Word: artistes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Contacted by Maloney, the FBI sent a sketch artist to render a portrait of Jacques. The drawing shows a muscular young man with a short haircut, full face and dark features. Maloney thinks he was "maybe Indian." Davidson agrees, adding, "maybe a little bit Hawaiian." The FBI has been looking for him for well over a year...
...trouble," writes a fictional narrator named David Leavitt at the beginning of The Term Paper Artist, the first of three novellas contained in the real David Leavitt's new book, Arkansas (Houghton Mifflin; 198 pages; $23). Sure enough, in a vertiginous display of life imitating art imitating life, those words, plus some sexually explicit terms that follow, got the real Leavitt in trouble all over again. Edward Kosner, editor in chief of Esquire, abruptly canceled the scheduled appearance of The Term Paper Artist in the April issue, causing the magazine's fiction editor to resign in high dudgeon and fueling...
...Esquire kill Leavitt's story? Kosner has insisted that the decision was simply a matter of editorial judgment (or rejudgment, since the magazine purchased rights to print The Term Paper Artist last fall). Other sources, including Will Blythe, the fiction editor who quit, charge that the story was yanked because publisher Valerie Salembier feared its explicit homosexual content, including a proposed man-to-man tryst in the back of a Jeep, would offend advertisers, particularly of automobiles. Through her representatives at the magazine, Salembier has denied saying any such thing...
...admits that The Term Paper Artist is provocative, but asks, "What's the point of writing if you don't provoke people?" Leavitt, 35, has won considerable renown and notoriety doing just that. His first collection of stories, Family Dancing (1984), and first novel, The Lost Language of Cranes (1987), were praised for their artful and frank treatment of gay characters and themes. But his ascending career hit a wall with the appearance of While England Sleeps (1993). Leavitt's novel included embroidered scenes from British poet Stephen Spender's 1951 memoir of the Spanish Civil War, World Within World...
This controversy provides the impetus for the surreal plot of The Term Paper Artist. In the novella, the character named David Leavitt, distraught over the suppression of his novel and suffering from writer's block as a result, hides out at his father's house in Los Angeles and does halfhearted research at the UCLA library for a novel he's pretty sure he will never write. By chance he meets Eric, an attractive undergraduate, who invites him to his apartment to share some marijuana. Hoping for sex, Leavitt learns that the seductive Eric has a more complex transaction...