Actually, let's not talk about that.

Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s Backwards City's vulnerable youth population was entranced by one gerund, shouted at the top of one's pixie stick dusted vocal chords: WRESTLING!

(Side Note: Throwing pixie sticks on a bonfire is a vaguely dangerous stunt also associated with this epoch.)

Though many of us have since lost the urge to see a freakishly large man (King Kong Bundy) battle his weight in midgets (plus Hillbilly Jim!), the titans of old claim a lonely corner within our mental hall of heroes. Now that it is firmly within our grasp to perm a mullet, grow a mustache, and don a pair of neon green tights the mystery of yesterday's heroes has waned.

This has especially been the case as of late, with the recent murder/suicide of Canadian! (almost every article I've read has stressed this a great deal) wrestler Chris Benoit and his wife and child. Mr. Benoit is only the most recent example of how life tends to disintegrate rapidly when one treads the lonely path of steroids, painkillers, hair gel, and faux rage. This is perhaps the only instance where the BCR blog will employ a quotation from Fox Sports, hosted on MSN. In any case, look for your former favorite idol and hang your head for the days when an atomic elbow to your brother's throat was still in the realm of good fun and was never followed by any legal action.

*Ravishing Rick Rude — Died at 40 of an apparent heart attack in 1999, a bottle of prescription pills for his bad back at his side. The autopsy report said he died of "mixed medications." Rude was an admitted user of anabolic steroids.

*Louis Mucciolo, a.k.a, Louie Spicolli — Died in 1998 at age 27 when he suffocated on his own vomit after ingesting massive amounts of Soma and alcohol. Investigators also found an empty vial of testosterone, pain pills and an anti-anxiety drug at the scene.


*Brian Pillman — An admitted user of steroids, he died of a heart attack at age 35 in 1997 on the morning of WWF's In Your House: Badd Blood pay-per-view event.

* Rick "the Renegade" Williams — Died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at age 33 after being released from his World Championship Wrestling contract in 1999.

* "Mr. Perfect" Curt Hennig — Found dead of a cocaine overdose at age 44 in his motel room on April 10, 2003, the morning of a match. Hennig's father maintained that steroids and painkillers contributed to his death.

* Rodney "Yokozuna" Anoa'i — Died of a heart attack in 2002 at 34.

* Davey Boy Smith, "The British Bulldog" — Died of a heart attack at age 39 on May 17, 2002. An autopsy report indicated that past steroid use had likely played a part in his death.

* Michael "Road Warrior Hawk" Hegstrand — An admitted steroid user, he died of a heart attack at age 46 in 2003.

* Michael Lockwood, "Crash Holly" — In 2003, at the age of 32, he choked to death on his own vomit after ingesting 90 painkiller pills.

* Jerry Tuite, "The Wall" a.k.a. "Malice" — Died at age 36 in 2003 of an apparent heart attack in his hotel room.

* Raymond "Hercules" Hernandez — Dead of heart failure in 2004 at age 47.

* Ray "The Big Boss Man" Traylor — Found dead of a heart attack in 2004 at age 42.

* Eddie Guerrero — After a long battle with painkillers, he was found dead of a heart attack by his nephew in his hotel room at age 38. The first person his nephew reportedly called was Guerrero's best friend, Chris Benoit.

* Chris Candido — Died in 2005 at age 33 from a blood clot after breaking his tibia and fibula and dislocating his ankle in a pay-per-view event.

* Owen Hart — Fell to his death at age 34 in 1999 when the rigging that was lowering him into the ring malfunctioned.

Update: Bam Bam Bigelow died on January 19, 2007 from a mixture of cocaine and benzodiazepenes. I'd like to imagine he's currently fighting a no-holds-barred cage match with Yokozuna in Wrestler-Heaven, like some sort of scripted version of a modern Ragnarok.

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
--Jeremiah 17:9

The New York Times has an article today about the ongoing civil trial of Laura Albert, otherwise known as JT Leroy. (If you don't know the backstory of JT Leroy, check out Stephen Beachy's Who is the Real JT Leroy?, published in the 10/17/05 issue of New York, which pretty much sums up the whole ugly affair.)

The Times mentions that Albert used a fake Southern accent to impersonate Leroy over the phone (sometimes to other authors, including Dennis Cooper, Mary Gaitskill and Mary Karr), including in an 11/26/01 interview on NPR's Fresh Air. (The interview is supposed to be archived here, but curiously reads: "Due to an agreement with the guest, the audio for this interview is unavailable.")

I immediately thought of Anthony Godby Johnson, another literary hoax whose plot parallels JT Leroy. Anthony, the sexually abused and AIDS-afflicted child, was the creation of a middle-aged woman (she went by Vicki Johnson-- her real name was either Vicki Fraginals or Joanne Victoria Fraginals-Zackheim) who wrote his "autobiography," A Rock and a Hard Place: One boy's triumphant story. Vicki also liked to talk on the phone-- her chats with (and subsequent discovery of fraud by) author Armistead Maupin led to his (very cool) 2000 novel, The Night Listener.

The James Frey case fits in here too, as does Stephen Glass, The New Republic fabulist who later saw his story hit the big screen in 2003's Shattered Glass. (As did Clifford Irving, who produced a fabricated biography of Howard Hughes, in the recently released Richard Gere movie The Hoax, though Irving insists, in this New Yorker article, that his hoax was "for the adventure" and so entirely different.)

