Ben Friedlander back-channel. (We had been discussing Joe Brainard and Edmond Jabès. Could the fake rabbi bit in the latter be considered a "schtick?"):

"I think of Brainard as genuine too. Does that rule out the possibility of schtick? That's a real question, by the way, not a rhetorical one: when I wrote you last night I was thinking of Emily Dickinson's neuroses as an example of schtick, in jest of course. But maybe a misreading of genuineness as schtick is itself a schtick rising to the level of poetics. Or maybe not..."