Santutxo

Eric was so nice as to let me blog again about another of my characters. This week is dedicated to Santutxo Etxeberria, the legendary Basque separatist. He’s featured in the excerpt from the novel which is in the current issue of BOMB.

So, you may recall from a prior post that I confessed to having recently stalked the philosopher Slavoj Žižek. I was trying to get him to disavow any connection to Santutxo. In the novel, there is some indication that Santutxo attended a dinner party with Žižek, Analia Hounie and Gayatri Spivak. Of course that didn’t really happen. Santutxo is a fictional character.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get Žižek to make a public statement on the subject.

Santutxo, however, was happy to post his own:

real people

As you may have surmised, while my novel is entirely fictional, it does invoke a number of “real life” celebrities from various art worlds, both highbrow and lowbrow. For a little while, I thought it would be interesting to contact some of these “real” people and give them an opportunity to deny any association with my fictional characters. I thought this might help my readers distinguish between fiction and reality.

The first person I approached was the philosopher Slavoj Žižek. I went to a talk he gave a few months ago at Cooper Union. The talk ended kind of abruptly because there was a bomb threat, but Žižek was gracious enough to stick around for a bit to sign copies of his book. I stood in line, but when I reached the front, instead of getting his autograph, I handed him a copy of my manuscript and said, “I wrote a novel and you’re a character in it.” He seemed kind of taken aback. He said, “Oh no, what, am I like that Jim Carrey character in ‘Dumb and Dumber’?”

I had inserted a brief note in the ms with my email address. I suggested that he might want to make a formal statement denying any actual association with my fictional characters. I’m afraid he didn’t write me back. I followed up with a message to his website. I thought he might want to say, “Santutxo Etxeberria is a figment of Barbara Browning’s imagination. He was never a guest at a dinner party attended by me, Analia Hounie and Gayatri Spivak. Furthermore, Cameron Diaz does seem like an interesting person. Why is this treated as a comical assertion?”

Again, he didn’t respond.

Then I thought maybe I should just pilfer some material from real interviews that were already a part of the public record. I thought maybe I could just cite them as though the celebrities were talking about my characters, but I could footnote the original sources so that any curious reader with an internet connection would quickly discover that they’d actually been talking about other things.

I ran this by a lawyer friend. Since I already mentioned that “Lacanian lawyer,” you may think I know a lot of people in the legal profession. In fact, I don’t. But I’m starting to find that lawyers can be pretty interesting people (who knew?). One of them told me I needed to worry about “rights of publicity,” which is basically exploiting somebody else’s celebrity status for your own personal gain.

I wrote one of the big shots in this legal field. I said I was thinking about trying to use a blurb from Björk that was pilfered from some random e-mail interview she’d done for the Brooklyn Rail (“i always feel i say too much...”), and maybe another from Mikhail Baryshnikov on Larry King (“Next question.”) – as though they were trying to be discreet about the identity of Vivian’s lovers. I said, “Are they likely to sue me?” He said a lawyer could really only prudently respond that anybody could sue you... He did, however, think it was an interesting idea... But very possibly actionable.

I gave it one last shot. I sent the manuscript to Laurie Anderson. She was so nice! She wrote back right away! She thought the book looked “cool”! But she declined to give me a blurb denying any association with Binh...

Binh wasn’t surprised. He said, “Laurie is a very sweet girl...”