In Competition No. 2382 you were invited to supply pretentious ‘intellectual’ tosh in the form of a review of a play, book, film or piece of classical music.
Back in 1990 that grand old comper Roger Woddis sent me a wonderful specimen of pseudocrap perpetrated by James Wolcott in the Observer. It deserves some space: ‘What’s interesting about Richard Ford’s Wildlife is not its chipped polish but its numb insularity. For all its Western smoke, it reads like a chamber play for phantoms. It has the ghostly rustle of white folds begging for a bloodstain.’
My apologies to those of you who misread my intentions: the tosh, I presumed, belonged to the reviewer not the work reviewed, and the latter, I also presumed, would be real, not imaginary. There was a general tendency to go over the top, with grotesque, near incomprehensible results which amazed rather than amused.
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