Since its launch only a week ago, the new book review The Oracular Reader has taken the book world by storm. It has been called bratty, arrogant, outrageous, offensive, hyper-opinionated, predjudiced, misinformed, awful, and many things far worse. Yet in an informal survey of readers of the new rag on books, one word keeps popping up. A sampling of their remarks:
It’s got zip.—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Prescient, puckish and dramatically zippy.—William Shakespeare
In spite of its use of adjectives and adverbs, it still has plenty of zip.—Earnest Hemingway
I fainted the first time I encountered it from all of the inebriating zip.—Emily Dickinson
As prophetic as Teresias, but much zippier.—Homer
Wickedly zippy, but in a good way.—Flannery O’Connor
A delusional, out of control case of zipomania. I'm really into it already.—Edgar Allen Poe
Everyone is a critic, so decide for yourself. Read the just published, most recent issue of The Oracular Reader with its exclusive, revealing, no-holds-barred interview with the biggest icon of modern poetry:
In it, for the first time ever, Eliot bares his soul and confesses:
• What the footnotes really mean.
• What it was like to be worshipped and lionized even though he knew he deserved it.
• His world-beater vocabulary was the result of memorizing at the age of five the Unabridged, 10,000 volume, Oxford English Dictionary.
• How his cocker spaniel Frisky taught him to French kiss and how they practiced technique in his mother’s basement.
• His love for fried chitlins and slow cooked mixed greens.
• His lifelong struggle with his irrational disdain for past participles, which often crippled his ability to write and sent him fleeing for the comfort of Frisky.
• How he really wanted to be a podiatrist but his mother forced him to be a great poet instead.
• His favorite contemporary poet after himself.
• His mother’s shameful dictionary dependence.
• His fear of pronouns, which he said were "horrid, evil, faceless little people out to get me."
• His left foot was 3 cm. smaller than his right foot.
• He faked knowing Sanskrit and ancient Greek and got away with it because no one else did either.
• Why he never learned to play the organ.
• What he thinks of today’s “poetizers and moonbeam rhymers.”
• His organic , environmentally friendly method for coming up with self-sustaining metaphors.
• How his parents had to take out second and third mortgages to pay his school boy library fines.
• How his truffle addiction nearly cost him his life in an encounter with an angry forest gnome.
• Why he never finished a single book he started unless he read it backwards , upside down in a dark room all by himself with a flashlight and chocolate cupcakes.
• He always wrote whatever popped into his head, whether it made sense or not, and never revised. "Unfettered spontaneity is the fountainhead of genius. Thinking craps everything up."
• And much, much more, including the stunning revelation that his nickname for both of his wives was "Frisky."
Questions and solicitations for further information should be directed to: oracular.reader@gmail.com
