Jay for fake

Is Jacket Copy still doing its Postmodernism Month? Murray Jay Siskind, who steals his scenes in DeLillo's White Noise and the pseudonymous Amazons, reviewed DFW's Oblivion in Modernism/Modernity in 2004. Here's editor Lawrence Rainey's letter sort of explaining it ("Who but a fictional character could be better qualified to review . . . well, new fiction? Isn’t that the very essence of peer reviewing?"), and here's a White Noise–infused extract from the piece:

It is at this point that I must confess to missing something in Wallace, namely the presence of women nearer the center of the narration (setting aside Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, Jr., the protagonist in Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System). I admit that I've always been partial to them, i.e. women. I fall apart at the sight of long legs, striding, briskly, as a breeze carries up from the river, on a weekday, in the play of morning light. And what fun it is to talk to an intelligent woman wearing nylon stockings as she crosses her legs. Wallace, I suspect, shares these predilections and could write wonderfully complicated women.

(Via Gawker, from Bret, who writes, "No love for Amazons!"—the piece doesn't mention MJS's appearance in that book; and from Lauren)

(Will post some Amazons-grade Siskind later maybe?)

The Connections: Post-Olympics Edition

Pakistan's only woman in the Olympics said Sunday that she was hurt by what she called negative feelings about Islam at the Athens Games, where she said she was criticized for running in clothes that covered much of her body. —Agence France-Presse

Toward the end of the season, Cleo and her teammates learn that the Rangers have a new owner and general manager, Ahmed ben Farouky, a Saudi petrodollar tycoon. Shortly thereafter, bed checks by men with Arab headdresses are initiated at home and on the road. Married players find their houses broken into and their wives’s cosmetics, bikini panties, and birth control missing (along with their liquor). (Meade cravenly explains, “They’re pretty ethnic people.”) Finally, Cleo is informed by the Saudi manager that “the men in the Gulf” have reached a compromise: “You must wear a veil when you play.” A full-length veil, which, as Cleo sarcastically observes, will be a distinct handicap on the breakaway. —Gerald Howard on Cleo Birdwell's Amazons (from Bookforum)