Questions of Pastiche (2009)

Page 25 July–August 2009 Questions of Pastiche Davis Schneiderman Administrative Assemblages Tom La Farge Proteotypes http://proteusgowanus.com/main/proteotypes 30 pages; paper, $10.00 Questionstruck William Walsh Keyhole Press http://www.keyholemagazine.com/books 172 pages; paper, $13.95 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, And was I also above making cracks about the possessions of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos after their sleazy palace was exposed to the world? Wasn’t I the joker who said it was difficult to believe that Mrs. Marcos was able to break in all those shoes without the use of political prisoners? It is these moments that appear to suggest contiguity from the Trillin sources—here suggesting the type of ego-projecting rhetorical devices Thompson used so effectively—where the reader will feel at least the illusion...