SOURCE: "The Same Pink as Pepto-Bismol," in American Book Review, Vol. 12, No. 5, November-December, 1990, pp. 16, 21.

[Everman is an American writer and educator. In the following review of My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, he cites numerous references to popular culture in Leyner's fiction, theorizing on the relationship between the act of writing and contemporary electronic mass media.]

Reading the pieces in Mark Leyner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist is like sitting in front of an ultrahightech video monitor and flipping back and forth through the channels, from this to that to this and back to that again. It's all here and all perfectly familiar—the quiz shows, the kiddie shows, the late movies, the news broadcasts, the talk shows, MTV, and of course the commercials. The monitor flickers like a strobe light, and it's up to the viewer to put the bits and pieces together, to make a program of what he sees and hears.

There are stories here—the story of kids' show host Big Squirrel who is also a ninja assassin, the story of a graduate of the Wilford Military Academy of Beauty who is sentenced to die in a custom-built Mies van der Rohe electric chair for allegedly attempting to crash a commercial jetliner into the Queen Elizabeth II—but the stories are twisted, broken, interrupted again and again by other stories and stories-within-stories, stories that appear and disappear with the flick of a remote control. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist is a kind of postmodern Arabian Nights, and its vocabulary is the "violent vocabulary of the u. s. a.," the vocabulary of the electronic media.

"what color is your mozzarella? i asked the waitress it's pink—it's the same color as the top of a mennen lady speed stick antiperspirant dispenser, y'know that color? no, ma'am, i said it's the same pink they use for the gillette daisy disposable razors for women … y'know that color? nope y'know the pink they use on the wrappers for carefree panty shields? nuh-uh well, it's the same pink as pepto-bismol, y'know that color? oh yeah, i said"

Leyner is a realist, and his reality is the reality of the electronic media, the new hyperreality, more real than your hand in front of your face. For better or worse, this is our reality, too. We know what we know—the color of mozzarella, the most up-to-date treatment for kidney stones, what Elvis was really like—because we've seen it all on TV.

Back in the thirties, Walter Benjamin suggested that the camera was replacing the human eye as the arbiter of the real. In the 1990s, nothing is real until it is seen through the camera. Is it raining outside? I turn on the weather channel. How do I feel about being a homosexual carpenter in the wilds of Montana? I find out by watching other gay Montana-based carpenters on Oprah. I can turn on the local news to see what I've been up to today.

Leyner's reality is the one we all share, and in his writing he can assume that we know all about hockey ("tonight at madison square garden the new york rangers disemboweled the boston bruins' goalie, brought a hibachi onto the ice, roasted his intestines and served them on toast points to the howling hometown fans"), cellulite exercises ("we're doing the nine or ten beautifully firming things you can do for your derriere"), wild life ("the hippopotamus feeds on soft vegetation"), and soft drinks ("I think Tab tastes like raw sewage"), just as Homer could assume that his listeners knew of Odysseus, Achilles, and the stories of Olympus.

"This [football] play is shown over and over and over and over and over and over again, in slow motion, fast motion, isolated camera, pixilated camera, thermographic camera, and finally X-ray vision which shows leaping skeletons in a bluish void surrounded by 75,000 roaring skulls."

The camera offers us what the human eye could never see on its own, the really real, and it can repeat that reality again and again. Electronic media are simply better than the eye, and better than memory. Their possibilities are infinite.

The other day, my two-year-old son and I were watching a videotape of Bambi. When Bambi's mother was shot by hunters, Charlie became upset, grabbed the remote control, and rewound the tape until Bambi's mom reappeared. He had discovered the real possibility of immortality.

"Huck is heavily into a Bertolt Brecht/Barbra Streisand thing. Later we go to the Thalia and sit through a double feature of Mother Courage and Yentl. During the climactic scene in Yentl where Barbra Streisand eats 300 salted herrings to prove to the other rabbinical students that she is macho, Huck weeps uncontrollably and vomits."

Leyner understands how the media work to flatten and homogenize culture. All celebrities, real or fictitious, are equal—Barbra Streisand, Bertolt Brecht, Huck Finn, Walid Jumblatt, President Bush, the 50-foot woman, Michael Jackson, Bruce Lee—as all events, real or fictitious, are equal, because they all appear in the same space, on the same screen. In the same way, Leyner's writing brings together seemingly disparate elements, not in a kind of Surrealist juxtaposition but in a leveling process that makes no distinction between, say, Big Bird and Charles Manson, who might very well find themselves seated side by side on the Carson show or on Hollywood Squares.

