Double-jointed review: Origins

There was a piece by [Trapnel] in Fission contrasting Rilke with Mayakovsky, two long reviews dovetailed together into a fresh article. —Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room

Now he's openin' the cabinet...

The latest Keeler News has another great Poundstone piece, in which he looks at the similarities between R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet and HSK's webwork novels. A must-read, with a meditation on so-called "bad art" that I subscribe to (in a nutshell, it's easier for the hoi polloi to think about something like Trapped or The Man With the Magic Eardrums—not that the h.p. ever thinks about TMWTME!—as comically inept failures, rather than deliberately wild works of art in which the creators strived for—and attained!—very specific, peculiar effects).

A fun little chart also points out that Keeler died on January 22, 1967 in Chicago...the same month and city in which R. Kelly was born!

Niiiiice

I.
Verlyn Klinkenborg had a double-jointed review in Saturday's Times, reading Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as if they were a chapter in newly minted Nobel laureate Doris Lessing's Shikasta.

II.
Luc Sante's blogging! The profile sez: "Subjectivity is my middle name, a trick memory is my pack mule, and self-contradiction is my trusty old jackknife." Niiiiiice.

III.
Currently watching: Jumong!