Lennon, Brian. Review of Appendices, Illustrations and Notes by Terence Gower and Mónica de la Torre. American Letters & Commentary 13 (2002): 195-197.

We have always wondered why the aspirants keep parroting Joyce's (was it Joyce's?) advice to paper one's walls with rejection slips. If you doubt the globalization of this piece of advice, conduct a simple Web search (http://www.google.com/search?q=paper+walls+rejection+slips). There is no shortage of creative writers manqués who claim the "distinction" of dwelling in such a house of cards, and if we do not believe them for a moment, our disbelief hardly matters. For in fact the image itself is its own potency. Unde malum?---from critics and editors, of course.

Regardless: like anything else, such modernist heroism has its own place in the autotherapy that is Creative Writing---which returns us to forgetting vs. repression, Nietzsche vs. Freud, being "free" vs. being "determined," living vs. waiting for life elsewhere, life of the Book. As aspirants enmeshed in this dialectic, we ourselves toss our rejection slips in the trash, immediately. Alternatively, one might opt for Appendices, Illustrations & Notes---an anthology, or, if not an anthology, a kind of uncommonplace book or album of enemies. What it is, does not so much defy description here, as place new kinds of hesitation in its way---not the least of which is "Appendix III: Review Subgenera"---a kind of Cerberus guarding the gates of book-reviewing hell. We excerpt here, in precisely the pensive self-consciousness of Appendices itself.

IV. Unreliable reviews.

a. Reviews with no clear purpose in which meaningless verbal constructions abound, accompanied by commonplaces coined by famous critics or philosophers:

1. Who have fallen into disrepute.

2. Whose thought is as ambiguous as to apply to everything always.

3. Whose ideas are debunked on a close-to-daily basis.

b. Reviews in which critics' flagrant display of knowledge conceals the fact that they hardly considered the art in question and that all sorts of preconceived ideas about other people's work were projected onto it.

c. Obsessive reviews that lead nowhere. (21)

A prescription for counter-reaction---or else, of self-fulfilling prophesy, which is the prime mode of Appendices, Illustrations & Notes and its best humor. There are letters---to a Dr. Glassman, from his aspirant patients; from the Osaka Southern Hemisphere Artists' Studio Program, awarding an artist's residency to a non-applicant; from Camp Review ("We enjoyed reading your 'experimental writings.' We regret to inform you, however, that your experiments in generating favorable readers' responses have failed"). There is a gallery of bogus-facsimile book jackets, author bios and head shots. There are reviews and "art notes" (the best one: "LYNDA HELMET, AGAIN!"), and book-editor pedantry.

All of which, one might say, comprises the best revenge: ambitious mockery of ambition, flagrant display of rage, tour de force, better than Cats, registering the mass production of opinion in happy satire, the anti-original originality of which one might express as something like http://www.google.com/search?q=so+funny+i+fell+off+my+chair. That is to say: you will turn up the bathos of happiness, in all its plenitude, as the parodies of Appendices, Illustrations & Notes uncover the absurdity of "taste."

If this last is meaningless to you, you are its target. We read it in bed one Sunday morning in spring, drunk on its mockery, knowing it true, and asking ourselves: how to be sincere about a hoax? Like Swift's modest proposal, it is a hoax for those alert to hoaxes, in whom irony and sincerity form a binary star, orbiting each other ever more closely. There's a despair, there, that these desiderata also point to, which is their poetry. Such is the ambivalence of being-for-mail; and at the point of the kiss, the collison---what then?

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