Doggy Bag

``The most interesting things are the things left over after you notice the things you notice. . . the things that make no kind of sense.'' Which are clearly the things that interest the author of Up and the publisher of American Book Review . His sometimes painful, sometimes funny, occasionally graphic but always intriguing world is littered with the flotsam and jetsam of American, European and Egyptian culture. As in works of European experimental literature, there is little enough plot: waiting in line at the Uffizi, consumerist Zombies (controlled by the White Voodoo Financial Wizards plaguing an ennervated and decadent Europe), a kind of OuLiPo-an ``Debbie Does Europe.'' The book is tied together rather by an internal coherence of wordplay (``An impossible slice of time sectioned from the sluice of life'') and allusion (a chapter titled ``A Long Narrative Poem in Prose'' evokes Sukenick's earlier The Endless Short Story ; the Zombies recall the living dead of his 98.6 ). Sukenick's concern is with philosophy and the plasticity of language. Like his character Signor Cranio, a quadruple amputee, he has sacrificed the limbs (iambics?) that might move him along the narrative road; instead ``he does it all with what he has--head, heart and balls.'' (Apr.)