, of course, it was Ms. Albert, a mother and otherwise
>> obscure novelist from Brooklyn Heights, who was spinning gritty
>> fantasies of drug addiction and Appalachian misery for the rich and
>> famous names at the other end of the keyboard or the line. She gave
>> interviews in a twangy accent to Terry Gross on NPR and sometimes
>> paid her former boyfriend's half-sister to appear in disguise as JT
>> LeRoy in the rarefied air of literary readings or the international
>> film festival at Cannes.
>>
>> It was deceptions like these that Antidote's lawyers said constituted
>> her fraud. Yet even though the company's lawyers assailed her in
>> court as a trickster and wily master of self-promotion, they - and
>> their client, Mr. Levy-Hinte - admitted a grudging admiration for her
>> writing talents, and for her performance.
>>
>> They also evinced a quiet sympathy for Ms. Albert, for it was soon
>> apparent that the eight-day trial would include testimony about her
>> rather gruesome history - a litany of adolescent trauma that included
>> sexual abuse, institutionalization and 13 years of telephone therapy
>> in which she spoke to her psychiatrist in the adopted persona of a
>> teenage boy. That boy, whom she took to calling Jeremy or Jeremiah,
>> was a sort of early incarnation of the full-blown alter ego that
>> would eventually evolve into JT LeRoy.
>>
>> Among the various battles waged at the trial - art versus commerce,
>> truth versus fiction, reality versus the imagination - it was perhaps
>> the battle over JT LeRoy's purpose in the world that was most in
>> dispute. Before his identity (or, rather, nonidentity) was revealed
>> last year in a series of newspaper articles, the production team at
>> Antidote considered him that rare commodity in today's biography-
>> obsessed entertainment world: a gifted writer with a titillating past
>> that only enhanced the value of the work. After the revelation, the
>> company took the position that Ms. Albert had used the JT LeRoy
>> "brand" - the same that had attracted them - as a celebrity magnet to
>> draw attention to her books.
>>
>> Ms. Albert herself, in testimony from the stand, suggested that JT
>> LeRoy was far more than a pseudonym in the classic Mark Twain-Samuel
>> Clemens mold. She offered the idea that JT LeRoy was a sort of
>> "respirator" for her inner life: an imaginary, though necessary,
>> survival apparatus that permitted her to breathe.
>>
>> The $116,500 judgment against Ms. Albert covers the option contract
>> and damages to Antidote, but not legal fees, which have not yet been
>> determined. If she is ordered to pay those as well, the amount could
>> be hundreds of thousands of dollars.
>>
>> Mr. Levy-Hinte, Antidote's president, said in an interview yesterday
>> that the lawsuit was less about getting his money back than about
>> sticking up for fair dealing and telling the truth.
>>
>> "I'm kind of a person of principle," he said. "Not kind of - I am. I
>> wasn't willing to simply walk away and take a loss with no apology or
>> reasonable explanation."
>>
>> He said he would not seek to make a movie out of "Sarah" as he had
>> wished, calling the project "too sullied and emotionally charged,"
>> although he added, "Somebody could make a good movie out of it, if
>> they wanted." He went on to say that if Ms. Albert, who never made a
>> fortune from her literary works, could not afford to pay the
>> judgment, he might have to consider laying claim to the rights to her
>> past and future books.
>>
>> Perhaps surprisingly, he said he had respect for Ms. Albert, who
>> "pulled off something quite startling - all these intelligent people
>> were taken in."
>>
>> It was a blessing in disguise, he said. The alter ego was gone.
>>
>> "She's liberated, in a way. It's quite wonderful."
>>
>>
>> "I don't know what music is."
>>                 --Ludvig van Beethoven
>>
>> Halvard Johnson
>> ================
>> halvard at earthlink.net
>> http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html
>> http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
>> http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
>> http://www.hamiltonstone.org
>> http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html
>>
> ~ Salt River Review:  http://www.poetserv.org
> ~ http://www.hamiltonstone.org/catalog.html#temporarymeaning
> ~ http://www.poetserv.org/jvc/home/index.html
> ~ http://home.earthlink.net/~jvcervantes/
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