The event was a presidential candidate
group-grope and steak-fry held in Indianola, Iowa, in September 2007.
The author takes obvious pleasure in language, especially compound words: "burner-hustlers," "fear-scanning" (as for the narks), "
group-grope," "street-scronge," "riot-gasm,""eyeball-data, "Keats-Shriek!" and "Blake-Flesh" (which carry him into the territory of fancy, a relaxed state of almost pure invention),"methplummet," "yogambulate," "slumopathic lust," and, of course "chaos" as a verb as in "he chaos'd her poems." The humor built into these words allows ordinary sentences a pleasurable but also meaningful zippiness: "Cynthia and John were setting up an exclusive relationship--that is, a pact of mono-grope relative to groin-clink."
The exhibitionistic display of the naked body--the old woman's in the witty Why the French Fear Americans and the
group-grope in Brother and Sister and Nick's Picnic--at once hides and compensates for the absence of self, reflecting Fischl's tacit narrative of this gesture's lack of significance, which is subtly brought to the fore by the ironic photo-sleaze textures of the work.