Writing About Writing? Oh, Dear Lord

When I cracked AGNI 70 and saw that Sven Birkerts's Editor's Note "And What Is Writing" led into Peter LaSalle's lifeless "Walking: An Essay on Writing," a warning light flashed: Theme Issue Alarm, Theme Issue Alarm. Hoping that Ken Kalfus would shut it off, I skipped ahead to his short story "The Un-," which begins (sigh) thusly: "There were hundreds of ways to go crazy wanting to be a writer."

Theme Issue Alarm Verified. Strap yourselves in for 236 pages of writing about writing.

Despite my bitter, almost manic distaste for themed issues and for writing about writing, I decided to trudge through. It is AGNI, after all, and Ken Kalfus, whose novel A Disorder Peculiar to the Country delighted me. "The Un-" did nothing to change my opinion of his work. It's an entertaining story about a young writer who spends his days watching the seconds tick by as he waits for the mailman to deliver rejection letters. When Joshua Glory realizes that no mail will come, he watches "the back of the mailman for a few minutes as he delivered to his neighbors their acceptances, theirgalleys, and their royalty checks" (33).

Joshua's fatal flaws are his lack of self-discipline, his own "self-defeating saliva," and an inferiority complex about his writing, some of which "had appeared two years ago in a small literary quarterly that had since folded, published by a university that then lost its accreditation, located in a state that shortly seceded from the Union" (34). The piece ends on a note that rings a bit false, although Kalfus is a coy writer and the reader gets the sense that the happy ending will not last. Kalfus is one of our finest unsung talents, and I decided that if the other stories in this AGNI are as strong as "The Un-," I would be able to tolerate all this writing about writing.

Up next was Giles Harvey's "The Indifferent Beak," a fictional panning of a fictional poetry collection, and let me just say that if every book review were as amusing as Harvey's, we reviewers would be a much more popular lot. He begins, "The book under review confronts the reader with a whole bouquet of unenviable problems," including the "stark absence ... of anything bearing the slightest resemblance to what in simpler and less strenuously egalitarian times was referred to as aesthetic value" (47).

Harvey's narrator, a professor who likes to "graze at some remove from the herd," tells his own students, "Monkeys working at typewriters for an infinite duration would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare; but we would first have to endure five thousand copies of Pound's Cantos" (48). A narrative eventually emerges here as we learn that this professor had as a student the poet in question, a "vain and posturing brat," and that she grew infatuated with him. The professor suggests an affair by denying an affair, and the review is colored with envy, making the reader wonder how much more there is to this story disguised as a book review.

Spoiler Alarm, Spoiler Alarm. AGNI 70 is not a themed issue full of writing about writing. The editors simply arranged the work so that the first four pieces of prose are about writing. Just as I've arranged this review so that it seems as if AGNI 70 is a themed issue full of writing about writing. Why did we do it? For fun, I guess.

Nope, this is just a regular old run-of-the-mill issue. AGNI is like the uncle who gives you $10 every year on your birthday; it's never exciting, and your birthday doesn't depend on that wrinkled, crusty bill, but every 3-4 years you have enough to go see a feature film. Another uncle may show up unexpected to your party one year and shit on your ice cream cake, and maybe you don't mind so much because at least it's unique, but in the end you always turn back to the uncle, or litmag, you can depend on. With AGNI, you won't see much avant-garde experimentation, nor many chances taken. What you see, issue after issue, year after year, is traditional, high-quality writing. These are the kinds of magazines that help keep the little guys, the fringe magazines (including Fringe Magazine), in business.