An Open Letter to Mark Sample,

We appreciate your recent remarks concerning a review essay about David

Foster Wallace, one that appeared in late 2004 in the pages of Modernism/Modernity
and was assigned to one Jay Murray Siskind, also the name of a character in Don
DeLillo’s novel White Noise. It is saddening indeed to see the review being cited with
po-faced earnestness, and surely you are right that this turns “a fun fake review into
something much more telling about the state of academia.” All too plainly, the time
has come to set the record straight.
As the journal’s book review editors at the time, we were at first disconcerted
to receive an email from Jay Murray Siskind. Our suspicions were heightened when
we noted that his email address read “blacksmith.edu,” rather than the better known
College-on-the-Hill, where Murray was last seen working. But research soon revealed
that his change in academic affiliation was the result of a bitter tenure decision fight,
in which Alfonse Stompanato had played an especially unsavoury role. Still, Murray’s
homepage is available to anyone who wishes to imagine it. And his competence in
popular culture is amply documented by his essays in publications such as the
American Transvestite and Ufology, not to mention Brüno. Who were we to reject the
offer of a review from a respected and even popular colleague? Who but a fictional
character could be better qualified to review . . . well, new fiction? Isn’t that the very
essence of peer reviewing? It should also have come as no surprise to anyone that Jay
Murray Siskind’s writing should have sounded like Jay Murray Siskind’s writing, in
much the same way we might expect that the writing of Pierre Menard, author of the
Quijote, to sound much like Don Quijote. Of course we took seriously our role as
editors. We toned down a fawning reference (“the most important study since Das
Kapital”) to the book that Murray co-authored with J.A.K. Gladney, Adolph and
Elvis: Two Twentieth-Century Men and Their Mothers. We also removed a plainly
vengeful mention of Alphonse Stompanato’s book, Crunching Granola: The
Semiotics of the Cereal Box (“drivel that positively drivels”). But apart from that, the
essay stands as Murray wrote it--perhaps the impish product of an impish mood that
relieved the tedium of editing the turgid, academic prose that appears in Ufology,
where he serves on the Advisory Board.
Yes, we agree that further investigation is urgently required to clarify the
entire affair. Perhaps help can be sought from Daniel Quinn, the noted employee of
the Auster Detective Agency. If so, he should get to work, or Max Work, immediately.
If not, the affair will remain shrouded in a cloud of unknowing.
Finally, in one of the posts to your piece, you highlighted “the fact that
Modernism/Modernity doesn’t concern itself with someone like Wallace.” Alas, M/M
was the first academic journal anywhere to publish an extended tribute to Wallace
after his untimely death, which included pieces by Dave Eggers, Michael North, and
Marshall Boswell. (See Modernism/Modernity 16.1, January 2009: 1-24.) The alleged
rupture between modernism and postmodernism is one urged only by the simple-, not
to be confused with the Sample-, minded.

Sincerely yours,
Lawrence Rainey, Editor of Modernism/Modernity
Nicole Devarenne, former Managing Editor of Modernism/Modernity