Davis Schneiderman

The Uniqueness of Badness

January–February 2010 preface, Whalen states, “I write everything with a fountain pen that must be coaxed and warmed before it will work properly. The following pages were written more for the pen’s benefit and instrumentation than they were for mine or for that of the public.” In this oversized facsimile edition published by Coyote Books, I observe Whalen’s poems and doodles as direct expressions of his thought in a verbal/visual continuum. Witty half-truths and playful elegance characterize this work. Although the book is lovely (rusty staples and all), it is its transparency that I value most. At Powell’s Books, I found So Long (1993) by my favorite contemporary fiction writer, Lucia Berlin, and tore through it over a couple shots of espresso one rainy morning. Books published by Black Sparrow Books are fairly formulaic, especially in their later years, and those designed by Graham Mackintosh (this one wasn’t) are brilliant, though unassuming. Aside from the grotesque cover designed by Barbara Martin and the clunky use of ornaments by a typesetter named “Words Worth” (!), I was so infatuated with her subdued stories that the physical fact of the language I was holding became immaterial. I wonder if Berlin was thinking of one of the characters in Leone’s film when she wrote the last couple of lines of her short story (included in this collection) entitled “Good and Bad”: “There was nobody to speak to. To say I was sorry.” As to which is which, invariably, only the reader can decide (or prefer not to).

Who's In? Who's Out?

July–August 2011 The passing of time provides clarity and perspective on literary art for which there is no substitute. It removes the distractions of writerly personality, and foregrounds the writerly products. Today’s fashion becomes yesterday’s failure; yesterday’s failure becomes today’s fashion. Overlooked or overrated—literary and critical gems are only visible with hindsight. Consider all the emerging authors prognosticated by critics and writers to become the next James Joyce or Samuel Beckett or Jorge Luis Borges and how few have risen to the accolades. Or remember today may be viewed against the relief of time. Such acts are more than just critical games. Rather, they are important exercises in helping direct our current writing and critical energies. American Book Review wants to know what the writing and criticism worlds will be like ten years from now. What authors will be in? What type of writing will be out? What poets will have faded, and who will be high up on our radar? What will be the “in” approach to criticism, and what will look like an historical artifact? those who became recognized as masters only in the slow brew of critical time—writers like Franz Kafka, Felipe Alfau, Roberto Bolaño, and Raymond Federman. One gauge of a literary generation’s power is its ability to exhibit critical foresight. To provide sharp prognostications of fiction’s future and the trajectory of current writers. To put hype and marketing aside and focus on the impact of writing and criticism. This highly speculative endeavor is perhaps the most difficult act in contemporary letters. Looking forward to a place where the writing and criticism

Questions of Pastiche

William Walsh’s perplexing new text Questionstruck is not all thumbs, but rather, all questions. In fact, there’s nothing even remotely clumsy about the deliberate method by which Walsh’s provocative book raises a dizzying assortment of interrogatories, posed in diction both simple and profound, as if the ever-questioning voice of its twentyfive sections and 172 pages were in fact a strangely probing unified consciousness some number of shades different from its upstanding source. Questionstruck’s voice—produced from the question-only samples of source texts by the long-producing Calvin Trillin—the reader might find, becomes as capable of simultaneously doing a backward summersault unprotected on the surface of Mars, as teaching, over a period of years, recalcitrant fleas to ride unicycles while wearing Fez caps with fraying yellow cords. Like an episode of “Jeopardy,” Walsh’s book places odd focus on the questions—eliding any text that is not in fact a query—and so its form, by presenting only questions, becomes a sort of endlessly malleable answer to these types of questions: What would a collection of questions taken only from the works of writer Trillin read like? Why would Walsh expend the immense amount of time in a presumably manual process needed to move through Trillin’s numerous tomes, including food writing, political journalism, and novels, to cull queries banal— “What harm does that do?”—domestic—“Could I please have a bowl of that cereal that’s chock full of Riboflavin?”—and Cold War—“If our side knows that Mikhail Gorbachev’s closest friends call him by an old law school nickname—Motormouth—is that what President Reagan should call him”? Questionstruck samples cleanly from all of Trillin’s books, producing a series of wry and sardonic and maudlin and punishing gesticulations on everything from why bagels in Kansas taste like round bread (a repeated touchstone) to how one might be “good” at editing Playboy to a sort of probing celebrity journalism that makes hack outfits like TMZ look even sluttier by comparison: “Who but an upper-class Englishman would sneak away from someone who looks like Princess Di in order to play around with someone who looks like Camilla Parker-Bowles?” Of course, Trillin—the famous doggerel “Deadline Poet” in The Nation (and long-time writer for that publication and The New Yorker) and novelist, with twenty-five books to his credit—is a far cry from the ideologically inflected cultural elitism of, say, Lionel Trilling. Yet there is something exceedingly high-end-cum-middlebrow about Walsh’s choice of subject. Critic Louis Menand, in American Studies (2003), notes the careful tone struck by William Shawn during the latter’s long stewardship of The New Yorker; while Questionstruck’s source material draws from the same stream of good-natured public intellectualism that would satisfy the earnest The New York Times-crossword-puzzle tackling, high-income lefty, there’s something delightfully incongruous about Trillin’s prose presented in this way. Questionstruck pulls the queries from Trillin’s work with Oulipian-eagerness flavored with a hint of the well-broiled untoward. The questions come from Trillin’s political screeds, novels, and gourmandic adventures, arranged out of chronological publication order, but keeping in each section of Walsh’s compendium to the material of a single Trillin book. The sum effect, even within a single section, often suggests the mordant ire of a Hunter S. Thompson. For example,