This is BearDog in Queens Park in 2008. When asked for his opinion on Barth’s (1968) Lost in the Funhouse, he stayed quite still and silent, as though the elastic band of his ski goggles had prevented him from hearing or noticing us. After some stuffed-arm twisting, he finally blurted out “it is nothing but ‘literary bankruptcy’ (Tobin, 1992: 85)!” BearDog was clearly reluctant to praise the “hopelessly dualistic images” (MM, 100) of Barth’s authorship. As he threw himself off the bench and shuffled along the February snow, we heard him mumbling the musings of Edward Said (1975 cited in Tobin, 1992: 97) under his breath: “[Modern] writing is an acquired mannerism, a performance, a characteristic gesture of inscription that separates the spaces of the page from the spaces of life.”

*Emphasis added by BearDog.