Remember last month when I told you about Tim Barrus' attempts to shop his life as "Nasdijj" around publishing circles? Well, he's still at it. In an email forwarded to GalleyCat, Barrus (who claims that "for the past ten years, I have been known simply as Nasdijj") says that he's spent the last week being interviewed by Esquire for an article, presumably about how/why he duped them. But not even a feature story can tell the complete story of Nasdijj, he says, so he's still hoping somebody will publish Year of the Hyena. "WHAT IS IDENTITY AND ARE WE ALLOWED IN A CLOSED AND BOXED SOCIETY TO REINVENT OURSELVES?" he asks (and, yes, he does it in all caps). "From my perspective, it's the responsibility of the artist to challenge the stability of the status quo and that is what I have always attempted to do with my work." (One imagines that also applies to gay S/M porn like The Mineshaft, the sort of thing Barrus wrote before he went "Native.")

I tried calling the folks who handle media relations for Esquire, but it's a holiday, so you can guess how that turned out. But I'll keep looking for confirmation, never fear. In the meantime, I've got even better news: Barrus isn't just sending query letters anymore; he's attached the entire manuscript, each chapter in its own little file. Here's a fairly used excerpt from Chapter 2:

"I was a car thief back then. If I don't tell you these things, I will be exposed as a fraud on the Internet by vividly literate magazines written by vividly literate graduate students suffering from Down's Syndrome."

Yah, that sure sounds like the sensitive Native American who cradled his adopted son in his arms as he died of fetal alcohol syndrome, doesn't it?