"i had 225 mortal illnesses my doctor painted a grim picture of each disease he did my leukemia in acrylic on canvas"

In a reality in which all things are the same, in which all differences are leveled, there is no difference between metaphor and the literal. To paint a grim picture is to paint a grim picture. There is no need for interpretation here. There is no meaning beneath the surface of the words, because the words are only surface.

Like the discourse of the electronic media, Leyner's discourse reads itself.

"If you want to be successful in life, he said, everything you do must be an act of patricide…. Even when shaving—each whisker you shave off is your father's head. And if you're using a twin blade—the first blade cuts off the father's head and as the father's neck snaps back it's cleanly lopped off by the second blade."

Leyner suggests that everything and anything we say or do is informed by "the violent vocabulary of the u. s. a.," that the media speak through us even in those moments when we speak the most revolutionary thought, the killing of the father who is the source of the Law.

"wasn't it mallarme who said, 'when a superhuman being shampoos its hair, it thinks of death?'"

Probably not, but here it is not the accuracy of the quotation that is important but the act of quoting in itself. To quote is always to quote out of context, or rather it is to decontextualize, then recontextualize what is being placed within the quotation marks.

But in the new media reality, who quotes and who is quoted? Are the media only saying what we say, or have we learned to say only what the media say?

Leyner's stories are full of unacknowledged quotations that most readers will recognize immediately ("In high school, I loved to rock 'n' roll, a hot dog made me lose control"). His sources are mass culture—TV shows, advertising, popular songs—and Leyner repeats once again those phrases and brand names we have heard so often that they seem natural, right. These are the familiar phrases that seem to say what we want to say. They express our thoughts. They make thinking and speaking easier, because they supply us with thoughts and the words to speak them. And why not? It's a complicated world, and we deserve a break today.

And yet, like everything else in Leyner's writing, these quotations, while recognizable, are misquoted, somehow off-center, disrupted from within themselves, as when the Queen of England says to one of Leyner's narrators: "Y'all come back and visit Buckingham Palace real soon, y'hear."

The words are familiar, but they no longer say what we want them to say.

"Well, to make a long story short…."

What is Leyner up to here? Are these stories with titles like "Colonoscope Nite" and "The Suggestiveness of One Stray Hair in an Otherwise Perfect Coiffure" supposed to be funny? Yes, of course, and they are. So is Leyner poking fun at the electronic media, critiquing them by using and exposing the techniques and the language of the media themselves? Are these works parodies?

The parody critiques by using the techniques and the form of what it parodies, but it does so in a way that exaggerates, exposes, and lays bare those techniques and that form. The parody is a parasite that lives off the host form, that indeed could not come into being and survive without the prior existence of its host.

Leyner's writing is parodic/parasitic in this way, but there is something more going on here. The parody is a negative critique, a making-fun-of. Like a parasite, it seems to aim at the destruction of the host form, which means, in turn, the destruction of parody as well, for the parody is an instance of the form it parodies. The work of the parody, once begun, is irreversible.

Leyner's project, however, is negative and positive—negative insofar as it is parody but positive insofar as there seems to be a genuine affection here for what is being critiqued. Is it possible that Mark Leyner loves The Patty Duke Shows, The Beverly Hillbillies, and professional wrestling, in the same way as, say, Andy Warhol loved Campbell's soup cans and Marilyn Monroe?

It's possible.

Because it is irreversible, the parody is relatively easy to write and to read. Leyner's writings, on the other hand, are not, because they move in two directions at once. He criticizes and makes fun of our American mass culture, and yet only one steeped in that culture could write what he writes, just as only the reader who is steeped in that culture could read those writings. As in the works of Andy Warhol, the photographs of Cindy Sherman, or the songs of Laurie Anderson, there are no simple resolutions in Leyner's writings, only questions with no apparent answers.

Like: Was Ronald Reagan the president of the United States, or was he an actor who played the part of the president on TV?

As Leyner's wildly funny and profoundly serious pieces make clear, there is no reality beyond the reality of the mass media, no point of reference beyond the slogans and the catch-phrases by which one might decide what is real and what is not. But is this bad news or good news?

Or is it just news?

"who are the new intellectuals who are the new aesthetes now that the old new intellectuals and the old new aesthetes have been decimated by the self-decimating ramifications of their old new ideas?"

Good question. Perhaps the new intellectuals and the new aesthetes are not intellectuals or aesthetes at all but players in an infinite game without resolution, without closure, without winners or losers. Perhaps they are the ones who are not afraid to make fun of/have fun with reality, no matter what its form might be. If this is Mark Leyner's game, he is a hell of a player.