"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...