"Ten stories" is the publisher's description of Da Vinci's Bicycle. Davenport's own word for what he makes is assemblages. His paragraphs array and elaborate discrete themes: the Paris of Miss Stein and Picasso, the anatomy of the wasp, the myths of a Dogon cosmologist, the Wrights, Charles Fourier; also the young photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue, and Da Vinci drawing a bicycle (as he did). All are found actualities. All are foragers, enamored of the particulate. All make up worlds out of innumerable acts of perception. And all are themselves made on these pages out of words, more than half of them monosyllabic, the way Seurat made large intricate pictures out of little spots of paint.

Nothing attracts Guy Davenport like a world almost impossible to imagine, requiring reconstitution atom by atom. (p. 1240)

Imagine. But we cannot imagine more than we are, and even Davenport's personages are all oblique self-portraits, even the Richard Nixon who utters banalities in China, a thing we are all of us doing much of the time. The most remarkable is the voice of the last strict fantasy, Robert Walser of Biel, who has experienced the world as widely as Odysseus…. [He] assembles memories and bizarre observations, and writes above the final blank space, "But let us desist, lest quite by accident we be so unlucky as to put these things in order."

There is an order which is death, placid in brains wherein thousands of words have died, and people suppose that they know what they are saying when they say (Richard Nixon said it), "The world is watching us." Five little words. And who knows the meaning of "The"? (p. 1241)