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Comments
Guy Davenport
I'm only on page 78 of Mockingbird but can't resist acknowledgement and appreciation. It's disorienting: I don't know what or whom I'm reading. Under the satire there's an indictment of the American mind and of language itself. The bibliography is some help for the clueless (me). A great deal of it confirms my theory that Homo Sapiens went crazy several thousand years back, leaving only mathematicians and artists who can, with much forgiveness, pass for sane.
 Still outside computer/website culture, I can feel how much of your wit I'm missing. I don't know half the writers you mention. It has been noticed before that the USA has no center. In France I hear that our greatest writer is somebody named Coover.
No author's name inside, and only on the back cover! Paul Metcalf would have liked this book. I've seen analogous texts in French; that is, collages of parody, pastiche, and poker-face quotation.
Cooper Esteban
One thing I was thinking a lot about is all the play in the title. Because a real mockingbird is simply a mimic of course, a singer of other birds' songs -- and this "fits" the sections in which you quote extensively from other sources. But because some of the purpose of your quoting is to "mock", in the more ordinary sense of "to make fun", then that creates another kind of mocking-bird. And since the manner in which you print the title on the cover removes the "g", one can be forgiven (especially a Texan) for pronouncing it "mockinbird", which again in Texan becomes "mawkinbird", which becomes a Joycean/Poundian kind of distortion of "American bird", as well as suggesting "mawkish". And since much of the book is specifically a criticism of American culture as given and American culture as criticism (or lack thereof) of itself, "Americanbird/merkenbird" works as well. So bravo, dude, bravo. It's also true that part of the "n" is removed by the white circle, so that one could even read "mockir" as a misspelling of "mocker", which doesn't necessarily ADD to the meanings already playing there, but does make them a little more pointed.
Gordon Lish
Thanks for the wonderfully designed book. What a gift you have! Thanks for all the mentions of my humble name. Thanks for: "She was skinny, but her mouth was wet, and that made up for it." Can you encourage this person to come to me in NYC? There never was a woman who was too skinny for me!
Guy Davenport -- Harper's, April 2002
Mockingbird, by Deron Bauman, is a nicely hand-bound book by the editor of the online magazine elimae. The text is a collage of found fatuities and dead-batteries language -- an NPR transcript of an interview (with listeners' call-ins) of two photographers of hideous atrocities, the kind of people who begin every other sentence with "basically". There are purple pages of Zane Grey and Cormac McCarthy, email exchanges by chuckly nerds, blurbs; in short, a sampler of the pathology of communication in our time, when, you know, like, you know, my opinion's as good as yours, basically, you know?
Bauman's rare sensibility hears for us the dead banality of our inchoherence. Joyce had such an ear, and Donald Barthelme. Basically, though, I'm guessing what this engaging little book is about.
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