Binjamin Wilkomirski, in his 1996 "autobiography" Fragments (which is actually a well-written book and a pleasure to read), describes his childhood as a holocaust survivor. The only problem is that Wilkomirski is actually Bruno Grosjean, a gentile Swiss orphan who was adopted by a wealthy couple in Zurich. To bolster his story, Grosjean relied on the testimony of Laura Grabowski, a holocaust survivor who claimed to have known him from internment camps. The only problem was that Grabowski too was a fraud. Grabowski (nee Lauren Rose Willson, also a gentile) hadn't gone so far as to author a book about her experience as a childhood survivor of the Holocaust, but had written (under the name Lauren Stratford) Satan's Underground, a 1988 memoir detailing her experience as a survivor of Satantic ritual abuse. Oi vey.

It's not that literary hoaxes don't have their basis in the canon. Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liasons Dangereuses (1782) is ostensibly a collection of real letters (rather than an epistolary novel) published by an invented editor as a moral tale for the public. Benjamin Constant's Adolphe (1816) purports to be a diary that Constant has found and edited. The same is true of Mikhail Lermentov's A Hero of Our Time (1839). In the introduction to 1862's The House of the Dead (also titled Memoirs From the House of the Dead or simply House of the Dead), Dostoyevsky claims that the book is actually found document, not authored but only edited by himself. (If you can think of any other books whose writers deny authorship, let me know in the comments.)

The difference seems to be one of ego. While de Laclos, Constant, Lermentov and Dostoyevsky deny authorship of the work, the hoaxers claim so much authorship that they try to become their characters. But this is an entirely sympathetic view. Rather than pathology, it's probably simply mercenary-- non-fiction consistently outsells fiction. A Million Little Pieces would never have been picked for Oprah's Book Club had it been published as fiction. Pushing aside literary games of identity and authorship, these modern hoaxers are playing only for the money.

Canadian singer/songwriter Leslie Feist recently explained in an NPR interview at the 9:30 Club in Washington that entering America as a musician is made possible only by passing through "two enormous iron doors: ... [one in] New York and [one in] California."

She also links her songwriting process to influences that range from the writings of Toni Morrison and Paul Auster to Joni Mitchell and indigo blue. The color.

In terms of temporality, I can see Morrison’s influence in song lyrics such as The Park and in the musical construction of Mitchell’s "Blue," but fail to see the connection between these New York artists and the iron door that Feist claims New York represents to international artists. Any thoughts?

Neuroscience researchers at the University of Iowa have traced emotional and moral reactions to an area of the brain known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Two groups (one with damaged VPCs and one comprised of those with intact forebrains) were asked to respond to hypothetical moral dilemmas.

In situations involving no personal knowledge, subjects in both groups responded similarly. For example, nearly all the respondents would choose to sacrifice one stranger to save three. However, when asked if they would smother their own child to save a group of people, those with intact forebrains said no. Those with damaged VPCs produced the almost pathologically utilitarian response of yes.

“The findings show that our natural aversion to harming others emerges from two previously documented systems in our brain-- one emotional and one rational,” says the June/July 2007 issue of Scientific American Mind. “Scientists do not yet understand how the two systems interact or how one supersedes the other when they dictate contradictory courses of action.

‘This study doesn’t mean that people who lack social emotions are dangerous,’ says Michael Koenigs, then at the University of Iowa, a member of the research team. ‘They tend to show little empathy and guilt, but they are not killers.’”

P.S. Don’t forget to enter our contest. Thanks.

That’s right—we’re having a cutesy little contest. Why? Because we want to get our readers more involved and judging from the confused reaction to the new editors’ blog posts, we figured a small bribe couldn’t hurt.

What’s the contest? We want new slogans for the Backwards City Review. The problem is that we don’t know how to make them. If we did, we could all take metropolitan advertising jobs as the “creative” types at our respective firms (i.e. wacky tie patterns and fake pot plants in our cubicles). So we want you to provide them.

We’re looking for something short, pithy and kind of ambiguously clever. It could be a tidy bit of chiasmus like “Ask not what you can do for your country…” or bluntly utilitarian like “We will bury your grandchildren.” So send us your tired, your poor, your huddled missives and you can win some cool swag.

Like what? First prize is a one-year subscription to the Backwards City Review. Second prize is a signed copy of Michael Parker’s acclaimed novel Hello Down There. Both are extremely cool. Even if you don’t like them, everyone likes getting mail. You can write your slogans in the comments of this post. We’ll all pick our favorites, argue about them over drinks, pick the winners and then collapse in a fitful and editorial bale of having done no real creative work ourselves. After we announce the slogans we like best, the winners can send us their mailing addresses so we can get their books to them.

So send us your entries and participate in our first online contest. We know it hurts the first time but you’re special and we love you and we think you’re worth it. Thank you.

Citizens:

Informant Google has developed a program for reconnoitering neighboring city-states called "Street View." Look up any city and click on the highlighted streets to see what it looked like when the imaging truck rolled through town. The dossier of surveilled cities is currently limited to our largest neighbors, but in time we will extend our sight into every corner of this land.

An unintended side effect could be the prefiguration of these cityscapes (issue explored further in Walker Percy's white paper "The Loss of the Creature"). But no matter. We must keep tabs on our neighbors for the foreseeable future to ensure the revolution may continue apace.