I have never cottoned to the work of either person, in any of their roles. I always hated Mondo 2000, the magazine edited by RU Sirius -- it was the epitome of flashy cool crap, with startling, fluorescent eye-catching graphics accompanying articles about bullshit. It was like porn for Burning Man types before there was Burning Man and before porn was cool, though it wasn't porn except in the sense of being masturbation material about "alternative" future crap, like "smart drugs" and hypertext fiction -- stuff that might have been interesting if it had existed, but which they treated totally seriously as if it did. (At one point, about 1992, another magazine came along that tried to look similar and was porn -- "Future Sex," which was almost as bad, though it was at least about something.)
I guess that makes RU Sirius the perfect person to interview Laura Albert, who wrote books that were considered to be good mainly because they were supposed to be not just novels but the merely lightly fictionalized story of a tragically victimized person whom, as it turned out, did not exist, thus rendering the books uninteresting. On the subject of Albert having been interviewed by the Paris Review (which was careful to characterize it not as an interview but an "encounter"), RU Sirius says, apparently with an absolute straight face: "It's a sign of respect for your work."
No, it's a sign that the Paris Review has changed its focus and now interviews freaks, like the Serbian assassin they talked with the issue before that. That was also an "encounter." (From a piece on the Paris Review's new editor Philip Gourevitch:
Best of all, he added a feature he calls Encounter, a short Q & A with interesting, obscure people.I'm still waiting for an agent to sell a book with Laura Albert's name on it. According to Publisher's Marketplace, that is yet to happen.
One Encounter was an interview with a professional mourner in China. "We used to treat every funeral like a contest," he said. "There were lead wailers and backup wailers, and after the gig was over, members would get together and critique each other's performances." Another Encounter was with a Chinese public toilet manager. ... Those Encounters were amusing, but the Encounter with Nikola Kavaja was chilling. Kavaja is a Serb assassin who served 18 years in U.S. prisons for hijacking an American Airlines jet in Chicago in 1979...)
Update: Apparently Albert is really making the rounds. Here's a USA Today -- or rather, a USA Today blog -- interview in which she starts crying when asked "is JT's voice completely gone from your head now, or does it still come back?" Utterly shameless.
Previously:
The Fake Patrol
Suckers line up to claim they were duped by LeRoy hoax
'Other writers latched onto JT as career move'
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